Selasa, 06 Maret 2012

three perspectives on international regimes


Introduction: three perspectives on
international regimes
More than twenty years after students of international relations began to ask questions about "international regimes" (Ruggie 1975), scholarly interest in the "principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures" (Krasner 1983c: 2) that govern state behavior in specific issueareas of international relations continues to be strong. It may be the case that the term "regime" has lost some of its earlier charm (Milner 1993: 494). But the substantive questions that define the regime-analytical research agenda - whether couched in terms of "regimes," "institutions" or otherwise - still count among the major foci of International Relations scholarship in both Europe and North America. What accounts for the emergence of instances of rule-based cooperation in the international system? How do international institutions (such as regimes)1 affect the behavior of state and non-state actors in the issueareas for which they have been created? Which factors, be they located within or without the institution, determine the success and the stability of international regimes? Is it possible to come up with non-idiosyncratic explanations for the properties of particular institutional arrangements (such as the extent to which they are formalized)?
Various theories have been proposed to shed light on at least some of the^e questions. According to the explanatory variables that these theories emphasize, they may be classified as power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based approaches, respectively. In fact, we may talk of three schools of thought within the study of international regimes: realists, who focus on power relationships; neoliberals, who base their analyses on constellations of interests; and cognitivists, who emphasize knowledge dynamics, communication, and identities. The use of the term "schools" does not imply that there are no significant differences among the positions taken by members of the same school with respect to international regimes. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, there are many such differences. It does imply, though, that the disagreements between members of different schools of thought are of a
more fundamental nature.
One major difference separating the three schools of thought is the degree of "institutionalism" that power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based theories of regimes tend to espouse. By "institutionalism" we mean the view that (international) institutions matter. Such a view may be, and actually is, held in minimalist and maximalist versions. To see just what this view involves, a basic distinction, to which we will return repeatedly throughout this book, is helpful. Analytically,
institutions can be significant in two respects: they may be more or less effective, and they may be more or less robust (or resilient). While effectiveness involves a static perspective in the sense that it can be
determined at and for any given point in time, resilience (robustness) is essentially a dynamic measure of the significance of regimes, the application of which presupposes a relevant change in the regime's
environment (Powell 1994:340f.).
To be more precise, regime effectiveness comprises two overlapping ideas (Underdal 1992; Young 1994: ch. 6). First, a regime is effective to the extent that its members abide by its norms and rules. (This attribute of regimes is sometimes also referred to as "regime strength/') Second, a regime is effective to the extent that it achieves certain objectives or fulfills certain purposes. The most fundamental and most widely discussed of these purposes is the enhancement of the ability of states to cooperate in the issue-area. In contrast, regime robustness (resilience) refers to the "staying power" of international institutions in the face of exogenous challenges and to the extent to which prior institutional choices constrain collective decisions and behavior in later periods, i.e. to the extent to which "institutional history matters" (Powell 1994:341). In other words, institutions that change with every shift of power
among their members or whenever the most powerful participants find that their interests are no longer optimally served by the current regime, lack resilience. "Change" in this context may mean either a fundamental alteration of the regime's normative content or a drastic change (usually,a decline) in the exent to which the regime's prescriptions are actually complied with by its members (or both). At least in principle, therefore, a regime may turn out brittle, even though it continues to exhibit a high degree of effectiveness: compliance with the new norms and rules may be just as high as it was with the previous ones. The two dimensions of regime significance are conceptually independent (although they may
be correlated empirically), i.e. a regime's robustness cannot be inferred from its effectiveness nor vice versa.2
None of the theories that we review in this book denies international regimes any impact whatsoever on world politics, but the degree of "institutionalism" implicit in these theories varies considerably. This variance can, to a large measure, be attributed to the "behavioral models" (Young 1989a: 209-13) upon which realists, neoliberals, and cognitivists tend to base their analyses, i.e. to the assumptions they make about the nature of state actors and their motivation. Power-based theories of regimes, which assume that states care not only for absolute, but for relative gains as well, are least inclined to ascribe a considerable degree of causal significance to international institutions, although they
acknowledge that regime-based inter-state cooperation is a reality that is in need of explanation. In a sense, power theorists of regimes face this need even more than others, since sustained international cooperation which is not readily reduced to a form of external balancing represents a major "puzzle" to the realist research program. Realists who take international institutions seriously3 argue that power is no less central in cooperation than in conflict between nations. According to these authors, the distribution of power resources among actors strongly affects both the prospects for effective regimes to emerge and persist in an issue-area and the nature of the regimes that result, especially as far as the distribution of the benefits from cooperation is concerned. Other realists have stressed the way in which considerations of relative power - forced upon states by the anarchical environment in which they struggle for survival and independence - create obstacles for international cooperation that tend to call into question the  effectiveness of international regimes (at least on the assumption that the leading school of thought in regime analysis, neoliberalism, has stated the functions that regimes may perform correctly).
