Abstract
What do we look at when we study IOs? There are two general approaches to this question in the field of IO theory: the regime approach and the institutional approach. Regimes, as used in this context, refer to the behavioral effects of IOs on other actors, principally on states. They have been defined as “sets of principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area.”1 This definition will be unpacked below. For the moment, the key element of the regime approach is the focus on actor expectations; the definition does not even mention IOs per se. In contrast, the institutional approach looks at what happens within particular IOs, rather than at the effects of IOs on other actors.
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Notes
Stephen Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” in International Regimes, ed. Stephen Krasner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 1.
For a discussion of the black box model and its limitations with respect to domestic politics in the United States, see Roger Hilsman, with Laura Gaughran and Patricia Weitsman, The Politics of Policy-Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs: Conceptual Models and Bureaucratic Politics, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).
An example of this approach is Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961).
The history of IO theory presented here follows that provided in Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, “International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State,” International Organization 40 (1986): 753–775.
See, for example, Lawrence Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 28–29. He provides a list of the “elements of a typical global environmental convention,” but these elements are in fact typical of most treaties that create IOs.
Christopher Joyner, “Managing Common-Pool Marine Living Resources: Lessons from the Southern Ocean Experience,” in Anarchy and the Environment: The International Relations of Common Pool Resources, ed. Samuel Barkin and George Shambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 70–96.
See, for example, Robert Cox and Harold Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-Making in International Organization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
The fourth and most recent report, published in 2007 and running to more than 2,800 pages, is available in four volumes: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Basis ; Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability ; Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change ; and Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2008).
For a more thorough discussion of the role of science and knowledge in international environmental cooperation, see Elizabeth DeSombre, The Global Environment and World Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2007), esp. ch. 4.
As of 2009. The complete set of country assessments can be found in General Assembly Resolution 61/237, Scale of Assessments for the Apportionment of the Expenses of the United Nations (New York: UN, 2007).
David Rohde, “Ted Turner Plans a $1 Billion Gift for U.N. Agencies,” New York Times, September 19, 1997, A1.
United Nat ions Chi ldren’s Fund, 2010 UNICEF Annual Report (New York: UNICEF, 2010), p. 33.
Ernst Haa s, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964).
See, for example, Ernst Haas, “Is There a Hole in the Whole? Knowledge, Technology, Interdependence, and the Construction of International Regimes,” International Organization 29 (1975): 827–876.
Phi l ippe Schmit ter, “Three Neo-Funct iona l ist Hypotheses about Internat iona l Integration,” International Organization 23 (1969): 161–166.
See, for example, Leon Lindberg and Stuart Scheingold, Europe’s Would-Be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970).
See, for example, Stanley Hoffmann, “International Organization and the International System,” International Organization 24 (1970): 389–413.
See, for example, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Interestingly, one of the first voices in this trend was that of Ernst Haas, who had earlier been a pioneer both of functionalism and neofunctionalism. See Haas, When Knowledge Is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
On IOs as being in the general good, see Harold Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
James Ma rch, Decisions and Organizations (Boston, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988) and James March and Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).
On bureaucrat ic pol it ic s see Graham A l l ison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1971); on sociological institutionalism see Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147–160.
James March and Johan Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders,” International Organization 52 (1998): 943–969.
See, inter alia, Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994). To be fair, the Bank is trying to address this problem.
Example taken from Barnett and Finnemore, “Pathologies of International Organizations.” See also David Kennedy, “International Refugee Protection,” Human Rights Quarterly 8 (1986): 1–9.
See, for example, United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 (New York: UN, 2001).
Conditionality refers to a process in which the IMF sets policy conditions, usually involving policy liberalization, that developing countries must meet in order to gain access to IMF loans. This process is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10.
These IOs are called “emanations.” Cheryl Shanks, Harold Jacobson, and Jeffrey Kaplan, “Inertia and Change in the Constellation of International Governmental Organizations, 1981–1992,” International Organization 50 (1996): 593–628.
See, for example, Darren Hawkins, David Lake, Daniel Nielson, and Michael Tierney, eds., Delegation and Agency in International Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
On network analysis in the study of IO generally, see Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations,” International Organization 63 (2009): 559–592.
The term “reflectivism” was introduced into the IO discourse by Robert Keohane in “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (1988): 379–396.
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© 2013 J. Samuel Barkin
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Barkin, J.S. (2013). Regimes and Institutions. In: International Organization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356734_4
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