A taxonomy of collaborative governance: a guide to understanding the diversity of international and domestic conservation accords

Partially in response to the increasing complexity of governance structures in the international environmental arena, international scholars have adopted a distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 international agreements. The former refer to agreements between governments, whereas the latter refer to agreements between governments and nonstate actors. While useful, this distinction offers only a partial taxonomy of the diversity of collaborative governance, and fails to incorporate Type 3 dynamics among nonstate actors. As an initial attempt at sorting out the wide array of collaborative governance structures both domestically and across international borders, we propose a 3 x 3 matrix based on two typologies, one institutional (governmental, collaborative, nonstate), the other geopolitical (domestic, transborder, interstate/transnational). The result is a classification system of nine types of both domestic and international governance. In addition to identifying fundamental differences among the myriad forms of governance, the matrix reveals how the softening of sovereignty occurs in practice.