Neoliberal or interest-based theories of regimes have been extraordinarily influential in the past decade and have come to represent the mainstream approach to analyzing international institutions. Though not completely insensitive to the effects of power differentials, they emphasize the role of international regimes in helping states to realize common interests. In so doing, they portray states as rational egoists who care only for their own (absolute) gains. Neoliberals have drawn heavily on
economic theories of institutions focusing on information and transaction costs. Game-theoretic models have been applied to characterize the constellations of interests that underlie different types of regimes and also affect the likelihood of a regime being created in the first place Deliberately appropriating essential elements of the realist approach to world politics, neoliberals have challenged the rationality of orthodox  realism's skepticism vis-a-vis international institutions by attempting to show that this skepticism cannot in fact be based on the assumptions realists make about the nature of states and the international system. Whereas power-based theories may well be regarded as a borderline case of institutionalism, interest-based theories of regimes adopt an unequivocally institutionalist perspective, i.e. they portray regimes as both effective and resilient. Regimes help (self-interested) states to coordinate
their behavior such that they may avoid collectively suboptimal outcomes, and states can be shown to have an interest in maintaining existing regimes even when the factors that brought them into being are
no longer operative. Nevertheless, the institutionalism of neoliberals is a bounded one. This is implicit in the rational choice models upon which their theories are based. For these models treat actors' preferences
and identities as exogenously given and thus as essentially unaffected by rule-governed practices or institutions.
Realists have taken up the neoliberal challenge by pointing out that their opponents' argument is flawed because it fails fully to appreciate the meaning of those realist assumptions that neoliberals claim to have incorporated into their theory, including assumptions about the basic motivation of states dwelling in anarchy.4 Members of the third school of thought in regime analysis, cognitivism, have subjected interestbased theorizing to a similarly thorough criticism. Yet, the thrust of this criticism is directly opposed to that of the former one: from the cognitivist point of view, the problem with neoliberalism is not that it has misconstrued some of the realist assumptions about the nature of world politics. Rather, its limits as a theory of international institutions can be traced back directly to three realist "heritages" still operative in interestbased theories: (1) the conception of states as rational actors, who are
atomistic in the sense that their identities, powers, and fundamental interests are prior to international society (the society of states) and its institutions; (2) the basically static approach to the study of international relations, which is ill-equipped to account for learning (at the unit level) and history (at the system level); and (3) the positivist methodology that prevents students of international institutions from understanding central aspects of the workings of social norms (including norms at the inter-state level).
Hence, knowledge-based theories of regimes have focused on the origins of interests as perceived by states and, in this connection, have accentuated the role of causal as well as normative ideas. Part of their contribution may thus be seen as complementary to the rationalist neoliberal mainstream in regime analysis, attempting to fill a gap in interest-based theorizing by adding a theory of preference formation. This strand of knowledge-based theorizing will be referred to here as "weak cognitivism." But the criticism of some cognitivists runs deeper, suggesting that an institutionalism that is informed by a sociological rather than a rational choice perspective is appropriate for the international system as
well. Thus, "strong cognitivists" have pointed out that interest-based theories have provided a truncated picture of the sources of regime robustness by failing to take adequate account of the repercussions of
institutionalized practices on the identities of international actors. At least in a great many situations, it is suggested, states are better understood as role-players than as utility-maximizers. Consequently, knowledge- based theories of regimes tend to embrace an institutionalism that









is much more pronounced than that which we find in either neoliberalism or realism.
