Global Governance in Time: Institutional Sequences, International Regime Complexes, and the Politics of Global Governance

abstract: Will China's rise fundamentally change global governance? Answering this question requires grasping how sequences shape the development of institutions across time. The books that we review adapt the standard historical institutional (hi) conceptual toolkit—path dependence, reactive sequences, and gradual institutional change—to explain institutional persistence and change in global governance. We argue that international regime complexity (irc) scholarship is a necessary complement because the international institutional context differs from the domestic context in important ways. irc generates two sequencing mechanisms that the standard hi toolkit misses. Disjointed sequences occur when actors relocate their efforts to other parts of the regime complex, creating changes that reverberate across parallel international institutions. International nondecisions are stymied efforts to adapt global institutions to address pressing concerns, in which the nondecision pushes the construction of substitutes outside of global institutions. The standard hi toolkit, plus the two irc sequence types, compose a helpful framework for thinking about what China's rise portends for the politics of global governance.