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Deference and Hierarchy in International Regime Complexes
Abstract
How do states resolve jurisdictional conflicts among international institutions? In many issue areas, global governance is increasingly fragmented among multiple international organizations (IOs). Existing work argues this fragmentation can undermine cooperation as different institutions adopt conflicting rules. However, this perspective overlooks the potential for interinstitutional coordination. I develop a theory of institutional deference : the acceptance of another IO's exercise of authority. By accepting rules crafted in another IO, member states can mitigate rule conflict and facilitate a division of labor within the regime complex. I use an original data set of over 2,000 IO policy documents to describe patterns of deference in the counterterrorism, intellectual property, and election-monitoring regime complexes. Empirical tests support two theoretical claims. First, institutional deference is indeed associated with a division of labor among institutions: IOs that defer to each other are more likely to focus their rule-making efforts on separate subissues. Second, deference is a strategic act that is shaped both by efficiency concerns and power politics. Statistical tests confirm that deference is used to efficiently pool resources among disparate organizations, and that IOs with weaker member states tend to defer to organizations with more powerful members.
... After World War II (WWII) and again after the end of the Cold War, multilateral cooperation in institutionalized arenas increased, bringing about a growing number of IOs that cover a broad array of different policy fields. Thus, we are now living in a world characterized by regime complexity ( Alter and Meunier 2009 ;Drezner 2009 ;Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013 ;Alter and Raustiala 2018 ;Pratt 2018 ), which is defined as an "array of partially overlapping and non-hierarchical institutions governing a particular issue-area" ( Raustiala and Victor 2004 , 279). Scholars often examine implications of regime complexity for state actors as well as effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance more generally (e.g., Raustiala and Victor 2004 ;Betts 2010 ;Nye 2014 ;Zelli et al. 2020 ). ...
... which dynamics and coping strategies this brings about, and to what effects (e.g., Drezner 2009 ;Oberthür and Stokke 2011 ;Betts 2013 ;Morin and Orsini 2013 ;Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013 ;Alter and Raustiala 2018 ;Pratt 2018 ). This work usually ignores the fact that ROs, whose policy scopes have increased tremendously over time, contributing to a multitude of regional and international coexisting organizations, today do cover similar policy issues and overlap with respect to some of their member states (e.g., Panke and Stapel 2018a ; Panke, Stapel, and Starkmann 2020 ). ...
... In shedding light on the ATT negotiation process in the regime complex, this article adds to the rich and vibrant scholarship in regime complexity and global governance complexes in two ways ( Alter and Meunier 2009 ;Drezner 2009 ;Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013 ;Alter and Raustiala 2018 ;Pratt 2018 ;Zelli et al. 2020 ). First, it introduces a novel analytical distinction between horizontal and vertical regime complexity and shows that each type provides important windows of opportunity to further the effectiveness and problem-solving capacity of global governance. ...
The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is an important milestone in reducing the illicit trade of arms but was highly unlikely to be negotiated and passed. Major powers and states exporting and importing arms were not keen on universally binding regulations, leading to political stalemate in the initial negotiation arena, the Conference on Disarmament. This article investigates under which conditions regime complexity had a positive influence on the ATT negotiation dynamics and result. We distinguish between two types of regime complexity, each providing states with a distinct window of opportunity during international negotiations: horizontal regime complexity can allow states to overcome negotiation gridlock by changing the institutional conditions for passing an agreement. Vertical regime complexity can allow regional organizations to turn into agents of change by bringing in experiences gained on the regional level to the international negotiation table. Our empirical analysis of the ATT negotiations revealed critical scope conditions under which both forms of regime complexity function properly, allowing the negotiations to overcome negotiation gridlock and resulting in the passing of the accord beyond a lowest common denominator. The article contributes to the rich and vibrant scholarship in regime complexity and global governance complexes by making a novel analytical distinction between horizontal and vertical regime complexity and by identifying the opportunity structures under which regime complexity can have positive effects on the negotiation and outcome of international treaties.
... The elemental institutions may be functional or regional regimes and they may include both public and private arrangements. While some, like Alter and Raustiala (2018) viewed the absence of hierarchy among rules and institutions as the key defining feature of a regime complex, others assume that hierarchy and relations of authority among elemental institutions may vary across regime complexes (Henning & Pratt, 2020;Pratt, 2018). 2 International regime complexity, in turn, refers to the "international political systems of global governance that emerge because of the coexistence of rule density and regime complexes" (Alter & Raustiala, 2018, p. 333). ...
... Orchestration involves "light coordination" and can be used to increase the gains and minimize the costs of institutional complexity (Abbott, 2012). Alternatively, international organizations in a regime complex can rely on institutional deference to manage potential rule conflict in regime complexes (Pratt, 2018). By ceding jurisdiction over a particular issue to another organization, institutional deference reduces overlaps and leads to a more efficient division of labor within regime complexes. ...
... Some scholars have also begun applying statistical analysis to study the determinants and consequences of institutional overlaps (e.g., Gómez-Mera, L. 2015; Gómez-Mera & Varela, 2021; Haftel & Hofmann, 2019;Pratt, 2020), as well as the dynamics of inter-institutional coordination (Pratt, 2018). These large-N studies make it possible to identify associations among different factors spotted in theoretical discussions. ...
A regime complex is an array of overlapping international institutions and agreements that interact to govern in a particular issue area of international relations. International regime complexity refers to the international political dynamics that emerge from the interaction among multiple overlapping institutions within regime complexes. Scholars have identified several factors explaining the emergence of regime complexes and the growing regime complexity in world politics. Some have emphasized the functional rationale for creating institutional linkages to contain negative spillovers across regimes. Others have focused instead on actors’ incentives, pointing to the various expected benefits of governing through regime complexes rather than through separate comprehensive institutions.
Scholars have also disagreed about the consequences of regime complexes and, in particular, about the extent to which regime complexity facilitates or hinders international cooperation. The early literature tended to emphasize how institutional proliferation and fragmentation contributed to regulatory conflicts, thus undermining global governance outcomes. By contrast, other works provide a more nuanced account of the effects of regime overlaps, showing that under certain conditions regime complexity contributes to the effectiveness of cooperation. A rich body of empirical evidence drawn from the study of regime complexes in several issue areas, including environmental, trade, security, migration, and public health governance, suggests that what matters is not the fragmentation and overlaps per se but how they are managed.
The increasing institutional density and overlaps in international politics in the 21st century has generated significant interest among scholars of international relations (IR). The literature on international regime complexity and regime complexes has evolved theoretically and empirically since the beginning of the 12st century. Three main questions have guided and informed theoretical debates and empirical research on regime complexes. First, what are regime complexes and how are they composed? What is meant by international regime complexity? Second, what causes regime complexity and how do regime complexes emerge? And third, what are the effects and consequences of regime complexity?
... A second perspective emphasizes the potential of regime complexes to self-organize in the absence of a central authority (Gehring and Faude, 2013;Kim, 2019). It suggests that the proliferation of international institutions gives rise to various processes of inter-institutional adaptation, orchestration, and deference that states exploit to fashion institutionalized cooperation resilient (Abbott et al., 2015;Gehring and Faude, 2014;Pratt, 2018). Authors subscribing to this line of reasoning emphasize that regime complexes do 'not necessarily imply chaos, anarchy, or disorder' but may feature 'structural coherence' (Kim, 2019, p. 12). ...
... Z€ urn, 2016, p. 207). To preserve inter-institutional adaptation may, however, be a costly process (Abbott et al., 2015;Pratt, 2018). Within this institutional arrangement, PTAs continue the path of progressive liberalization set in motion by the GATT in 1947. ...
... The key task for practitioners is to invoke suitable governance techniques such as orchestration and deference to work towards mutual complementarity between international (economic) institutions (Abbott et al., 2015;Pratt, 2018). Notwithstanding their potential to make institutionalized cooperation among states resilient in the face of challenges, regime complexes are in the first instance characterized by overlapping claims to authority that are not necessarily mutually complementary. ...
What are the implications of the proliferating preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for the liberal trade order? Many scholars and practitioners see large increases in PTAs as a destabilizing factor that undermines core features of the post‐war international trade system. By contrast, this paper argues that the accelerated growth of PTAs since the mid‐1990s enhances the resilience of the liberal trade order. PTAs increase the ability of the order to accommodate heterogeneous preferences and distributive conflicts. They represent a continuation of a longer path of liberalization set in motion by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This path‐dependent development created conditions for a gradual expansion of the membership and the regulatory scope of the GATT/WTO system, but also heightened levels of preference heterogeneity and distributive conflicts. By enabling groups of states with homogenous preferences to layer new rules on top of the multilateral GATT/WTO system, PTAs enable the continuation of the liberalization path. Consequently, PTAs have served as complements rather than to undermine the WTO. Only if inter‐institutional coordination is successfully established, are regime complexes able to stabilize institutionalized cooperation in a changing world.
... Third, this study builds on the growing international relations (IR) literature on institutional interactions and regime complexity (Jönsson, 2017). It addresses the relationships among multiple institutions that co-govern a specific issue (Clark, 2021;Gehring & Faude, 2014;Johnson & Urpelainen, 2012;Pratt, 2018). These studies often analyze institutional overlapping, with several different institutions having similar or even conflicting tasks in a given issue, and discuss it in relation to the role of member states. ...
... That is, the complexes of institutions provide states with opportunities for forum shopping or regime shifting, which could undermine the overall effectiveness of governance (Morse & Keohane, 2014;Orsini, Morin, & Young, 2013;Raustiala, 2012). Increasingly, studies are exploring how political actors (states, IOs, and private actors) seek to set inter-institutional coordination and collaboration to correct overlaps, and how this process interacts with states' interests (Clark, 2021;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2022;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Westerwinter, 2022;Gehring & Faude, 2013Henning, 2017;Pratt, 2018). Thus, inter-institutional coordination is related to the cooperation between IOs, given that both entail a similar coordination process. ...