One word of caution is in order at this stage. We use the term "school of thought" to refer to ideas, i.e. sets of theories, rather than to people: schools of thought, in our parlance, are constituted by contributions which share certain assumptions and emphases in making sense of regimes, rather than by contributors. They are intellectual, not sociological, entities. It is therefore not inconsistent with our claim that three schools of thought define the contemporary study of international regimes to find that, occasionally, individuals have contributed to more than one "school." A case in point is Robert Keohane who, although his work is most closely associated with neoliberalism, has also made notable contributions to the power- and knowledge-based research agendas (Keohane 1980; Goldstein and Keohane 1993a). This said, most authors whose works we discuss in this book can be unambiguously
attributed to a particular school of thought. (In this sense, one can talk of "members" of a school.) And even those who, like Keohane, have straddled the lines are more strongly associated with one school (in
Keohane's case, neoliberalism) than with others.5
In this book we review recent and not so recent contributions to all three schools of thought. Since interest-based theories represent the mainstream approach to analyzing international regimes and, consequently, have attracted criticism from opposed perspectives, we address their arguments first (ch. 3). Subsequently, we look at various powerbased theories of regimes (ch. 4), before we discuss some of the work on international institutions that has been done from a cognitivist point of view (ch. 5). In each case, we pay special attention to the points of disagreement with neoliberalism as the leading school of thought in regime analysis. The conclusion (ch. 6) seeks to draw these threads together by focusing on the question of to what extent syntheses between two or even all three of these schools of thought appear possible and desirable. We begin, however, by addressing a set of very fundamental questions that cut across these paradigmatic divisions, although it would be naive to assume that they are strictly prior to them: What exactly is an international regime? Is the concept of an international regime precise enough to guide potentially cumulative empirical
research? Insofar as it is not, how can this problem be remedied? And
how does the concept of international regime relate to cognate concepts
such as international institution or international organization? It is these
conceptual issues that are the subject of the following chapter.

regimes and institutions


Regimes and Institutions
What do we look at when we study international organizations (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.
An analogy can be made here to an approach to the study of political institutions more generally called the “black box” approach. Some approaches to the study of politics look at political institutions as if they were black boxes, where we can see what goes in and what comes out, but not what happens within the box itself.2 A
pluralist approach to the study of national politics, for example, looks at the pressures on government from various domestic political groups (the inputs), and the resultant government policy (the output).3 It does not, however, look at what happens within the government to turn pressures into policy. Rather, it usually assumes some sort of decision rule. Other approaches, conversely, focus on what happens within the “black box” of government, on, perhaps, the relationship between the executive and legislative branches or on the mechanics of party politics. Regime analysis is a black-box approach to the study of IOs. Institutional analysis looks inside the black box. In addition to discussing the theoretical implications of these two approaches, this chapter will focus primarily on the mechanics of the institutional approach. The mechanics of the regime approach will be discussed in more
detail in Chapter 4.
Institutional Approaches
Many of the earliest studies of IOs fit into a category that has been called formal institutional analysis.4 This approach looks at the formal structure, organization, and bureaucratic hierarchy of IOs. The starting point for this sort of analysis is the organization’s charter, which is in turn usually the text of an international treaty. The charter specifies when and why an IO will come into being, what it is called, and which countries (or other actors) can be members. It also specifies what the bureaucratic structure of the organization will be, and what powers it will have. It often discusses decision-making procedures within the organization, and its voting structure. Finally, it indicates how the organization will be financed, often provides a process for countries to leave the IO, and sometimes, though infrequently, provides a mechanism for the organization to be terminated once its function has been fulfilled.5
Formal institutional analysis is an important starting point for institutional research into IOs. The previous chapter discussed the importance of such things as voting structure to questions of relative power in IOs. One cannot, for example, understand the politics of the UN Security Council without understanding the mechanics of the veto power of the five permanent members. Similarly, one cannot understand the lending patterns of the IMF and World Bank without knowing about the strong voting position of the United States and its allies. International
organizations that work on a unanimity or consensus basis, such as the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR),6 generate different patterns of cooperation than those that work on a majority vote basis.
