The concept of orchestration originated in Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal’s work on “regulatory standard setting” in transnational governance: “the promulgation and implementation of non-legally-binding standards of behavior applicable directly to private actors,” notably business firms, in fields such as environmental protection, worker rights, and human rights (“International Regulation without International Government: Improving IO Performance through Orchestration,” Review of International Organizations 5 [September 2010]: 316). The focus of this work was on how various forms of steering and support by international governmental organizations (IGOs) might help to mitigate the costs of competition among multiple regulatory schemes operating in the same field—such as duplicate compliance burdens, downward pressure on standards, and consumer confusion—while preserving benefits of pluralism like experimentation, learning, adaptability to local contexts, and contestability. Understood in this way, orchestration seemed a useful concept and policy tool for enhancing the effectiveness of transnational governance in advancing broad public goals under conditions of regulatory pluralism through collaboration by international organizations (IOs) and states with private business and civil society actors.
The current volume, coedited by Abbott and Snidal with Philipp Genschel and Bernard Zangl, is much broader and more ambitious. Orchestration, defined as “enlist[ing] intermediary actors on a voluntary basis, by providing them with ideational and material support, to address target actors in pursuit of [an actor’s] governance goals” (p. 3), has now been elevated to a general “mode of governance,” distinguished from other familiar modes (hierarchy, delegation, collaboration) by its combination of “softness” and “indirectness.” The core motivation for orchestration in this analysis is an actor’s lack of sufficient capabilities for hard, direct governance, such as regulatory competence, operational capacities, or legitimating authority. The availability of intermediaries with complementary capabilities and mutually correlated goals thus constitutes a second condition hypothesized to underpin orchestration. Other general characteristics hypothesized by the editors to make orchestration more likely are the focality of governance actors in their issue area and an organizational culture that encourages policy entrepreneurship. For IGOs more specifically, goal divergence among member states and weak institutional control mechanisms are hypothesized to promote orchestration by increasing officials’ motivation to engage in soft, indirect governance strategies while reducing constraints on their ability to do so (pp. 16–30).
Reframed in this way, International Organizations as Orchestrators extends the original concept to a very wide universe of cases, including arrangements aimed at “managing states,” which Abbott and Snidal’s earlier work considered unlikely. The examples discussed in the volume’s 12 core empirical chapters by a distinguished group of international scholars include European Union regulatory networks in competition, telecommunications, and finance; the World Trade Organization and the Codex Alimentarius Commission; the G20 in international financial regulation; the Global Environmental Facility in climate adaptation; UN human rights treaty bodies; the World Health Organization in health aid and infectious disease control; the UN Security Council and the Kimberly Process for conflict diamonds; the UN Environment Program and the Principles for Responsible Investment; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) protection; the International Labor Organization in child labor prevention; and the Financial Action Task Force in anti–money laundering. The actors involved are extremely diverse, encompassing the EU supranational institutions, formal IGOs, and informal international bodies among the orchestrators, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business associations, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, and other IGOs among the intermediaries. So too are the roles performed on each side, which include convening, agenda setting, assistance, endorsement, and coordination by the orchestrators, and standard setting, certification, monitoring, implementation review, technical assistance, project funding, and execution by the intermediaries.
By extending the concept to cover such a broad and heterogeneous array of actors, arrangements, and activities, orchestration loses much of its original specificity and becomes practically ubiquitous in transnational governance. In some cases, the expansion of the concept’s empirical scope threatens to undermine even its now very abstract general definition as a distinctive mode of governance. Consider, for example, the European regulatory networks analyzed by Michael Blauberger and Berthold Rittberger (Chap. 2) and Walter Mattli and Jack Seddon (Chap. 13), respectively. There, as Blauberger and Rittberger explicitly argue, the EU institutions possess strong regulatory competences, but lack the operational capacities and detailed knowledge needed to implement and enforce European rules on the ground. Hence, the EU has created networks of independent national regulatory authorities to collaborate with the Commission in developing, monitoring, and reviewing the application of common rules, while adapting them to varied local conditions. But since both the roles of the participants and the rules themselves are defined in legislation and have become increasingly formalized over time, it hardly seems appropriate to term such arrangements a “soft” or voluntary mode of governance. Indeed, if lack of direct operational and enforcement capacities is a defining criterion, then nearly everything that IGOs do can be interpreted as a form of orchestration, since even those with the strongest formal hierarchical powers (like the UN Security Council, the WTO, or the EU) depend in practice on member states and other actors to implement their decisions—as the chapters in this volume document.
The editors’ conclusion reviews the empirical findings of the other chapters against their initial theoretical framework and hypotheses, carefully identifying discordant as well as confirmatory results. Predictably, given the concept’s broad definition, the contributors find orchestration to be extremely widespread, though it is initiated and welcomed by intermediaries and targets, including states themselves, more frequently than originally anticipated. Unsurprisingly, too, the orchestrator capability deficit and intermediary availability hypotheses are largely supported by the case studies. At the same time, however, there are dynamic effects at work, since successful orchestration can increase IGO capabilities, while IGOs can also create new intermediaries where these do not already exist. Other hypotheses like orchestrator focality and entrepreneurship fare less well empirically, since the latter proved hard to operationalize, while the former can be as much an outcome as a condition of successful orchestration. The goal divergence hypothesis holds only for orchestration initiated by IGOs, but not by states, where tight oversight capacities instead are crucial; but even on this dimension, orchestration can transform initial conditions over time, by increasing goal convergence or exposing new conflicts among the participants, as in the case of the Kimberley Process analyzed by Virginia Haufler (Chap. 9).
Although the dynamic effects discussed here are acknowledged by the editors (pp. 31, 359–60), the static character of their theoretical framework constitutes a major weakness. The core logic of their model is based on gains from specialization and pooling of resources among governance actors and intermediaries with preexisting capabilities and well-defined goals, whose complementarity leads the former to reach out to the latter. Yet as many of the case studies in this volume show, participation in orchestration processes can often lead over time to transformations in the capabilities, goals, and roles of the various actors involved. Despite the extensive typology of orchestration techniques proposed by the editors, the mechanisms behind these recursive dynamics and their contribution to the problem-solving effectiveness of transnational governance arrangements remain largely unexplained. Thus for example, although the introduction lists mutual learning among the potential benefits of orchestration (p. 7), this mechanism plays hardly any role in the rest of the volume. In tackling these unresolved issues, insights from alternative theoretical approaches, such as experimentalist governance, that focus on the feedback effects of coordinated learning from local experience in implementing and revising common goals may prove of particular value.