Why do international organizations (IOs) adopt different arrangements for cooperation? Drawing on the theory of institutional context and the rational theory of international design, I argue that a prior thick institution between IOs, which involves the adjustment of organizational mandates and/or activities, facilitates a decentralized arrangement for their current cooperation by fostering mutual expectations and reducing uncertainty. If the prior institution merely assumes direct combinations of resources and expertise, a centralized arrangement is needed to reduce uncertainty regarding the counterpart IO’s cooperative motive. With archival analysis and extensive interviews with IO staff members, this argument is tested against two empirical cases of inter-organizational cooperation undertaken by the United Nations Environment Program under the Minamata Convention on Mercury. The in-depth analysis reveals how IOs cope with demands and obstacles for inter-organizational cooperation on the ground, which has been largely unexplored in the literature.
... While informal hierarchy also exists within regime complexes (Pratt 2018), the institutional heterogeneity of HICs expands and reinforces it. ...
... However, institutions composed of powerful member states or agencies, and institutions to which states have delegated extensive authority, cast stronger shadows of hierarchy than weaker institutions (Pratt 2018). The G20, for example, represents sufficient state authority and power to coordinate all the TGNs in the financial HIC. ...
Most issue areas in world politics today are governed neither by individual institutions nor by regime complexes composed of formal interstate institutions. Rather, they are governed by “hybrid institutional complexes” (HICs) comprising heterogeneous interstate, infra-state, public–private and private transnational institutions, formal and informal. We develop the concept of the HIC as a novel descriptive and analytical lens for the study of contemporary global governance. The core structural difference between HICs and regime complexes is the greater diversity of institutional forms within HICs. Because of that diversity, HICs operate differently than regime complexes in two significant ways: (1) HICs exhibit relatively greater functional differentiation among their component institutions, and hence suffer from relatively fewer overlapping claims to authority; and (2) HICs exhibit greater informal hierarchy among their component institutions, and hence benefit from greater ordering. Both are systemic features. HICs have characteristic governance benefits: they offer good “substantive fit” for multi-faceted governance problems and good “political fit” for the preferences of diverse constituents; constrain conflictive cross-institutional strategies; and are conducive to mechanisms of coordination, which enhance substantive coherence. Yet HICs also pose characteristic governance risks: individual institutions may take on aspects of problems for which they are ill-suited; multiple institutions may create confusion; HICs can amplify conflict and contestation rather than constraining them; and the “soft” institutions within HICs can reduce the focality of incumbent treaties and intergovernmental organizations and forestall the establishment of new ones. We outline a continuing research agenda for exploring the structures, operations and governance implications of HICs.
... By generating the conditions for rule conflict, for blurring lines of accountability, and for cross-institutional strategies, institutional overlap is likely to affect international cooperation, and the stakes are particularly high when the core of governance complexesformal IGOsis concerned. Unsurprisingly, much of the literature on the consequences of governance complexity has focused on this institutional type (see, for example, Betts 2013; Lesage and Van de Graaf 2013;Pratt 2018). Given their central role in global governance, the absence of systematic empirical information about IGO complexity constitutes a serious gap in extant research. ...
... Recent research on governance complexity, in turn, is interested in the consequences of this phenomenon for institutional performance. Whereas most analyses expect overlap to undermine performance due to conflicting rules and norms (Alter and Meunier 2009;Raustiala and Victor 2004), others expect overlap to have little effect on performance, or even to enhance it, due to processes of inter-institutional coordination (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2021; Gehring and Faude 2014;Pratt 2018). With only a few exceptions, this research is based on individual case studies. ...
Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.
... A regime complex is defined as "an array of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions that includes more than one international agreement or authority" (Raustalia and Victor 2004: 279). In most theorizing on the politics of regime complexes, the principle importance of IOs lies in the fact that they are the main forums or arenas in which states pursue their interests by utilizing cross-institutional political strategies, such as "regime-shifting" (Helfer 2009), "institutional deference" (Pratt 2018) and "hostagetaking" (Hofmann 2019). Yet IOs are not only arenas for states to pursue their strategic goalsthey can also be independent actors in their own right (Reinalda and Verbeek 1998;Barnett and Finnemore 2004;Oestreich 2012). ...
... While scholars of regime complexes have taken steps to model in the behavior of private actors (Green and Auld 2017;Zelli et al. 2017) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Orsini 2013;Gómez-Mera 2016), theorizing and research on IOs as actors in regime complexes has lagged behind. The likely reason is that regime complexes have been chiefly theorized by scholars working from Functionalist paradigms that view IOs as mechanisms created by states in order to lower transaction costs and solve coordination problems (Abbott and Snidal 1998); most research on regime complexes thus seeks to explain whether partially overlapping authority increases or decreases the incentives for states to cooperate (Raustalia and Victor 2004;Oberthür and Gehring 2006;Alter and Meunier 2009;Keohane and Victor 2011;Johnson and Urpelainen 2012;Orsini et al. 2013;Gehring and Faude 2014;Pratt 2018;Hofmann 2019). While this is undoubtedly important research, it has come at the cost of neglecting the agency of IOs in regime complexes. ...
This article identifies the existence of a previously unknown but important type of self-directed political behavior by International Organizations (IOs) that I term intervention . Intervention occurs when an IO secretariat acts with the intention of altering an anticipated decision at a partially-overlapping IO in a regime complex. Intervention is a distinct type of behavior by IOs that differs from either bureaucratic competition among IOs for mandates, resources and policy influence, or cooperation to achieve joint regulatory goals and enhance performance. I probe the plausibility of intervention through an analysis of three illustrative case studies in the regime complex for food security showing self-directed political actions by the secretariats of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) directed at altering decision-making by states at the World Trade Organization (WTO). I identify three distinct intervention strategies – mobilizing states, public shaming and invoking alternative legal frameworks – in which IOs utilize their material, ideational and symbolic capabilities to influence decision-making not within their own institutions, but at other, overlapping organizations in a regime complex over which they have no direct control.
... Since states have tended to create more and more international and, in particular, regional organizations within the last ten years (Söderbaum 2016), scholars have started to analyze the effects of overlapping organizations on regional cooperation. The analysis of regional overlap is often interlinked with the study of regime complexity, where different regional actors are connected and interact with each other (e.g., Alter and Meunier 2009;Keohane and Victor 2011;Brosig 2013Brosig , 2015Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013;Weiffen, Wehner, and Nolte 2013;Aris, Snetkov, and Wenger 2018;Pratt 2018). Since ROs are different from regimes and cover multiple policy areas in a more structured manner, the debate on regime complexity does not capture the phenomenon completely, despite the rich findings elaborated so far. ...
... With vast international pressure exerted on Nigeria after the Chibok kidnapping, domestic pressure, which had been rising since 2012, increased with the Senate urging the federal government to support regional solutions (Onogu 2014) and the main opposition party calling for including the ECOWAS and the AU in the fight against Boko Haram (Xinhua General News Service 2014). In general, the Nigerian presidential elections, postponed from February 14, 2015to March 28, 2015, heightened demands to effectively address the threat through regional solutions (Mercury 2015). Increasingly, African state officials criticized Nigerian requests for endorsement and called for action (Weekly Trust 2015). ...
Regional conflicts increasingly require multilevel efforts by regional, subregional, and international actors. When states are confronted with a cooperation problem, often there are several institutions available to address this issue. Drawing on the literature of overlapping regionalism and forum-shopping, we argue that existing explanatory models benefit from adding power-based explanations. By conceptualizing an issue-specific dimension and factors specific to the national environment as additional power-based criteria for forum-shopping, we expand the existing literature. Applying our framework to the response to the Boko Haram uprising, our study examines why Nigeria preferred specific regional entities to others. We find that Nigerian resistance toward external intervention and hegemonic interests inherent in national elites as power-based aspects of forum-shopping explain the counterintuitive creation of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) under the umbrella of the rather unknown Lake Chad Bassin Commission (LCBC) instead of reliance on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the African Union (AU) as important security providers in Africa.
... 56 Regime complexes vary in their degree of fragmentation and coordination, and are not necessarily deliberately designed. 57 The literature tends to explore phenomena of institutional overlap and their consequences. 58 Together with the emergence of regime International Affairs 00: 0, 2023 complexes, the inter-organizational turn in the literature explores ever closer links between IGOs. ...
Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) are an indispensable but scantly conceptualized part of global governance. In recent years, several typologies and classifications of global governance arrangements have been provided, mostly differentiating them based on their organizational design features of degree of formality and membership composition. These do not capture AHCs and the role they play in global governance. In this article, we not only provide a conceptualization of AHCs, but also propose ways in which AHCs fit within the broader global governance architecture. We argue that what sets AHCs apart is not so much their (in)formality or membership, but rather their short-notice creation, their task-specific purpose and their temporarily circumscribed existence. We therefore define AHCs as autonomous arrangements with a task-specific mandate established at short notice for a limited time frame. We then develop a research agenda on the nature and future of AHCs, including their short- and long-term relationship with other multilateral arrangements in the global governance architecture. This is important, as we do yet not know how AHCs complement, compete and impact on international organizations and international crisis response.
... A new surveillance organization, such as AMRO, might learn or emulate those skills developed by the IMF because it takes considerable time and effort to acquire these abilities. 6 This implies that AMRO might defer to the IMF because of the latter's comparative advantage or a leader's initiative in the sense of a Stackelberg game (Pratt, 2018). 7 By contrast, Scenario (2) predicts that the IMF will coordinate on region-specific ideas in surveillance for APT countries to address regional economic problems and policy issues. ...