Understanding the bureaucratic structure of an IO is similarly important in understanding what the organization can and cannot do. This involves looking at the size, composition, and components of the structure of a given organization.7 The issue of size is a relatively straightforward one. A bureaucracy with a thousand full-time employees will operate differently from a bureaucracy with two. For example, the IMF, with a staff of roughly 2,700 people, can track, research, publish extensive reports on, and make policy toward the economies of over one hundred countries simultaneously.8 In contrast, the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area (ACCOBAMS), headquartered in Monaco, has only a handful of staff, and is thus far more limited than the IMF, both in the range of activities it can monitor and in the depth in which it can report on them.9
When looking at the composition of an IO’s bureaucracy, a key distinction to keep in mind is the difference between administrative employees and political appointees. Most IOs have both an administrative and a political element. Administrative employees work for the organization itself, and their primary loyalty is presumably to the organization and its goals. Political appointees work with the IO, but work for their home governments, with which their primary loyalty is supposed to lie. For example, a specialist on the economy of a particular country at the
IMF will be an administrative employee of the IMF. Irrespective of the country the analyst came from, she or he is employed by, paid by, and ultimately answerable to the IMF as an institution. A member of the Board of Governors of the IMF, on the other hand, will be an appointee of a particular member country, and will be expected to represent the interests of that country in the making of IMF policy. As a general rule, the bodies that act as the equivalents of legislatures for IOs and make broad policy (such as general assemblies) are composed of political appointees, whereas executive bodies, the bureaucracies that implement the policies, are staffed with administrative employees. The relative balance of power between these two groups, however, can vary from organization to organization. An organization with a strong secretariat can influence policy-making, whereas when the secretariat is relatively weak member states can end up micro-managing implementation.10
Different IOs can also have different components in their bureaucratic structure. Almost all IOs will have some sort of secretariat, which is the central administrative organ of the organization. These, as has already been mentioned, can vary greatly in size and scope. Some IOs will piggyback on the secretariats of larger IOs rather
than create a wholly new bureaucratic structure. This can save resources when an IO is starting up, and allows smaller IOs to use their limited budgets and resources more efficiently. A good example of this sort of setup is the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which provides secretariat functions for at least ten different treaty organizations, ranging from the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals.11
Beyond the strictly administrative functions of the secretariat, IOs can have bodies that deal with scientific research, technical standards, adjudicating disputes, and interactions with member countries. These bodies can be either subsidiary to or separate from the secretariat. Many IOs that deal with environmental issues, for example, have separate scientific bodies. These bodies are tasked with developing programs of research into the relevant environmental phenomena that are separate from the research undertaken by national research communities. There are two reasons for an IO to have this sort of research capability. The first is to provide research in areas where such research does not already exist. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, was authorized by the UN General Assembly (GA) explicitly to provide the sort of overview of climate science and the issue of climate change that did not exist at the time. The IPCC issues reports every five years that remain significantly more extensive than any other overviews available on the issue.12
The second reason that some IOs have separate research capabilities is to create a body of scientific expertise that is seen by the member-states of the organization as being politically neutral, and thus independent of the interests of other states. This allows states to have a common body of accepted facts on which to base discussion
of rules and national obligations. For example, in many IOs that deal with international fisheries issues, states often suspect the scientific reports of other states of being designed to maximize those states’ fisheries quotas, rather than to accurately portray the health of fish stocks. An independent scientific council associated with the IO can allay those fears and generate a body of estimates of stock health that all participants will be willing to use as a basis for negotiating quotas. It is often through these scientific bodies, whether designed to provide impartial research or
create new knowledge, that IOs develop the epistemic communities discussed in the previous chapter.13
Bodies that deal with technical standards are similar to scientific committees, except that they focus on setting specific technical standards rather than on independent research. For example, the secretariat of the International Civil Aviation

Organization (ICAO) includes the Air Navigation Bureau and the Air Transportation Bureau. These bureaus employ technical experts on the subject of air navigation and civilian air transportation, who then propose international standards for the airline industry. These standards are then accepted or rejected by the ICAO Council, the governing body made up of member country political appointees. Technical bodies tend mainly to employ people with specific professional expertise in the relevant issue-areas. These also often work with representatives both of national standard-setting bodies, and of the relevant industries. The technical bureaus of the ICAO would thus create new standards in consultation both with national airline regulators (such as the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] in the United States) and representatives of both the airline industry and themajor manufacturers of commercial jets.14
Another category of administrative function to be found in many IOs is juridical, or legal. This function can consist of offering legal advice and adjudicating the settlement of disputes among states. Many IOs have a legal department or bureau that provides advice both to the secretariat and to member states on legal issues related to the IO’s remit. To continue with the example from the last paragraph, the ICAO secretariat includes a legal bureau, the job of which is to provide advice “to the Secretary General and through him to the various bodies of the Organizationand to ICAO Member States on constitutional, administrative and procedural matters, on problems of international law, air law, commercial law, labour law and related matters.”15
There is one IO that deals almost exclusively with adjudication: the International Court of Justice (ICJ). There are also a few bodies that deal with the enforcement of international law with respect to individuals, such as the special tribunals set up to deal with war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International
Criminal Court (ICC).16 Many treaties call for the creation of ad hoc panels to settle specific disputes relating to their rules. A few IOs have full-time dispute settlement bodies as part of their organizational structure. The best known example is the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM), which adjudicates trade disputes among WTO member states. Judges from a variety of member states who are generally accepted as experts in international trade law preside at hearings at which states are represented by their lawyers. International adjudicative bodies such as the
DSM, whether permanent or ad hoc, tend to behave very much like domestic courts.
