Oil and gas, as the main sources of global energy supply, have always been heavily influenced by political activities. Due to their fundamental importance to states, they were also often excluded from legal activities. The forecasts for 2035 allow us to expect that oil and gas will remain the dominant sources of the world’s primary energy.2 In the near future, reliable consumer access to oil and gas at reasonable prices will still be a key strategic value. For producing countries, oil and gas will remain important sources of income and key drivers for the growth of their economies. Examining the issues of global governance on oil and gas resources under international law is justified by the importance of these resources for the entire global community as the dominant sources of global primary energy.
The conceptualization of global governance issues has led to the emergence of the concept of a “regime complex” and then to exploring its temporal changes.3 This expression is described by a number of overlapping and non-hierarchical institutions regulating a given substantive area,4 and its conceptual scope is similar to the scope of the conceptual term “global governance architecture” defined as the superior system of public and private institutions that are important and active in a given sphere of world politics.5 World law is characterized by a dynamic multiplicity of operations, in the course of which parallel normative systems of different origins stimulate, interlock, and interfere with each other.6 However, they do not create uniform superior orders that would absorb their parts, but still coexist in a heterarchic manner. It is no longer the policy of states to determine the differentiation of world law, but the expansion of international organizations and regulatory regimes that, despite their origin in international agreements, have grown into independent legal orders.7 The emergence of global regimes does not therefore mean the harmonization of legal orders, but is related to the creation of a new form of internal differentiation and the shaping of a new fragmentation8 that differentiates world law according to transnational homogeneous legal regimes specific to the regulated subject. As a consequence, there is a whole range of regimes in which national, international, and supranational legal acts are visible. For the purposes of this publication, it was hypothesized that in the area of global governance, a regime complex can be distinguished that is a series of overlapping and non-hierarchical institutions regulating a given substantive area, which is related specifically to the extraction of oil and gas resources and which serves the interests of nations as members of the international community.
The research method of this work is based on the concept of G. Teubner and A. Fischer-Lescano, who, inspired by the systems theory of N. Luhmann,9 described the process of spreading international law by referring to the multi-faceted fragmentation of world society law, that is, a global space that differentiates itself into countless autonomous systems. In their opinion, the aim of law research should be to identify specific regulatory systems, and then to study their creation and inter-systemic interaction, in search of a general model. At the same time, they considered it legitimate to ask questions about what constitutes a given system, how systems change and how they interact, how conflicts between systems are resolved, and how these systems are protected.10
The research objective is to identify the regulatory system for global oil and gas resources governance in international law. This objective was focused on specific issues concentrating on examining the origin of this system, its evolution and structure, as well as on identifying the