Institutional proliferation in the global financial order raises concerns about a failure of coordination between global and regional organizations and the resulting confusion and conflict. One area of concern is macroeconomic surveillance, which is crucial for the detection of financial crises as a task subject to institutional overlaps. The existing literature does not provide systematic evidence on the extent and determinants of such coordination. To fill this lacuna, we compare the International Monetary Fund and the ASEAN Plus Three Macroeconomic Research Office, a surveillance agency in East Asia, using their country reports as outcomes of their surveillance of East Asian countries. We conduct dictionary-based text analyses to assess the usage patterns of key terms concerning particular economic ideas. The results demonstrate substantial similarities between the country reports as well as some residual differences. These findings suggest that they engage in informal coordination based on focal-point effects through the use of general and regional economic ideas for multifaceted surveillance. They further suggest that informality permits them to exercise discretion in deciding policy categories for aligned and autonomous actions, thereby providing an efficient solution to an autonomy–coordination dilemma. Through these discussions, our study suggests important implications for researchers and member governments.
... The condition for approving the rule-making function of one governing body by another body is entirely subjective, i.e. completely depends on the will of the controlling actor. However, the procedure for such an agreement should acquire the properties of certainty and get the corresponding regulation [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. ...
The article considers the rule-making powers of new public and legal institutions in the Russian Federation, i.e., federal territories as exemplified by the Sirius federal territory. The possibility of creating federal territories is a procedural innovation in Russian law but some foreign legal systems have already enshrined it. Thus, it is appropriate to study the experience of other countries in this field.
The study aims at determining the specific rule-making competence of public authorities in a federal territory. The research objective is to analyze a new mechanism for implementing the rule-making competence of public authorities developed in coordination with the Russian government.
The article conducted a comparative analysis of the US and Russian legal orders and a content analysis of new Russian laws on federal territories and the doctrines on the competence-based approach in state formation and management.
The authors have concluded that the powers of public authorities in a federal territory have two levels. One of them is inherent in the nature of such powers, and the other has a discretionary and fictitious nature.
... Right now, the sense that global governance is inherently solution seeking helps to explain why international regime complexes can generate hierarchy and deference, and why international regime complexity does not portend disorder (Faude, 2020;Faude & Groβe-Kreul, 2020;Gehring & Faude, 2014;Pratt, 2018). But this focus on an order/ disorder binary also dodges the more fundamental constructivist question of 'how does the global governance problem get defined and limited in the first place?' ...
As the world becomes more complicated, so too does global governance. The political consequences of the rising density of institutions, policies, rules and strategies to address global phenomena has been a central focus of the scholarship on international regime complexity. This conclusion to a special issue grapples with the promise and perils of theorizing about international regime complexity in a constantly evolving world. It discusses the special issue contributions while uniting the different conversations about the increasingly complex global governance space we refer to as international regime complexity. The goal is to bridge existing debates about global governance, to expand the scholarly conversation by drawing from and better connecting to IR debates, and to ensure that we can address practical and pressing global governance challenges.
... Although France won a concession to discuss bringing the ESM under the rule of EU law later by 2018 (making it justiciable in the Court, involving the Commission and Parliament and bringing in new procedures and principles), Germany's conflicts with Cyprus and Greece through 2015 left it convinced that external control was key to its success, and the talks were fruitless (Donnelly, 2018). The ESM, coupled with the Franco-German conflict, is rightly seen as Germany's success in establishing a new institution (Jupille et al., 2013) that sets terms for the EU (Pratt, 2018). ...
Failing forward describes an endogenous cycle of EU institution-building through lowest-common denominator breakthroughs in Council. This article adds a dynamic called failing outward, in which a powerful country steers EU law and policy from outside the EU. Where strong Council deadlocks persist during crises, and a powerful state possesses a critical, excludable resource, it will make access conditional on EU rules and institutions that reflect its own interests rather than Council compromises. A non-EU institution helps it do this, entrenching conditionality. Repeated institutional fixes follow as the system fails (some) other Member States. This model is applied to Germany’s effective authority through the European Stability Mechanism over Council and Commission in determining EMU reforms, including Banking Union.
... Regime complexes are viewed as having the potential to reduce inconsistency by establishing different mechanisms of either formal or informal coordination such as joint interplay management (Stokke and Oberth€ ur 2011), institutional deference (Pratt, 2018), orchestration (Abbott et al., 2015;Quaglia and Spendzharova 2021) or a stable division of labor between different elements (Gehring and Faude 2014). If global and regional organizations specialize and focus on their comparative advantages, this will eliminate duplication, even if the formal mandates overlap widely. ...
Multilateral Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are increasingly challenged by a rising number of bilateral, regional and plurilateral organizations. The mandates of global and regional organizations overlap and intersect when trade is being regulated, financial crisis lending is being provided or development is being financed. In this special issue we examine the forms, dynamics and implications of these global–regional realignments for global economic governance. By drawing on the analytical toolbox of regime complexity research, the authors address mechanisms of integration and disintegration in the regime complexes in trade, finance and development from the viewpoint of actors and particularly regional challengers. The papers discuss first, the motives and strategies to spur fragmentation or integration. Second, they examine to what extent actors seek to substitute or complement focal institutions on the global level. Third, the special issue evaluates the implications of a coexistence of integration and disintegration for global economic governance.
... Recent research on governance complexity, in turn, is interested in the consequences of this phenomenon for institutional performance. Whereas most analyses expect overlap to undermine performance due to conflicting rules and norms(Alter and Meunier 2009;Raustiala and Victor 2004), others expect overlap to have little effect on performance, or even to enhance it, due to processes of inter-institutional coordination (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2021;Gehring and Faude 2014;Pratt 2018). With only a few exceptions, this research is based on individual case studies.Our measures could complement these studies by providing a basis for a systematic analysis of institutional performance across time and space. ...
Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance institutions. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, the present article makes two contributions. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed- dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive dataset on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, that allow researchers to examine the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.
... While acknowledging a trade-off between differentiation and coherence, I conjecture that, as long as the number of institutions remains within certain reasonable limits, greater differentiation is likely to have positive net effects on resilience in the medium-and long-term. It is by now well-known that, over time, institutional complexity tends to induce inter-institutional coherence among international institutions with overlapping competences (Abbott et al. 2015;Gehring & Faude 2014;Pratt 2018;Oberthür & Stokke 2011). Thus, a trade-off between a greater availability of actions and a greater risk from reduced coherence should exist only in the short term. ...
This paper asks how institutional complexity affects the resilience of global governance. By drawing on sociological differentiation theory, it interprets growing levels of institutional complexity as a process of institutional differentiation which allows the "political system of world society" to mirror the increasing complexity of its social environment. More precisely, the paper suggests that growing levels of institutional complexity enhance the resilience of global governance by providing states with a more diverse set of governance tools and by making backup governance tools available. Against this backdrop, it makes two interrelated contributions to the literature on global governance. First, by applying the concept of resilience to global governance, the paper provides the conceptual basis for a novel research agenda on the ability of contemporary global governance to operate under stress. So far, the analytical toolbox of global governance researchers does not contain a concept that enables a theory-driven analysis of international institutions' ability to facilitate cooperation when confronted with high levels of stress. Second, it offers a sense of how the central structural feature of contemporary global governance-institutional complexity-affects its resilience. With these two interrelated contributions, the paper seeks to start a scholarly conversation on the resilience of contemporary global governance.
... Most importantly, the literature on regime complexity has addressed the increasingly dense geometry of governance beyond the nation state. The debate usually features task-specific international organizations (IOs), and mostly addresses the consequences of and responses to increasing complexity (Alter and Meunier 2009;Gehring and Faude 2014;Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013;Alter and Raustiala 2018;Pratt 2018). However, this paper focuses on ROs. ...
Regional Organizations (ROs) have become a central pillar of governance beyond the nation-state. This paper investigates why European states turned into architects of regional regime complexity: they have created and joined numerous different ROs and equipped them with a broad range of different policy competencies. Thereby, European states – some more than others – have increasingly duplicated identical policy competencies in multiple ROs. The phenomenon is puzzling as it is potentially costly and might undermine the effectiveness of regional cooperation especially if incompatible regional rules trigger non-compliance. Therefore, we ask why states differ in the extent to which they cover identical competencies in different ROs. Drawing on a unique dataset and analyzing cross-sectional temporal variation, we show that both indirect factors, such as late accessions and the number of states in Europe, as well as direct factors, such as state power and democracy, drive regional regime complexity.
... One bureaucratic response to growing institutional overlap might be to modify or reduce the scope of institutional activities to avoid direct competition with peers; a strategy of "avoidance" (see Bernholz 2009). Alternatively, weaker institutional agents may choose to defer to stronger peers by accepting their rules on issues where they are deemed more authoritative by virtue of having greater expertise or more powerful member states (Pratt 2018a). Individual institutions may also seek to specialize in functions or tasks that complement rather than compete with others. ...
Many observers worry that growing numbers of international institutions with overlapping functions serve to undermine governance effectiveness via duplication, inconsistency and conflict. Such pessimistic assessments may undervalue the mechanisms available to states and other political agents to reduce conflictual overlap and enhance inter-institutional synergy. Drawing on historical data I examine how states can mitigate conflict within Global Governance Complexes (GGCs) by dissolving or merging existing institutions or by re-configuring their mandates. I further explore how "order in complexity" can emerge through "bottom-up" processes of adaptation in lieu of state-led reform. My analysis supports three theoretical claims: (1) states frequently refashion governance complexes "top-down" in order to reduce conflictual overlap; (2) "top-down" restructuring and "bottom-up" adaptation present alternative mechanisms for ordering relations among component institutions of GGCs; (3) these twin mechanisms ensure that GGCs tend to (re)produce elements of order over time-albeit often temporarily. Rather than evolving towards ever-greater fragmentation and disorder, complex governance systems thus tend to fluctuate between greater or lesser integration and (dis)order.
... A growing literature on regime complexity argues that these benefits may be reduced when IOs proliferate (Raustiala and Victor 2004;Helfer 2009;Davis 2009). By tying power directly to the creation of overlapping IOs, the paper complements work that privileges power relations in regime complexes (Drezner 2009;Pratt 2018). In doing so, it supplements theories of IO proliferation that emphasize competing preferences among states (Morse and Keohane 2014). ...