The final major category of administrative function to be found in the secretariats of many IOs is what might be called direct implementation. Many IOs, particularly those that deal with development and humanitarian issues, have employees on the ground in member countries, either assisting governments or undertaking
activities that governments might normally undertake. Not all IOs that deal with humanitarian issues do all of their own direct implementation. Many subcontract with NGOs for some or all of this work. But for many IOs, direct implementation is their primary raison d’être.
A good example of this latter sort of IO is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The UNHCR secretariat fulfills all of the standard administrative functions of bureaucracies, and plays an active role in publicizing refugee issues, lobbying for the rights of refugees, monitoring member
country behavior with respect to refugees, and fund-raising. But the bulk of its efforts are aimed at giving direct relief to refugees on the ground, through 120 regional offices and direct representation in crisis areas and at refugee camps. The UNHCR works in concert with more than 500 NGOs, so it does engage in some subcontracting of its efforts. But it does much of the work itself, as suggested by its in-house staff of more than 5,000 employees, 84 percent of whom work in the field rather than at the head office in Geneva.17
Several other IOs focus on direct implementation. Many of these, like the UNHCR, are UN agencies, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). For other IOs, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), direct implementation is a major but not predominant function. Some IOs that focus on implementing specific projects in member countries, such as UNICEF, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), maintain representation in many countries, but implement projects primarily through grants to governments and NGOs, rather than through in-house staff.
Many IOs that one might not normally think of as dealing with direct implementation do in fact have administrative components that focus on this task. To return to an example used above, the ICAO has a Technical Cooperation Bureau that sends experts to assist developing countries in improving their civil aviation technical standards. The Bureau’s job is to provide expertise, rather than funding. Funding for the Bureau’s programs comes either from other IOs, such as the UNDP, or from the governments being assisted.18 Other IOs have different
approaches to direct implementation. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), for example, runs the World Maritime University in Mälmo, Sweden, which offers courses and degrees on issues and techniques related to maritime and shipping safety.19
A final administrative function, noted above with respect to the UNHCR, is fund-raising. International organizations are generally thought of as being funded by member states, and this is usually the case to a significant degree. The constitutional documents of most IOs specify either the funding mechanism or rules for arriving at a funding mechanism for the IO. Assessments are sometimes based on a flat rate per country, but more often require that larger and wealthier countries pay more. For example, the structure of UN dues is based on the concept of ability to pay. This results in the United States paying 22 percent of the UN’s basic budget, and several small, poor countries paying the minimum level of dues, 0.001 percent. 20 Many IOs set their dues structure based on the UN structure.
But not all funding for IOs comes from mandatory dues from member states. Many IOs raise funds, both voluntary funds from member states and donations from private individuals. The largest single pledge by a private individual to an IO was $1 billion, by Ted Turner to the UN.21 There are a number of IOs that depend on a constant stream of smaller donations in order to maintain their programs. The UNHCR, for example, has a Donor Relations and Resource Mobilization Service in the Division of Communication and Information in its Secretariat.22 UNICEF
runs a network of thirty-seven national committees, each of which is registered as an NGO in a developed country, to raise funds for it. These national committees contribute roughly a third of UNICEF’s annual budget of just over $1 billion.23

Neofunctionalism
Formal institutional analysis is based on the premise that we can learn about what an IO does from the way it is set up, and the way in which it is organized at any given point in time. This is certainly a good, perhaps even a necessary, starting point in understanding IOs. It is, however, static: it can paint for us a picture of where an IO is at a particular point in time, but cannot tell us anything about how and when an organization will change. And IOs do change. Sometimes, they disappear when their function has become obsolete. But they can grow and acquire new roles. What started off as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a relatively narrow and limited organization, has become the European Union (EU), an organization that affects almost all aspects of life in its member states. The IMF was designed to oversee a system of fixed exchange rates. That system collapsed in the
early 1970s, and yet the IMF still exists, having found new roles for itself.
