Coordination regimes, treaty layering and governance congestion in global biodiversity governance: The International Big Cat Alliance

Global biodiversity governance has expanded into a dense regime complex of overlapping institutions, generating risks of fragmentation and coordination challenges. In response, governance arrangements increasingly emphasise coordination across existing frameworks, yet their systemic implications remain under-examined. This paper develops the concept of coordination-oriented meta-regimes as an analytical lens to examine how treaty-based arrangements may reshape regime complexity. Using the International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) as an exploratory case, this paper analyses its institutional architecture. The findings suggest that IBCA introduces additional organisational structures, reporting systems and financial channels within an already dense biodiversity governance landscape. This highlights how treaty-based coordination arrangements may contribute to institutional congestion and governance sclerosis through cumulative layering. Under certain conditions, these dynamics may generate governance congestion and institutional sclerosis, with fragmentation risks emerging as a secondary consequence.