Why do states build new international organizations (IOs) in issue areas where many institutions already exist? Prevailing theories of institutional creation emphasize their ability to resolve market failures, but adding new IOs can increase uncertainty and rule inconsistency. I argue that institutional proliferation occurs when existing IOs fail to adapt to shifts in state power. Member states expect decision-making rules to reflect their underlying power; when it does not, they demand greater influence in the organization. Subsequent bargaining over the redistribution of IO influence often fails due to credibility and information problems. As a result, under-represented states construct new organizations that provide them with greater institutional control. To test this argument, I examine the proliferation of multilateral development banks since 1944. I leverage a novel identification strategy rooted in the allocation of World Bank votes at Bretton Woods to show that the probability of institutional proliferation is higher when power is misaligned in existing institutions. My results suggest that conflict over shifts in global power contribute to the fragmentation of global governance.
... 164 Hofmann 2018. 165 Pratt 2018. effort the subordinate country will expend on its own defense." ...
The allocation of resources and the sharing of defense burdens among states in the transatlantic security community is central to ordering and organization among its members. While economists have shed light on variation in burden-sharing behavior among states and measured as top-line defense spending, only qualitative work in the security studies field has addressed the nature of contributions to shared priorities. Neither field has explicitly addressed spending on modernizing defense capabilities, which is of primary interest to policy-makers aiming to mitigate burden-shifting tendencies in alliances. I find the larger the weight of arms production is in its domestic economy, the more a state spends on shared transatlantic priorities. This finding suggests that the strategic effects of defense industrial policy, and particularly the distribution of defense industries across Europe, extend beyond the production of defense articles and into the politics of burden sharing. Policies designed to encourage European defense industrial cooperation in the interest of European strategic autonomy are thus likely to improve transatlantic and intra-European burden-sharing. The finding is robust to multiple statistical modeling choices. It also finds support from primary source archival evidence and participant interviews.
... Different, not necessarily exclusive, motives can drive the activating move. Some actors might bring the conflicts to the attention of the international community to achieve their recognition, and/or to enable collective action if the conflict is resolved and the norms are harmonized (Pratt 2018). Others, on the contrary, might seek to thwart collective action and/or to evade a norm that is costly for them through the instrumentalization, hardening, or even escalating the conflict (Gómez-Mera 2016: 572-573, Fehl 2018: 6, Sanders 2018. ...
The paper outlines a framework for studying norm complexity in international politics. We argue that – due to the increasing density and plurality of the global order – relations and interactions between international norms are gaining relevance as factors influencing norm evolution. While IR scholars have long acknowledged that international norms are embedded in wider normative contexts, this insight has been slow to translate into focused explorations of norm complexity. To advance this line of research, we classify different forms of norm relations that capture norms’ structural positions vis-à-vis each other, identify different types of norm interactions enabled by, but also generating norm relations, and propose a research agenda that exploits our framework to inquire into potential effects of norm complexity: Does it help or harm the emergence, spread, and robustness of individual norms? Does it enable or constrain norm promoters and addressees? Does it empower strong or weak actors?
... The analysis of regional overlap is often interlinked with the study of regime complexity where different regional actors are connected and interact with each other (e.g. Alter and Meunier 2009;Keohane and Victor 2011;Brosig 2013Brosig , 2015Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013;Weiffen et al. 2013;Aris, Snetkov, and Wenger 2018;Pratt 2018). Since ROs are different from regimes and cover multiple policy areas in a more structured manner, the debate on regime complexity does not capture the phenomenon completely, despite the rich findings elaborated so far. ...
Regional conflicts increasingly require multilevel efforts by regional, subregional, and international actors. When states are confronted with a cooperation problem, often there are several institutions available to address this issue. Drawing on the literature of overlapping regionalism and forum-shopping, we argue that existing explanatory models benefit from adding power-based explanations. By conceptualizing an issue-specific dimension and factors specific to the national environment as additional power-based criteria for forum-shopping, we expand the existing literature. Applying our framework to the response to the Boko Haram uprising, our study examines why Nigeria preferred specific regional entities to others. We find that Nigerian resistance toward external intervention and hegemonic interests inherent in national elites as power-based aspects of forum-shopping explain the counterintuitive creation of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) under the umbrella of the rather unknown Lake Chad Bassin Commission (LCBC) instead of reliance on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the African Union (AU) as important security providers in Africa.
... Against this backdrop the 'division of work', commonly justified with reference to the established principle of subsidiarity, 9 corresponds to what Pratt (2018) terms deference, whereby one IO selectively confers authority to another IO or actor, so as to mitigate a rule conflict or a normative tension. In the present case, deference helps the UN to mitigate a tension within its own normative structure, and allows for 'transferring risks', as well as 'some of the dirty work', to African actors (interviews, UNOCHA executive, Bamako (28 January 2018); UN official, DPO, New York (13 March 2019)). ...
This article traces recent changes of the practices and justifications of the use of force in intervention, in the context of African security governance, highlighting how these changes interact with norm transformations at the scale of the global order. In doing so, it conveys how a long-standing pattern of norm contestation between international and African actors over external intervention vs sovereignty, has started to give way to a mutually accepted division of labour. After 9/11, the paradigm of liberal interventionism has been incrementally replaced by the framework of stabilisation, with a re-prioritisation of sovereigntist agendas. This has increased collaboration between international and African actors, specifically prompting the United Nations and the African Union to divide tasks of mandating and enforcement, thereby increasing inter-institutional ‘order’. This consensus, however, far from signifying wider compliance with ‘liberal ordering’ principles, rather indicates the need to revisit central assumptions of the International Relations norm diffusion literature. While the latter emphasises the diffusion of ‘good’ international norms, especially pertaining to human rights and democratisation, the growing consensus on ‘intervention as stabilisation’ instead exposes how post-9/11 justifications of practices that carry the potential to downsize the scope of such norms, are starting to resonate across international, regional and national sites of policy and practice.
... International organizations can also rely on institutional deference, recognizing and ceding regulatory authority and jurisdiction to other organizations. These attempts at inter-institutional coordination tend to be based on a division of labour among organizations, ultimately aimed at reducing overlaps and conflicts within regime complexes (Pratt 2018). ...
International institutions are prevalent in world politics. More than a thousand multilateral treaties are in place just to protect the environment alone, and there are many more. And yet, it is also clear that these institutions do not operate in a void but are enmeshed in larger, highly complex webs of governance arrangements. This compelling book conceptualises these broader structures as the 'architectures' of global governance. Here, over 40 international relations scholars offer an authoritative synthesis of a decade of research on global governance architectures with an empirical focus on protecting the environment and vital earth systems. They investigate the structural intricacies of earth system governance and explain how global architectures enable or hinder individual institutions and their overall effectiveness. The book offers much-needed conceptual clarity about key building blocks and structures of complex governance architectures, charts detailed directions for new research, and provides analytical groundwork for policy reform.
... This could be a way in which minilateralism could relegitimize the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negating the global powershifts that contributed to the slowdown in multilateral negotiations that took place under its purview (Falkner 2016). Pratt (2018) emphasizes here the concept of institutional deference, where deference to other international organizations makes focused rule-making on sub-issues more likely. Although the concept was used to describe the development of a division of labour within regime complexes, comparable developments might also be apparent or possible within broader governance architectures. ...
Architectures of Earth System Governance - edited by Frank Biermann May 2020
... Such division of work is structured by a logic whereby regional African partners and organizations take on 'first responder' enforcement activities, whereas the UN (ideally) takes over when there is a peace to keep and/ or engage in parallel stabilization tasks. This can be understood as what Pratt (2018) terms deference, whereby one IO selectively confers authority to another IO or actor, so as to mitigate a rule conflict or normative tensions. In peace operations, deference of 'robust' tasks to ROs helps the UN to mitigate tensions occurring within its own organizational structure (being a peacekeeping organization faced with new demands for robust action), and allows for transferring risks to African actors (Moe and Geis forthcoming). ...
Security governance in Africa constitutes a web of interactions between national, regional, and international organizations. This emerging ‘African security regime complex' receives growing attention in International Relations debates on international organizations (IOs). Most analysis, however, follows institutionalist and problem-solving approaches, centred on regulatory concerns. We offer a different perspective. Moving beyond dominant perspectives on organizations as either pre-given institutional ‘wholes' or rationalized ‘tools' of states, we instead unpack the ‘politics of organizations’, understood as the multiple processes and forms of agency through which organizations emerge, diversify and transform. In doing so, we bring IO analysis into conversation with debates on hybridity, friction and translocality.
... The ebb and flow of populist 1 politics has also long been a central topic in diverse fields. 2 Despite a recent "populist surge (Mudde 2016, 25)" disrupting politics in Western societies, there has been little empirical analysis of the relationship between populism and international order, and none on the effect of populism on the international politics of burden-sharing. This is an important gap, because burden-sharing, or "the distribution of costs and risks among members of a group in the process of accomplishing a goal (Cimbala and Forster 2005, 1)," is central to the concept of international order and the functioning of international regimes (Lake 2007;Pratt 2018). 1 I understand populism as a "style of rhetoric reflecting first-order principles about who should rule, claiming that legitimate power rests with 'the people' not the elites (Norris and Inglehart 2019, 4)." I contend that this style of politics translates to the international arena as "us first" foreign policies. ...
While the causes and consequences of populism have drawn much attention from researchers, transatlantic burden-sharing captivates not only scholars, but populist politicians themselves. A populist President in the United States has called for significant changes in the way the U.S. leads, focusing on burden-sharing as a bone of contention with allies; Turkey is at odds with its Western partners; the UK is on the brink of leaving the EU; and illiberal parties who question the utility of the institutional architecture that has ordered European politics for 70 years have made significant electoral gains. More than just a defense economics question, burden-sharing is at the core of hierarchy and order in the transatlantic community. Yet no research to date has empirically analyzed the relationship between populism in national politics and burden-sharing. I find that the higher the share of seats in a state’s parliament held by populist parties, the less that state spends on agreed priorities for collective defense. In short, populist politics is associated with adverse burden-sharing outcomes in the transatlantic community. This finding suggests that the strategic effects of populism extend beyond probabilities of conflict and cooperation and into alliance burden-sharing politics and grand strategy.
