THE SPEAKER

Oran Young is distinguished professor emeritus at the Bren School of Environmental Science, University of California (Santa Barbara). He has devoted his career to analyzing the roles that institutions play in meeting needs for governance at various levels of social organization. His applied work deals with questions of governance relating to the atmosphere (e.g. climate change). In recent years, he also has worked extensively on comparative analyses of environmental governance in China and U.S. His current work focus on meeting governance challenges in complex systems featuring hyperconnectivity, nonlinearities, directional change, and emergent properties.

ABSTRACT

How can/should we understand change in international institutions, especially in an era of increasingly complex and dynamic systems? I start by identifying and commenting on several key analytic distinctions. These include distinctions: (i) between changes occurring within existing institutions and changes in the institutions themselves, (ii) between constitutive changes and issue specific regime changes, and (iii) between formal changes and informal changes. I then apply these distinctions to shed light on several cases of current interest: (i) international society as a whole, (ii) the United Nations system, (iii) the governance system for climate, (iv) the international trade regime, and (v) the growing category of informal regimes.

14:00-15:30 Panel 1 

Speaker: Yan Bo, Hongsong Liu, Lingyu Lu, Mingguo Wang

15:30-15:45 Tea break 

15:45-17:15 Panel 2 

Speaker: Weiwei Mao, Zheng Chen, Bei Tang, Jiejin Zhu

17:15-17:20 Comment