The inability of formal institutional analysis to deal with functional change in IOs led, in the 1950s, to the development of an approach to the study of IOs known as functionalism. This approach suggested that as the problems facing both states and IOs were becoming more international, the scope for global governance was expanding. This meant that the functions of IOs had to continuously expand to keep apace. Functionalists saw IOs themselves as important drivers of this process, by identifying new areas where international governance was needed and by proposing ways of dealing with these new demands. This approach developed to a large extent with reference to the process of European integration through the European Economic Community (EEC), although one of the seminal works of the functionalist approach focused on the ILO. 24
The functionalist approach focused on technical demands for international governance. The ICAO provides a good example of this process: as international civil air transport expanded, the complexity of the rules needed to keep the industry operating smoothly grew as well. This change generated a technical need for greater international cooperation, and helps to explain the gradual expansion of the ICAO. The increased technical need also had the effect of empowering the ICAO as an agenda setter in its area of expertise, allowing it an active role in moving the process of functional integration forward.
By the 1960s, it was becoming clear, however, that much of the increase in international cooperation through IOs was political rather than purely technical.25 The UNHCR, for example, grew much faster than the number of refugees in the world in the second half of the twentieth century. The UNHCR’s growth, then, could not
have been fueled exclusively by the technical demands imposed by a greater refugee population. It was fueled as well (perhaps primarily) by an increasing political consensus among states that they had an ethical responsibility to ameliorate the plight of refugees. This consensus was helped along to a significant degree by the UNHCR itself, by both its successes in helping refugees and its lobbying on their behalf. A variant of functionalism, called neofunctionalism, developed in the 1960s to account for political as well as technical demands for increased global governance.26
A neofunctionalist approach, then, looks at the political, as well as technical, processes of integration of governance functions globally. As an approach to the study of IOs that developed largely in tandem with the EEC, neofunctionalism looks more at the evolution of governance patterns within an existing institutional and organizational structure, rather than at the creation of new forms of organization. 27 It would, for example, look at why the WHO declared a focus on mental health for World Health Day in 2001, thus putting an issue that had existed longer than the organization on the global health agenda. No new institution was created, but political leadership made a global issue out of something that had previously been entirely within the purview of national governments.
The political leadership that leads to neofunctionalist integration can come either from states or from IOs. Neofunctionalism thus spans the distinction made at the beginning of this chapter between institutional approaches and regime approaches. To the extent that the political leadership comes from states, or, for that matter, from any actors other than IOs, neofunctionalism is a precursor of regime approaches.28 The evolution in IO theory from neofunctionalism to regime theory is discussed in the next section. To the extent that the political leadership comes
from within IOs, neofunctionalism takes an institutionalist perspective. It looks at the way IOs, as actors, are changing global governance. It has the advantage over formal institutional approaches that it directly addresses the issue of change, be it change of structure, change of mission, change of scope, or change of scale, in IOs.
It has the advantage over earlier functionalist approaches that it can cope with the broad array of issue-areas in international governance that are political rather than purely technical. In other words, it allows us to ask why IOs push some issues rather than others onto the international agenda.
Neoinstitutionalism
Neofunctionalism served to bring politics back into the study of IOs, in a way that classical functionalism or formal institutionalism did not allow for. But it shares one major limitation of its two predecessors. It can address the question of what IOs do, but not of how well they do it. It can look at the place an IO holds on the international agenda, and the way in which it changes that agenda, but it cannot really look at the overall effect that the organization has on world politics. By the 1980s, this common limitation of institutionalist approaches led to a focus
within the IO theory community on regime approaches, which is discussed in the following section.29
By the late 1990s, however, some students of IOs began to feel that the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of regime analysis.30 Since regime analysis black-boxes IOs as institutions, it cannot address the effects of what goes on inside those boxes on international politics. If IOs in fact operate as they are designed, and work efficiently to deal with the problems they are designed to deal with, then treating them as opaque black boxes should not be a problem. But this assumes both that IOs are efficient organizations that deal with the problems they are designed to

deal with, and that they have little independent power separate from states to redefine their missions and their internal organization. A rejuvenation of institutionalist approaches was driven by the observation that these assumptions were not entirely reasonable.31