I am grateful to Pippa Norris, Douglas Lute, Bob Bell, Matt DiGiuseppe, Yf Rykers, Linde Desmaele, Antonio Calcara, Edward Hunter Christie, and Seth Johnston for feedback on this paper. I am also grateful to the organizers of Politicologenetmaal 2019 at the University of Antwerp for the opportunity to present this paper there.
... International organizations can also rely on institutional deference, recognizing and ceding regulatory authority and jurisdiction to other organizations. These attempts at inter-institutional coordination tend to be based on a division of labour among organizations, ultimately aimed at reducing overlaps and conflicts within regime complexes (Pratt 2018). ...
This chapter reviews this literature on environmental regime complexes. The first section clarifies the definition of regime complex and distinguishes it from similar concepts.
The following three sections look respectively at the emergence, the development, and
the consequences of regime complexes. The fifth section surveys the different methods
used in the regime complex literature. Finally, the last section discusses future directions
for research on environmental regime complexes.
... Configured in terms that are also amenable to testing, the argument is then used to explain the historical and recent proliferation of multilateral development banks (MDBs). Once multiple institutions are created in the same issue area, the same author argues that the organizations with weaker member states tend to defer to organizations with stronger members (Pratt, 2018b). Lipscy (2017) argues that changes within international institutionsspecifically in the voting shares and formal influence of members in institutional governance -depend substantially on their exposure to competition. ...
The theory of regime complexity offers a useful lens through which to analyse the increasing density of international institutions and the patterns of conflict and cooperation among them. Scholarship on crisis and development finance would benefit from more fully employing this approach to explain the emergence of overlapping institutions and offer recommendations for designing regime complexes. The theory advanced here emphasizes the strategies of key states to use institutional overlap to limit agency ‘drift’ away from their preferences. Prioritizing control often comes at the cost of conflict among the institutions, however, and can thus impede the achievement of financial stability and development goals. The regime complexity approach is distinct from the rational design of institutions, institutional experimentalism and theoretical realism. Drawing on lessons from the euro crisis, this article offers informed conjectures on financial arrangements in the regions of Latin America and East Asia and their interaction with global multilateral institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund.
Foreign influences on elections are widespread. Although foreign interventions around elections differ markedly-in terms of when and why they occur, and whether they are even legal-they all have enormous potential to influence citizens in the countries where elections are held. Bush and Prather explain how and why outside interventions influence local trust in elections, a critical factor for democracy and stability. Whether foreign actors enhance or diminish electoral trust depends on who is intervening, what political party citizens support, and where the election takes place. The book draws on diverse evidence, including new surveys conducted around elections with varying levels of democracy in Georgia, Tunisia, and the United States. Its insights about public opinion shed light on why leaders sometimes invite foreign influences on elections and why the candidates that win elections do not do more to respond to credible evidence of foreign meddling.
While many issue areas of global governance have witnessed the proliferation of evermore overlapping institutions, the topologies underlying regime complexes differ from strongly centralised, to rather decentralised institutional structures. This paper contributes to a better understanding of this phenomenon in two ways. First, it proposes a conceptualisation of institutional topologies that takes a social network perspective. Second, building on economic good theories, the paper complements the existing arguments about policy area competition claiming that they overlooked the important role of the (non-)excludability of institutional benefits. This policy specific variable shapes an institutional complex’s propensity for competition which, in turn, spurs the (de)centralisation of institutional complexes. Two structured comparisons provide empirical support for this argument: comparing the propensities for competition and network structures underlying the institutional complexes of TA and intellectual property protection, I show that despite their many similarities, fundamental differences regarding the excludability of institutional benefits co-vary with fundamentally different institutional configurations. I complement these findings with qualitative case studies of institutionalisation processes in both policy fields rendering further empirical support for the theory’s underlying causal claim.
Multilateral trust funds have become an increasingly prominent funding mechanism in international development. Yet marked differences exist in the extent to which donors support trust funds. In this study, we argue that differential support for trust funds originates in donor domestic politics. Specifically, it results from differences in national bureaucratic rulebooks that incentivise aid officials to support trust funds more or less. Because trust funds place a high premium on performance and results, aid officials from donor countries whose aid bureaucracies are set up to promote performance and results are more likely to support trust funds than their counterparts from aid bureaucracies that are less performance-oriented. We find robust support for differential use of trust funds in terms of incidence of usage, type of preferred fund and outsourcing behaviour, drawing on a data set of World Bank trust funds. Our project contributes to the understanding of international development cooperation by mapping donor political economies to the rise of trust fund usage. We also contribute to a better understanding of the global diffusion of performance-based evaluation.
This article analyses how and when institutional actors can shape overlap with other international organisations. Growing overlap either poses the threat of marginalisation to the incumbent organisation or offers opportunities for cooperation. Institutional actors should therefore be expected to try shape the relations with the overlapping organisation to protect their own. The article theorises that institutional actors can shape overlap if they possess sufficient institutional capacity and face a favourable opportunity structure. Whether institutional actors embrace or resist overlap, in turn, depends on their perception of the nature of the domain expansion of the other international organisation. Relying on 20 interviews with senior officials, the article probes the argument against the case of the growing overlap between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union resulting from the latter’s recent security and defence initiatives. Contrary to most expectations, it finds that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization actors played a consequential role in restructuring the relationship with the European Union.
This paper critically assesses the (de)legitimation strategies used by rising powers against existing formal and informal International Organizations (IOs), especially the G7/8, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In doing so, it first analyzes how legitimacy relates to multilateralism and vice versa. Then, it examines why legitimacy matters to rising powers the two main (de)legitimation strategies—regime shift and competitive regime creation—used by rising powers when they contest the legitimacy of the existing IOs. Finally, it uses the cases of the G20 and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to highlight the strengths and limits of regime shift and competitive regime creation strategies. This paper argues that rising powers' quest for enhanced legitimacy by means of joining alternative existing institutions (G20) or creating new institutions (AIIB) seems to have produced limited results because, like the status-quo institutions, the G20 and AIIB also suffer from legitimacy deficit.
Many scholars argue that regime complexes are nonhierarchical. However, if that is true, then how does authority function? This article argues that the conceptualization of regime complexes as largely devoid of hierarchy is mistaken. Instead, it offers a new definition of regime complexes: emergent patterns of authority among state and non-state actors, which vary in their degree of hierarchy. Hierarchy in regime complexes looks different from political scientists’ traditional conceptualization. It is systemic, emergent, and positional. I present two dimensions of variation in hierarchy: deference and autonomy. These dimensions provide both a conceptual and an empirical strategy for understanding how authority relations are constituted. Conceptually, they allow us to “see” hierarchy in regime complexes. Empirically, they provide transparent, replicable and variable measures, which have eluded much of the work to date. I use topic modeling coupled with network analysis to detect hierarchy in the regime complex for Antarctica. I demonstrate that the inclusion of non-state actors and their governance activities changes our understanding of the Antarctic regime complex. This approach reveals a hierarchical regime complex, where some non-state actors have considerable authority and are governing issues not regulated by formal rules.
This study focuses on regime complexity and state competition over global Internet governance (GIG). By conceptualizing and mapping international regime complexity, the actors in international issues concerning GIG are identified and studied and the dynamic interactions between states related to GIG are explored. In particular, the 2012 amendments to the International Telecommunication Regulations are used in our analysis of the factors that have contributed to the creation of disputes and cooperation among states in the GIG regime. The empirical study shows that the influence of powerful states, such as the US and China, can affect other states’ decisions on GIG. Furthermore, the findings reveal that democratic states with fewer regulations on business are more likely to support the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers over the International Telecommunication Union.
International organizations (IOs) increasingly pool resources and expertise. Under what conditions do they pool rather than compete when their activities overlap? Drawing on elite interviews, I argue that even though many cooperation decisions are made by staff possessing high degrees of autonomy from member state principals, IOs are more likely to pool resources when their leading stakeholders are geopolitically aligned. Regardless of whether member states directly oversee the negotiation of these arrangements, staff design policies that are amenable to major stakeholders. I test this argument with regression analysis of an original data set that documents patterns of co-financing and information sharing among IOs in the development issue area. I further supplement these tests with an elite survey experiment deployed via LinkedIn to bureaucrats from various development IOs. Across the board, I find evidence consistent with my theory.
The increasing density and entanglement of international law and institutions leads to a growing potential for collisions between norms and rules emanating from different international institutions. It is an open question, however, when actors actually create manifest conflicts about overlapping norms and rules and how – and with what consequences – such conflicts are handled. We therefore utilize the concept of “interface conflicts” in which two or more actors express positional differences over the scope or prevalence of different international norms. Building on the findings of the DFG research group OSAIC (Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts), we introduce the Interface Conflicts 1.0 dataset, which assembles information on 78 interface conflicts. The dataset provides information on the actors and norms at stake in interface conflicts and focuses specifically on their subsequent handling. It distinguishes co-operative from non-cooperative conflict management, and codes the institutional as well as distributional outcomes of all management efforts. Drawing on the Interface Conflicts 1.0 dataset, the paper discusses first descriptive statistics regarding the bones of contention in interface conflicts, distributions across types of conflict management, and conflict management effects on the legal and institutional arrangements in the areas at stake. We thus contribute empirical building blocks to debates about global (dis)order and open new avenues for future research.
