This volume assesses the importance of international organisations in global governance during the last ten years. The prestigious team of international contributors seek to determine the ways in which IO's contribute to the solution of global problems by influencing international decision-making in ways that go beyond the lowest common denominator of national interests.
Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators. Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.
This volume assesses the importance of international organisations in global governance during the last ten years. The prestigious team of international contributors seek to determine the ways in which IO's contribute to the solution of global problems by influencing international decision-making in ways that go beyond the lowest common denominator of national interests.
Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Commission, this book explores the different methods that states employ to ensure their interests are being served, and identifies the problems involved with monitoring and managing IOs. The contributors suggest that it is not inherently more difficult to design effective delegation mechanisms at international level than at domestic level and, drawing on principal-agent theory, help explain the variations that exist in the extent to which states are willing to delegate to IOs. They argue that IOs are neither all evil nor all virtuous, but are better understood as bureaucracies that can be controlled to varying degrees by their political masters.
This Handbook brings together scholars whose essays discuss significant issues with regard to international organization as a process and international organizations as institutions. Although the focus is on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are discussed where relevant. The handbook is divided into six parts: Documentation, Data Sets and Sources International Secretariats as Bureaucracies Actors within International Bureaucracies Processes within International Bureaucracies Challenges to International Organizations, and Expanding International Architectures. The state-of-the-art articles are meant to encourage current and future generations of scholars to enjoy working in and further exploiting the field and are also of great interest to practitioners of international organization and global governance
Policy scientists have long been concerned with understanding the basic tools, or instruments, that governments can use to accomplish their goals. The initial interest in inductively developing comprehensive lists of generic instruments for policy analysis soon gave way to efforts to discover more parsimonious, but still useful, specifications of the elementary components out of which instruments can be assembled. Moving from a generic instrument to a fully specified policy alternative, however, requires the designer to go much beyond the elementary components. Rather than directly specifying some of these details, the designer may instead set the rules by which they will be specified. The creation of these specifications and rules can be thought of as institutional design. This book helps scholars and policy analysts formulate more effective policy alternatives by a better understanding of institutional design. The feasibility and effectiveness of policies depend on the political, economic, and social contexts in which they are embedded. These contexts provide an environment of existing institutions that offer opportunities and barriers to institutional design. A fundamental understanding of institutional design requires theories of institutions and institutional change. With a resurgence of interest in institutions in recent years, there are many possible sources of theory. The contributors to this volume draw from the variety of sources to identify implications for understanding institutional design.
International organizations have come to play a central role in world politics. The authors present a major new attempt to explain the difference - and the similarities - between them, as well as their crucial role
