Download or read book What Makes a 'Regime Complex' Complex? It Depends written by James Hollway and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes the collections of international institutions or regimes governing various domains--called in the literature regime, institutional or governance complexes--“complex”? This article examines several conditions for complexity discussed in that literature, and finds them necessary but not sufficient. It argues that the sufficient condition is dependence, and outlines a framework of increasing levels of synchronic (social/spatial) and diachronic (temporal) dependence. Putting dependence at the centre of discussions on regime complexes has four advantages: (1) it is analytically more precise a condition than proliferation or linkage; (2) it orients us toward questions of degree, 'how complex', instead of the binary 'whether complex'; (3) it informs a range of research design and theoretical choices, especially highlighting extra-dyadic dependencies and an underdeveloped temporal dimension; and (4) it arguably reconciles competing uses of the term 'complex' in the literature without conflating it with complexity, structure, or topology.