International regime complexity has become a prominent feature of the global economy and world politics. The international governance of derivatives markets is a notable case of this phenomenon in finance because a variety of post‐crisis rules have been issued by a multitude of international standard‐setting bodies. By combining the regime complexity and orchestration frameworks, we explain the precision and scope of international standards for derivatives trade reporting. We show how a collective orchestrator (the Group of Twenty) and a hub intermediary (the Financial Stability Board) managed regime complexity through the orchestration of the available intermediaries. We also seek to refine the orchestration framework by explaining how the mechanism of issue de‐linkage can be used to manage the partly diverging goals among states within the collective orchestrator. Our findings are relevant for the global regulation and governance of other policy areas characterized by a multiplicity of actors and interlinked issues, such as trade, energy, and environmental policy.
Within the field of international peace and security, policy makers and analysts alike commonly treat collaboration and convergence among international organizations and intervention frameworks as a policy objective in itself. Indeed, from the focus on the ‘comprehensive approach’, during the 2000s, to the recent emphasis on multi-dimensional and integrated stabilization frameworks, institutional collaboration is cast as inherently positive and desirable in regard to addressing international collective matters. This article challenges such ‘collaboration bias’. It does so by exploring the empirical effects of increasing collaboration and ‘strategic partnerships’ within the context of the current (re)turn to stabilization interventions. Specifically, focusing on Mali, it unpacks how contemporary stabilization efforts intensify collaboration across counterterrorism and peacekeeping interventions in ways that undercut policy implementation within one of the most central peacekeeping priority areas, namely the Protection of Civilians (PoC). In detailing key aspects on which contemporary peacekeeping-counterterrorism entanglements compromise protection efforts, the article conveys some of the ‘dark sides’ of cooperation regimes. It moreover highlights the need to not only explore regime complexity as a systemic feature of world politics but also unpack how it operates, and to what effect, at the meso and micro levels of policy implementation and practice.
The After Fragmentation special issue unites political science conversations about regime complexity with legal/normative conversations about global constitutionalism through a focus on the generation and resolution of interface conflicts, defined as moments when overlapping elements or rule incompatibilities generate actual conflicts. Yet scholars choosing among these two perspectives actually have different objectives. After reviewing the two literatures, I argue that this special issue is closer to the global constitutionalism perspective, which generally seeks legitimated order. By contrast, the regime complexity literature asks how does the fact that global governance is spread across multiple institutions in itself shape cooperation politics. Investigating what it means to get ‘beyond fragmentation’, I suggest that the potential or actuality of rule conflicts is not necessarily a problem because conflicts are a normal and even salutary aspect of politics. If conflict is not the concern, then what should we be worrying about? Both perspectives, I argue, are amoral because they normalise and help justify an international order where responsibility is spread across institutions, promoting order while failing to address fundamental problems affecting people and the world. In this respect, resolving rule conflicts does not get us beyond fragmentation.
This article introduces and explores the expansion of international cooperation through the concept or framework of ‘regime complex,’ which has been studied in international relations and global governance literature. ‘Regime complex’ is a framework that proposes the consideration of the increasing numbers, linkages, and overlaps of formal international organizations and international agreements that co-govern a global problem. Through the documentary research, this article uses the oil-energy regime complex, election monitoring regime complex, and plant-genetic resources regime complex as the examples to understand the concept. The article also examines new forms of international cooperation, such as institutional deference and rules/norms coordination by international organizations, which might be interesting future research topics.
Architectures of Earth System Governance - edited by Frank Biermann May 2020
This article examines to what extent regulatory import (RI), a common, but understudied mode of governance in regime complexes, was a separate factor of the global financial crisis in 2008. RI describes a specific mode of governance that occurs when regulators explicitly incorporate functionally important governance from an external forum to their own regulations, thus making their own performance dependent on external agency. While RI is associated with benefits, such as specialisation, it could cause unintended consequences. The one-sided dependence on external authority could result in the import of non-complementary governance or regulatory failures and undermine the regulator’s performance. We illustrate our argument with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that imported governance authority from the International Accounting Standards Board and credit rating agencies. The paper finds two negative consequences of RI for the Basel Committee’s regulatory performance in the 2008 financial crisis. First, uncoordinated changes of accounting rules increased pro-cyclical effects that exacerbated the banking crisis. Second, import of credit risk measurement from credit rating agencies led to misjudgement of risk exposure.
Deference and Hierarchy in International Regime Complexes—ERRATUM - Volume 72 Issue 3 - Tyler Pratt
Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do pseudo-democrats-undemocratic leaders who present themselves as democratic-invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? In The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma, Susan D. Hyde explains international election monitoring with a new theory of international norm formation. Hyde argues that election observation was initiated by states seeking international support. International benefits tied to democracy give some governments an incentive to signal their commitment to democratization without having to give up power. Invitations to nonpartisan foreigners to monitor elections, and avoiding their criticism, became a widely recognized and imitated signal of a government's purported commitment to democratic elections. Hyde draws on cross-national data on the global spread of election observation between 1960 and 2006, detailed descriptions of the characteristics of countries that do and do not invite observers, and evidence of three ways that election monitoring is costly to pseudo-democrats: micro-level experimental tests from elections in Armenia and Indonesia showing that observers can deter election-day fraud and otherwise improve the quality of elections; illustrative cases demonstrating that international benefits are contingent on democracy in countries like Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe; and qualitative evidence documenting the escalating game of strategic manipulation among pseudo-democrats, international monitors, and pro-democracy forces.
The crossborder movement of people, goods, and information frequently results in legal disputes that come under the jurisdiction of multiple states. The principle of deference – acceptance of the exercise of legal authority by another state – is one mechanism to manage such jurisdictional conflicts. Despite the importance of deference in international law and cooperation, little is known about the causes of variation in its use. In this article, we develop a theory of deference that focuses on the role that domestic institutions and norms play in assuring procedural and substantive fairness. We test this theory in an original dataset concerning accession practices in the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. Our findings offer considerable support for the idea that states evaluate partners on the likelihood that they can offer a fair legal process. Exploring empirically the efforts against parental child-abduction, we offer a nuanced account of the link between domestic institutions and norms and international cooperation. This account suggests that greater attention should be paid to the use of deference as a mechanism to manage the conflicts posed by globalization.
We conceive authority of an international organization as latent in two independent dimensions: delegation by states to international agents and pooling in collective decision making bodies. We theorize that delegation and pooling are empirically as well as conceptually different. Delegation is an effort to deal with the transaction costs of cooperation which are greater in larger, broader, and correspondingly more complex organizations. Pooling reflects the tension between protecting or surrendering the national veto. This paper theorizes that delegation and pooling are constrained by two basic design features: a) the scope of an IO’s policy portfolio and b) the scale of its membership. We test these hypotheses with a new cross-sectional dataset that provides detailed and reliable information on IO decision making. Our major finding is that the design of international organizations is framed by stark and intelligible choices, but in surprising ways. Large membership organizations tend to have both more delegation and more pooling. The broader the policy scope of an IO, the more willing are its members to delegate, but the less willing they are to pool authority.
“Contested multilateralism” describes the situation that results from the pursuit of strategies by states, multilateral organizations, and non-state actors to use multilateral institutions, existing or newly created, to challenge the rules, practices, or missions of existing multilateral institutions. It occurs when coalitions dissatisfied with existing institutions combine threats of exit, voice, and the creation of alternative institutions to pursue policies and practices different from those of existing institutions. Contested multilateralism takes two principal forms: regime shifting and competitive regime creation. It can be observed across issue areas. It shapes patterns of international cooperation and discord on key security concerns such as combating terrorist financing, halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and banning certain conventional weapons. It is also evident on economic issues involving intellectual property, on environmental and energy issues, and in the realm of global public health. The sources of dissatisfaction are primarily exogenous, and the institutions used to challenge the status quo range from traditional treaties or intergovernmental organizations to informal networks, some of which include non-state actors. Some institutions are winners from the process of contested multilateralism; others may lose authority or status. Although we do not propose an explanatory theory of contested multilateralism, we do suggest that this concept provides a useful framework for understanding changes in regime complexes and the strategies that generate such changes.
The article examines the consequences of functional overlap among regulatory international institutions for governance within institutional complexes. Whereas the existing literature assumes that states tend to exploit forum-shopping opportunities to pursue their parochial interests, we show that multiple members of several overlapping institutions operate in a setting of ‘nested games’. They have a general interest in some form of institutional complementarity within the complex and therefore take the implications for overlapping institutions into account when determining their behavior within either of these institutions. On that basis, we show first that the multiple members are likely to induce complementary processes of institutional adaptation, even if their interests diverge with regard to the specific form of institutional rearrangement; second, that a balanced distribution of power among the advocates of different institutions may be expected to produce particularly sophisticated forms of institutional adaptation that do not simply separate the domains of overlapping institutions, but establish patterns of permanent co-governance; and third that state-induced processes of institutional adaptation gradually produce a spontaneously emerging division of labor among overlapping institutions that organizes their governance activities. These theoretical claims are probed by two case studies on institutional complexes that are characterized by sharp distributional conflicts among the multiple members: First, we demonstrate the emergence of a sophisticated division of labor in the institutional complex on international trade in agricultural GMOs. Second, we show that an equally sophisticated division of labor has emerged in the institutional complex on public health-related intellectual property rights.
Understanding the impact of regime complexes on global governance calls for creative policy thinking. This introduction provides a new and more precise definition of the concept of regime complex. It also suggests spe-cific tools to characterize regime complexes and analyze their impacts on global governance. The articles in this issue deepen the analytical under-standing of complexes by examining concrete examples in various domains of global governance such as piracy, taxation, energy, food security, emis-sions reduction, carbon sinks, biosafety, and refugee governance. In addi-tion to providing an in-depth description of a variety of different regime complexes, this issue is innovative on three accounts: (1) it presents com-plexes as both barriers and opportunities for global governance and gives explanations for these diverse outcomes; (2) it shows how a broad spec-trum of actors is necessary for understanding the creation and evolution of complexes; and (3) it qualifies former claims to the effect that only pow-erful actors can impact regime complexes.