But both formal institutionalism and neofunctionalism are also limited in the extent to which they can capture the politics internal to IOs, and the political power of IOs. Formal institutionalism looks at how IOs are designed on paper. This is a necessary step in understanding the internal politics of IOs, but not a sufficient step, because organizations do not always function in the way they are designed and laid out. Formal institutionalism can also capture the power resources that IOs are formally given in their constitutional documents, but not those that they develop informally. Neofunctionalism, meanwhile, recognizes both that IOs have significant agenda-setting power in international politics, and that IOs have some autonomy in deciding how to affect those agendas. But neofunctionalism is nonetheless limited by the assumptions that IOs set agendas to further international governance in the issue-areas that they were designed to deal with, and that they will ultimately act to represent the broader interests of the states that created them.32
A response to these limitations is neoinstitutionalism, also called sociological institutionalism.33 Rather than taking as a starting point the structure and purpose of an organization as defined by outside actors, neoinstitutionalism looks at the actual organizational dynamics within institutions.34 It borrows from fields outside
of international relations theory, such as the study of bureaucratic politics in political science and the study of institutions in sociology, that look at the way bureaucracies behave and at the effects of these broader patterns of behavior.35
As applied to IOs, this means looking at bureaucratic and institutional rules and politics within the IOs, rather than at constitutional documents or the demands of the issue-area. This can be done in a number of ways. Historical institutionalism looks at the ways in which norms and procedures within particular institutions have
developed over time. This approach tends to understand institutional histories as path-dependent, limiting the extent to which the analyst can generalize across institutions. Functional institutionalism focuses on the rules and procedures within organizations, and looks at how these rules and procedures shape the behavior both of the organization and of the people within it.36 Analysts using this approach to the neoinstitutionalist study of IOs have often concluded that IOs exhibit a strong tendency to be as committed to their own internal rules and procedures as they are to their formal mission, and a tendency to be committed to their own survival as institutions.
There are two ways to look at an IO’s commitment to its own rules and procedures. The first is as an empowering mechanism. States create IOs to serve a particular purpose, and create their structure to further that purpose. But it is the IOs themselves, once they have been created, that create their own norms and operating
procedures over time. To the extent that they are committed to these procedures, and to the extent to which the IO makes a difference in international politics, the creation and maintenance of procedures allows the IO to dictate how things will be done within its issue-area. When combined with effective claims by IOs to both impartiality (they serve the international community, rather than the interests of particular states) and expertise, this functional autonomy allows IOs to operate as independent actors with considerable freedom of action.
The IMF is a good example of this process. This organization is limited in what it can do by its charter and by its member states. Within these limitations, it is supposed “to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment;
and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment.”37 One of the main ways in which it does this is to lend money on condition that the borrower state adopt certain policies. But the organization has considerable leeway in deciding which conditions to impose. There is little oversight of the conditions imposed on certain loans, which are determined within the bureaucratic structure of the IMF, and which can have a major effect on the economic health of individual countries. Understanding which conditions are to be imposed requires looking in some detail at rules, procedures, and politics internal to the IMF.
The second way to look at an IO’s commitment to its own rules and procedures is as a “pathology.”38 A pathology in this context is when the bureaucratic empowering mechanisms discussed above lead to organizational dysfunction. This can mean behavior that is at odds with the organization’s mission, which is internally contradictory, or which simply does not make sense.39 An example of such a pathology can be found in the World Bank. The staff in the World Bank’s bureaucracy who are in charge of making loans to developing countries are judged by the volume of loans that they make. They are not judged by whether the project for which the money was loaned is ultimately a success. This gives them an incentive to approve loans that are of dubious development value in order to maximize their loan portfolio and increase their profile within the World Bank bureaucracy.40
Another example of organizational pathology can be found at the UNHCR. The High Commission’s Protection Division, located primarily at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, is the UNHCR’s legal arm. It is responsible for protecting the rights of refugees under international law, and tends to approach this mission
in a narrow legalistic sense. The regional bureaus, on the other hand, are more interestedin the ultimate causes of refugee flows. This can lead to internal dispute within the organization on issues such as the repatriation of refugees. The Protection Division will concern itself primarily with the individual rights of refugees, including the right not to be repatriated without consent. The regional office, on the other hand, may well be more concerned with figuring out what course of action will stop the flow of refugees in the first place, whether or not that course of action is in strict
compliance either with international law or with the official institutional norms of the UNHCR.41
More broadly, an organization as large and as wide-ranging as the UN will inevitably find itself in situations where different parts of the organization are trying to do incompatible things. In late 2001, for example, some parts of the UN sympathized with the bombing of Afghanistan,42 while other parts were attempting to engage in supplying humanitarian aid. This resulted in an unclear message as to where the UN stood, and what role it played, with respect to governance in Afghanistan.