The proliferation of international rules, laws, and institutional forms raises important questions for regime theory. Looking at the theoretical and empirical arguments presented by all the contributors, however, it seems clear that that complexity's effects on actor strategies—particularly powerful actors—remain open to debate. Some of the posited effects of international regime complexity have contradictory or cross-cutting effects. Further effects of regime complexity—cross-institutional strategizing, the asymmetrical distribution of legal and technical expertise, and the fragmentation of reputation—can erode the significance of institutions in complex environments. This contribution considers the effect that regime complexity has on how powerful actors approach world politics—in part by connecting the current debate with past discussions about the significance of international regimes in world politics.
As the pressure to invite international election monitors rose at the end of the Cold War, states refused to grant the United Nations a dominant role. Thus, today multiple intergovernmental, regional, and international non-governmental organizations often monitor the same elections with equal authority. This article examines the costs and benefits of this complex regime to highlight some possible broader implications of regime complexity. It argues that the availability of many different organizations facilitates action that might otherwise have been blocked for political reasons. Furthermore, when different international election monitoring agencies agree, their consensus can bolster their individual legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of the international norms they stress, and thus magnify their influence on domestic politics. Unfortunately the election monitoring example also suggests that complex regimes can engender damaging inter-organizational politics and that the different biases, capabilities, and standards of organizations sometime can lead organizations to outright contradict each other or work at cross-purposes.
There is no integrated regime governing efforts to limit the extent of climate change. Instead, there is a regime complex: a loosely coupled set of specific regimes. We describe the regime complex for climate change and seek to explain it, using functional, strategic, and organizational arguments. This institutional form is likely to persist; efforts to build a comprehensive regime are unlikely to succeed, but narrower institutions focused on particular aspects of the climate change problem are already thriving. Building on this analysis, we argue that a climate change regime complex, if it meets specified criteria, has advantages over any politically feasible comprehensive regime, particularly with respect to adaptability and flexibility. Adaptability and flexibility are particularly important in a setting, such as climate change policy, in which the most demanding international commitments are interdependent yet governments vary widely in their interest and ability to implement them.
The increasing density of international regimes has contributed to the proliferation of overlap across agreements, conflicts among international obligations, and confusion regarding what international and bilateral obligations cover an issue. This symposium examines the consequences of the complex of overlapping, parallel and nested agreements for subsequent politics, thus the issue of overlap and complexity as an independent variable. Our central questions are: What insights can be gained by thinking about any single agreement as part of a larger complex of international rules and agreements? Does the existence of simultaneous and overlapping agreements alter either the strategies of players or the politics of the issue itself? Karen Alter and Sophie Meunier's introductory essay identifies the mechanisms through which nesting and overlap across agreements can influence politics, and identifies six modes through which overlap as an independent variable can manifest itself. Short contributions identify how the complex of international agreements affects politics in specific issue areas: refugee politics (by Alexander Betts), trade politics (by Christina Davis), human rights and trade (by Emilie Hafner-Burton), intellectual property politics (by Laurence Helfer), security politics (by Stephanie Hofmann), and election monitoring (by Judith Kelley). Daniel Drezner concludes by arguing that the complexity of rules may well benefit the powerful more than others.
The decades following the end of the Cold War have witnessed the growing proliferation of international regulatory institutions with overlapping jurisdictions and ambiguous boundaries. Practicing jurists have expressed concern about the effects of this increased fragmentation of international law, but for the most part international legal theorists have tended to dismiss such concerns as unwarranted. Indeed, many regard the resulting competition for influence among institutions as a generative, market-like pluralism that has produced more progress toward integration and democratization than could ever have been achieved through more formal means. In this essay we argue that the problem of fragmentation is more serious than it is commonly assumed to be and also more resistant to reform by the various decentralized mechanisms that operate in international law such as governmental networks. Fragmentation's resistance to reform stems from the fact that it is only partly the accidental byproduct of broad social forces such as globalization. It also represents an ongoing effort on the part of powerful states to preserve their dominance in an era in which hierarchy is increasingly viewed as illegitimate, and to reduce their accountability both domestically and internationally. Fragmentation accomplishes this in three ways. First, by creating institutions along narrow functionalist lines and restricting the scope of multilateral agreements, it limits the opportunities that weaker actors have to build the cross-issue coalitions that are necessary to increase their bargaining power and influence. Second, the ambiguous boundaries and overlapping authority created by fragmentation dramatically increase the transaction costs that international legal bodies must incur in trying to reintegrate or rationalize the resulting legal order. Third, by suggesting the absence of design and obscuring the role of intentionality, fragmentation frees powerful states from having to assume responsibility for the shortcomings of a global legal system that they themselves have played a preponderant role in creating. The result is a regulatory order that both reflects powerful state interests and that only they can alter.
Most research on global governance has focused either on theoretical accounts of the overall phenomenon or on empirical studies of distinct institutions that serve to solve particular governance challenges. In this article we analyze instead "governance architectures," defined as the overarching system of public and private institutions, principles, norms, regulations, decision-making procedures and organizations that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics. We focus on one aspect that is turning into a major source of concern for scholars and policy-makers alike: the "fragmentation" of governance architectures in important policy domains. The article offers a typology of different degrees of fragmentation, which we describe as synergistic, cooperative, and conflictive fragmentation. We then systematically assess alternative hypotheses over the relative advantages and disadvantages of different degrees of fragmentation. We argue that moderate degrees of fragmentation may entail both significant costs and benefits, while higher degrees of fragmentation are likely to decrease the overall performance of a governance architecture. The article concludes with policy options on how high degrees of fragmentation could be reduced. Fragmentation is prevalent in particular in the current governance of climate change, which we have hence chosen as illustration for our discussion. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This Article draws upon the international relations theory of regimes to analyze the growing chorus of challenges to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and to the expansion of intellectual property rights more generally. The few years since TRIPs entered into force have seen nothing less than an explosion of interest in intellectual property issues in international fora not previously concerned with the products of human creativity or innovation. Intellectual property is now at or near the top of the agenda in intergovernmental organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, in international negotiating fora such as the Convention on Biological Diversity's Conference of the Parties and the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and in expert and political bodies such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and its Sub-Commission on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights. In some of these venues, intellectual property lawmaking has led to the negotiation of new treaties; in others, challenges to TRIPs are framed through reinterpretation of existing agreements and the creation of nonbinding declarations, recommendations, and other forms of soft law. The theoretical and practical consequences of these new developments have yet to be fully explored. I argue in this Article that the expansion of intellectual property lawmaking into these diverse international fora is the result of a strategy of "regime shifting" by developing countries and NGOs that are dissatisfied with many of the provisions in TRIPs and are actively seeking ways to recalibrate, revise, or supplement them. State and non-state actors shift lawmaking initiatives from one international regime to another for many reasons. In the case of intellectual property rights, developing countries and their allies have shifted negotiations and hard and soft lawmaking initiatives to four international regimes - those governing biodiversity, plant genetic resources, public health and human rights - whose institutions, actors, and subject matter mandates are more closely aligned with these countries' interests. Within these four regimes, developing countries are questioning established legal prescriptions and generating new principles, norms, and rules of intellectual property protection for states and private parties to follow. Intellectual property regime shifting thus heralds the rise of a more complex international environment in which seemingly settled treaty bargains are contested and new dynamics of lawmaking and dispute settlement must be considered.
Why do states build new international organizations (IOs) in issue areas where many institutions already exist? Prevailing theories of institutional creation emphasize their ability to resolve market failures, but adding new IOs can increase uncertainty and rule inconsistency. I argue that institutional proliferation occurs when existing IOs fail to adapt to shifts in state power. Member states expect decision-making rules to reflect their underlying power; when it does not, they demand greater influence in the organization. Subsequent bargaining over the redistribution of IO influence often fails due to credibility and information problems. As a result, under-represented states construct new organizations that provide them with greater institutional control. To test this argument, I examine the proliferation of multilateral development banks since 1944. I leverage a novel identification strategy rooted in the allocation of World Bank votes at Bretton Woods to show that the probability of institutional proliferation is higher when power is misaligned in existing institutions. My results suggest that conflict over shifts in global power contribute to the fragmentation of global governance.
In recent decades, governments and NGOs—in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world—have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? This book argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving interaction between domestic and international politics, the book refutes prevailing arguments that international efforts cannot curb government behavior and that democratization is entirely a domestic process. Yet, the book also shows that democracy promotion efforts are deficient and that outside actors often have no power and sometimes even do harm. Analyzing original data on over 600 monitoring missions and 1,300 elections, the book grounds its investigation in solid historical context as well as studies of long-term developments over several elections in fifteen countries. It pinpoints the weaknesses of international election monitoring and looks at how practitioners and policymakers might help to improve them.
Many of the core challenges facing national financial regulators stem from a classical puzzle of international law: how to manage conduct that is beyond national jurisdiction, or conduct that is potentially subject to multiple regulatory authorities, in a context in which markets are transnational and market participants arbitrage the differences between regulatory regimes to their own advantage. The dominant approach of the G20 to this challenge has been a model borrowed from public international law and institutions. After reviewing some of the limitations of this approach, the paper considers how tools in the private international lawyer's toolkit that might offer a very different, yet potentially more effective approach.
Why do states create overlapping international institutions? This practice presents a puzzle: conventional wisdom suggests that states should use existing institutions to minimize the transaction costs of co-operation. This article proposes a bargaining approach to explain the
de novo
creation of overlapping international institutions. In this model, a dissatisfied ‘challenger’ state threatens to create a new institution, and a ‘defender’ state can propose to reform the currently focal institution. Overlapping institutions are created when the currently focal institution is (1) captured by interests opposed to the challenger and (2) domestic political pressure to abandon the status quo is intense. Similar to models of deterrence, the expectation that the new institution garners support among third parties is irrelevant for the equilibrium likelihood of
de novo
creation. A comparative analysis of international bargaining over energy, whaling and intellectual property rights provides empirical evidence.
Collection and especially analysis of open-ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it incorporates information about the document, such as the author's gender, political affiliation, and treatment assignment (if an experimental study). This article focuses on how the STM is helpful for survey researchers and experimentalists. The STM makes analyzing open-ended responses easier, more revealing, and capable of being used to estimate treatment effects. We illustrate these innovations with analysis of text from surveys and experiments.
How is the United States able to control the IMF with only 17 per cent of the votes? How are the rules of the global economy made? This book shows how a combination of formal and informal rules explain how international organizations really work. Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best understood as equilibrium outcomes that balance the power and interests of the leading state and the member countries. Presenting a new model of institutional design and comparing the IMF, WTO and EU, Stone argues that institutional variations reflect the distribution of power and interests. He shows that US interests influence the size, terms and enforcement of IMF programs, and new data, archival documents and interviews reveal the shortcomings of IMF programs in Mexico, Russia, Korea, Indonesia and Argentina.
This article examines the effect of overlapping institutions in trade policy, where the World Trade Organization, preferential trade agreements, and other economic negotiation venues give states many options for negotiating rules and settling disputes. This article argues that overlapping institutions influence trade politics at three stages: selection of venue, negotiation of liberalization commitments, and enforcement of compliance. First, lobby groups and governments on both sides of a trade negotiation try to choose the set of rules that will favor their preferred outcome. WTO rules that restrict use of coercive tactics outside of the WTO generate a selection process that filters the most difficult trade issues into WTO trade rounds or dispute adjudication while easier issues are settled in bilateral and regional fora. This selection dynamic creates a challenge at the negotiation stage by disaggregating interest group pressure for liberalization commitments. The narrowing of interest group lobbying for the multilateral process may impede negotiation of liberalization agreements that could only gain political support through a broad coalition of exporter mobilization. At the enforcement stage international regime complexity creates the potential for contradictory legal rulings that undermine compliance, but also adds greater penalties for noncompliance if reputation effects operate across agreements.
Regime analysis has focused on issues of market failure, the resolution of which depends upon knowledge and institution building. Global communications regimes, however, have been concerned either with issues of pure coordination or with coordination problems with distributional consequences. Outcomes have been decided by the underlying distribution of national power. In those areas where power was asymmetrically distributed and there was no agreement on basic principles and norms—radio broadcasting and remote sensing—no regime was formed. In those areas where distributional issues could not be unilaterally resolved—allocation of the radio spectrum and telecommunications—regimes were created, although both principles and rules changed with alterations in national power capabilities.
Climate Change Policy in the European Union: Confronting the Dilemmas of Mitigation and Adaptation? Edited by JordanAndrew, HuitemaDave, van AsseltHarro, RaynerTim, and BerkhoutFrans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 304p. $105.00 cloth. - Volume 9 Issue 1 - David G. Victor
Footnotes
* This article draws heavily, without further citations, on my previously published work, including especially two coauthored papers: Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane, “Accountability and the Abuse of Power in World Politics,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005), pp. 29–44; and Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, “The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal,” Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1–22.
One of the signal features of contemporary world politics is that intellectual property rights are increasingly an arena for global cooperation and conflict. The proper role, scope, and stringency of international intellectual property (IP) rules are highly contested questions, questions that more and more arouse both passions and interests. Once limited to a set of relatively anemic treaties that lacked an effective means of international enforcement, international IP law has, in the last decade, been transformed by the arrival of a dense array of new institutions and agreements. This dense array of institutions has in turn transformed both the substance and the process of international IP lawmaking. This paper comments on Laurence Helfer's contribution to the 2006 UC Davis Law Review symposium, entitled 'Toward a Human Rights Framework for Intellectual Property'. Helfer's specific focus is the intersection of human rights and IP law. His core claim is that human rights agreements and human rights treaty bodies increasingly engage with questions of IP, and IP institutions and agreements increasingly use human rights language and rhetoric. There is no question that the underlying phenomena Helfer identifies - an increasingly dense system of international institutions, and rising competition and conflict among differing rules and institutions - exist and are growing in importance. In this regard 'Toward a Human Rights Framework' raises important positive and normative points, which I will take up in turn in this short paper. Part I considers the positive claim that the processes by which IP law is made are shifting. I concur with this assessment, and indeed expand upon it by situating the claim within broader trends in international law and politics. Using the concept of a regime complex I argue that international IP law exhibits particular features, features which are explicable only once the impact of institutional density is recognized. Part II then turns to normative questions, and briefly queries whether the marriage of human rights and IP is bound to be a happy one. In particular, I question whether the infusion of human rights concepts and rhetoric will serve, on balance, to make international IP rights more socially just, or just more powerful. I look to recent examples of propertization in traditional knowledge and geographic indications and argue that these cases illustrate some benefits, but also some pitfalls, from the intersection of human rights and IP law.
We articulate a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions. This standard can provide the basis for principled criticism of global governance institutions and guide reform efforts in circumstances in which people disagree deeply about the demands of global justice and the role that global governance institutions should play in meeting them. We stake out a middle ground between an increasingly discredited conception of legitimacy that conflates legitimacy with international legality understood as state consent, on the one hand, and the unrealistic view that legitimacy for these institutions requires the same democratic standards that are now applied to states, on the other.
Recent research on compliance in international regulatory regimes has argued (1) that compliance is generally quite good; (2) that this high level of compliance has been achieved with little attention to enforcement; (3) that those compliance problems that do exist are best addressed as management rather than enforcement problems; and (4) that the management rather than the enforcement approach holds the key to the evolution of future regulatory cooperation in the international system. While the descriptive findings above are largely correct, the policy inferences are dangerously contaminated by endogeneity and selection problems. A high rate of compliance is often the result of states formulating treaties that require them to do little more than they would do in the absence of a treaty. In those cases where noncompliance does occur and where the effects of selection are attenuated, both self-interest and enforcement play significant roles.
The international intellectual property system provides an important illustration of how regime complexity shapes domestic and international strategies of states and non-state actors. This article describes and graphically illustrates the multifaceted nature of the international intellectual property system. It then analyzes the consequences of regime complexity for international and domestic politics, emphasizing the strategy of regime shifting and its consequences for chessboard politics and the domestic implementation of international rules.
This article first briefly outlines the current terrorist threat posed by militant Islamist radical terrorism and the complexity and evolving nature of threat. It highlights the lack of consensus in academic and policy communities regarding the underlying causes of this terrorism. It them posits that the overarching challenge in the next few years will be to maintain the broad-based international cooperation in the fight against terrorism that has existed since 11 September 2001, which is essential to address the threat effectively. Elements of this challenge include dispelling the notion that the US-led counterterrorism effort is targeting Islam and keeping the global South engaged. Durable, effective and flexible mechanisms are needed at the global, regional and national levels to ensure that multifaceted, holistic strategies are developed and implemented to address these issues. The article then outlines the current capacity of multilateral institutions to contribute to the fight against terrorism. The performance of the main UN counterterrorism bodies - led by the Security Council’s different counterterrorism entities - as well as some of the key regional and functional ones, this article concludes, has been uneven. Different organisations have developed counterterrorism programs and units, but these have emerged from political reactions rather than strategic decisions with corresponding achievable technical objectives. The duplication of efforts, overlapping mandates and lack of co-ordination at the international, regional and sub-regional levels have limited the different bodies’ overall contribution to the global non-military counterterrorism
We develop attractive functional forms and simple quasi-likelihood estimation methods for regression models with a fractional dependent variable. Compared with log-odds type procedures, there is no difficulty in recovering the regression function for the fractional variable, and there is no need to use ad hoc transformations to handle data at the extreme values of zero and one. We also offer some new, robust specification tests by nesting the logit or probit function in a more general functional form. We apply these methods to a data set of employee participation rates in 401(k) pension plans. Copyright 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This article examines the implications of the rising density of international institutions. Despite the rapid proliferation of institutions, scholars continue to embrace the assumption that individual regimes are decomposable from others. We contend that an increasingly common phenomenon is the regime complex: a collective of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical regimes. The evolution of regime complexes reflects the influence of legalization on world politics. Regime complexes are laden with legal inconsistencies because the rules in one regime are rarely coordinated closely with overlapping rules in related regimes. Negotiators often attempt to avoid glaring inconsistencies by adopting broad rules that allow for multiple interpretations. In turn, solutions refined through implementation of these rules focus later rounds of negotiation and legalization. We explore these processes using the issue of plant genetic resources (PGR). Over the last century, states have created property rights in these resources in a Demsetzian process: as new technologies and ideas have made PGR far more valuable, actors have mobilized and clashed over the creation of property rights that allow the appropriation of that value.We are grateful for comments on early drafts presented at Stanford Law School, New York University Law School, Duke Law School, Harvard Law School, and the American Society for International Law. Thanks especially to Larry Helfer, Tom Heller, Robert Keohane, Benedict Kingsbury, Peter Lallas, Lisa Martin, Ron Mitchell, Sabrina Safrin, Gene Skolnikoff, Richard Stewart, Chris Stone, Buzz Thompson, Jonathan Wiener, Katrina Wyman, Oran Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Kal Raustiala thanks the Program on Law and Public Affairs at Princeton for support. We also thank our research assistants, Lindsay Carlson, Lesley Coben and Joshua House.
International institutions are central features of moderninternational relations. This is true of trade, international debt andnancial restructuring, and even national security, once the exclusiverealm of pure state action. It was certainly true of the two majormilitary engagements of the 1990s, the wars in Kosovo and the PersianGulf. As international institutions have gained prominence in thepolitical landscape, they have increasingly become prominent topics forstudy. The sharpest debate among researchers has been theoretical: Dointernational institutions really matter? Missing from this debate is asustained inquiry into how these institutions actually work. We shiftthe focus by posing researchable questions about how they operate andhow they relate to the problems states face.
European Parliament Resolution of 16
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International Institutions and Market Enforcement: Generating Compliance in the Regime to Combat Terrorist Financing
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United Nations General Assembly Voting Data
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- Adis Merdzanovic
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