A final observation of neoinstitutionalist analysis is that bureaucracies will often have a great commitment at minimum to their own self preservation and at maximum to institutional growth. For example, the system of fixed international exchange rates, known as the Bretton Woods system, fell apart in the early 1970s. The organization designed to manage the system, the IMF, might have been expected to go out of business as a result, and perhaps be replaced by a new IO designed to meet the needs of the system of floating exchange rates that replaced the Bretton
Woods system. But the IMF did not go out of business. Instead, it created a new role for itself based on the concept of conditionality, a role that was never really envisioned for it.43 Several IOs, not least among them the UN and the EU, are constantly expanding the range of issues over which they have authority. Most new IOs these days are created by existing organizations, rather than by states; in other words, IOs are not only expanding, but are also reproducing.44 A neofunctionalist may ascribe this to the demands of global governance in an increasingly globalized world. A neoinstitutionalist would want to find out if it was the result of institutional pathologies. Only empirical research could resolve this dispute.
A relatively new attempt to bridge the gap between traditional institutionalism (in which IOs do what they are designed to do) and neoinstitutionalism (in which IOs do what is in their institutional interest) has been through the use of the principal–agent model. This model, developed in microeconomics and brought into the study of IOs relatively recently, sees states (principals) as creating IOs (agents) to undertake specific tasks for them. As long as the agents undertake those tasks reasonably well, the principals will leave them alone, because extensive oversight is
expensive. But when the behavior of the agents strays too far from the goals of the principals, the principals must act to rein the agents in. This theoretical approach can be useful for explaining both why states give IOs some autonomy, and when states will act to limit that autonomy. The principal–agent model has been applied to analyses of the EU and the World Bank, among other IOs.45
Regime Analysis
While institutional analysis was the predominant approach used for studying IOs in the 1950s and 1960s, and has been making something of a comeback recently, the predominant approach for studying IOs in the 1980s and 1990s was regime analysis. Arguably, it is still the predominant approach.The key difference between a regime approach and an institutional approach lies in whom the different approaches look to as actors. Institutionalists look to the IOs
themselves as actors, and ask what it is that the organizations do. Regime analysts, on the other hand, look to other actors, primarily states, as the source of outcomes in international politics, and ask what effects the various principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures associated with IOs have on the expectations and
behaviors of states. Institutionalists study IOs by looking at what happens within the organizations. Regime analysts study IOs by looking at the behavior of states and at the effects of the norms and rules that the organizations embody on that behavior.
Regime analysis, as suggested above, arose out of a frustration with the limitations of institutional analysis. Primary among these limitations is the inability of institutional analysis to address the bigger picture of the effect of IOs on patterns of behavior in international relations more broadly. It can tell us what IOs do, but  not what difference they make. Regime analysis provides a corrective to this by allowing us to question both where IOs come from and how effective they are. Some students of IO theory have suggested that regime theory is an evolutionary
development from early formal institutionalism, through neofunctionalism.46
But it is perhaps more useful to think of a pendulum, with institutionalist analysis at one end and regime analysis at the other. A broad understanding of the role of IOs in international relations requires both approaches: it requires that we understand both how IOs work and what effects they have on other actors in international
politics. The pendulum occasionally swings too far in one direction, but after a while, the gravitational pull toward understanding IOs pulls it back into balance. Unfortunately, it often then gets pulled too far, and swings out of balance in the other direction. This is what happened in the 1980s, when the balance swung in the direction of regime theory. It remains to be seen whether the pendulum is currently being pulled back into equilibrium by neoinstitutionalism, or whether it will overcompensate and put regime analysis out of fashion for a while.
There are a few observations worth mentioning at this point about the definition of regimes. The first is that they are issue-area specific; the systems for repatriating refugees or for allocating national fishing quotas are regimes, the international system as a whole is not. The second is that regime analysis specifies a range of things
to look at, such as principles, norms and rules, and decision-making procedures. This covers the gamut from the very general (principles) to the very specific (decision- making procedures), and from the explicit (rules) to the implicit (norms). Different schools of thought within regime theory tend to focus on different parts of this definition. In particular, there is a rationalist approach to regime theory that focuses mostly on rules and procedures and asks how we can make regimes as efficient as possible in solving the problems they are created to solve. There is also what has been called a reflectivist approach,47 which focuses on principles and norms. Proponents of this approach tend to ask questions about the effects of IOs on the ways in which actors in international politics think and on the ideas that drive international relations. This tension between efficiency and ideas is the fourth distinction around which the theoretical section of this book is constructed, and provides the focus of Chapter 4.