Global governance is in crisis just when we need it most. Rocked by a pandemic and financial crises, riven by rising multipolarity, and repudiated by nationalists and populists, global institutions face immediate threats even as unprecedented long-term challenges like climate change loom. But, as these two books demonstrate, global governance shifts and adapts. The overriding question for students of world politics now is how the current strains and shifts in the international system will shape that order going forward. Alexandru Grigorescu’s and Charles B. Roger’s contributions provide important empirical and theoretical building blocks toward understanding this macro-problem in the discipline.

Specifically, both books add to the significant and central literature examining all those areas of global governance beyond the canonical state-to-state, formal, intergovernmental organization. These include various forms of private, transnational, and hybrid governance; soft law; informality; and other modes of cooperation across borders. Although earlier literature in this realm has conceptualized these “nontraditional” phenomena and explored their dynamics, these two books join current efforts to explain variation in the form that governance takes. Both focus on organizations as opposed to wider forms of governance, such as agreements, networks, and the like. First, they show that “noncanonical” international organizations are more widespread than is widely understood and indeed have been for some time. It is not only that new forms of governance have increased but also that our theoretical focus on the canonical intergovernmental organization narrowed the breadth of earlier scholarship (albeit with important exceptions). Second, the books show that variation in the form of global governance is closely linked not just to systemic shifts (e.g., the rise of complex interdependence), as is commonly argued, but also to domestic politics—specifically ideologies, leaders’ incentives, and bureaucratic politics—in key states.

Roger focuses on the rise of so-called informal intergovernmental organizations like the Basel Committee on Banking Standards or the International Competition Network. He distinguishes these from, say, the World Bank or the European Union both by their degree of institutionalization (whether they have large permanent secretariats, staff, and so on) and their legal form (whether they were created through formal international legal agreements). Roger asks, How much informality is there? Why do states prefer formal or informal arrangements? Why has informality arisen?

A core contribution of his book is to map the universe of informal intergovernmental organizations (building on earlier work by Felicity Vabulas and Duncan Snidal, “Organization without Delegation: Informal Intergovernmental Organizations [IIGOs] and the Spectrum of Intergovernmental Arrangements,” Review of International Organizations, 2013). Roger shows that approximately one-third of international organizations are now informal and that the proportion of informal organizations has increased over time. From 1945 to 1975, the proportion of informal organization grew only from 8% to 12%, but then rapidly increased in the 1980s and 1990s even as states created formal organizations less frequently. Understanding informal international organizations is therefore critical to understanding international organization more generally.

To explain why states might prefer informal institutions in some cases, we need to look beyond the functionalist and power-based arguments in the literature (see, for example, the recent special issue of Review of International Organizations, 2020, edited by Oliver Westerwinter, Kenneth Abbott, and Thomas Biersteker) and consider domestic politics, Roger argues. Different governmental entities have different preferences concerning formality and informality, because they can obtain different levels of credit for them and different degrees of control over them. Relatively autonomous bureaucratic agencies, say, a central bank, will prefer informal organizations that they can control without interference from foreign ministries or legislatures. Domestic entities more linked to political leaders will, instead, have incentives to pursue more high-profile, treaty-based organizations. But while the lead organization’s interests are critical, it does not always get what it wants within domestic politics. Autonomous bureaucracies may see their issue become politicized, raising it out of “low politics” and into the realm of formal cooperation. Similarly, political leaders may struggle to get formal institutions approved by domestic veto players, forcing them to pursue informal channels. And, of course, whatever proposals emerge from this domestic process must then gain international agreement through interstate bargaining.

This theory of why states prefer formal or informal entities leads Roger to explain the rise of informal institutions as a product of two trends. First, the rise of the regulatory state from the 1970s forward created a larger set of powerful and relatively autonomous government bureaucracies, especially in advanced democracies. Second, the rise of political polarization in the same set of countries made it more difficult for proposals for formal institutions to make it through the gauntlet of domestic politics. Although this trend has been particularly pronounced in the United States, Roger documents it in other advanced democracies as well.

Whereas Roger builds on and expands a rich vein in the literature on informality and transgovernmentalism (e.g., Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence, 1971; Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order, 2004), giving it greater empirical and theoretical precision, Grigorescu offers a more radical reconceptualization of long-established categories in the field. His core argument is that we should not define intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations by their juridical status (Roger’s key distinguishing feature between formal and informal), but rather by “who governs” (Grigorescu approvingly draws on Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan Sell’s memorable framing in Who Governs the Globe? 2010). Specifically, Grigorescu places all international organizations on a governmental–nongovernmental spectrum based on what kinds of actors have decision-making power, what kinds of actors contribute financially, and what kinds of actors are represented. In other words, instead of seeing “governmentalness” as purely an international legal definition, we should consider a wide range of channels through which different actors might influence a given organization to understand its essential nature.

Grigorescu applies this innovative conceptualization from the nineteenth century to the present to describe how the global governance of health, labor, and technical standards has shifted back and forth along the governmental and nongovernmental continuum over time, the “ebb and flow” of his title. Although the book documents a clear shift toward nongovernmentalism in recent decades, consistent with the conventional wisdom, the advantage of its historical reach is to record a lot of variation both over time and across the three issue areas. Such historically grounded work is essential for effective theorizing, and it decisively dispenses with naïve notions of intergovernmentalism as the historical norm in global governance and everything else as unprecedented post–Cold War innovations.

Like Roger, Grigorescu accepts the structural theories that predominate in the literature, but emphasizes an explanation based on the domestic politics of key states. He posits two linked hypotheses. One, analogous to Roger’s explanation, argues that the strength of domestic governmental or nongovernmental organizations will influence what kind of “governmentalness” states will seek in international organizations. Two, moving toward ideational mechanisms, Grigorescu argues that political elites’ ideologies will matter. Elites who favor a more interventionist, activist role for government will support governmental organizations; those with a more laissez-faire orientation will prefer a larger role for nongovernmental modes of governance. Again, as with Roger’s theory, Grigorescu notes that these domestic preferences will then be aggregated through a process of international bargaining.

Because Grigorescu’s empirical range extends more widely than Roger’s, covering entities beyond those created or driven by states alone, a theoretical emphasis on the domestic politics of key states necessarily explains less of the targeted variation; indeed, Grigorescu notes the limits of emphasizing a simple set of theories to explain such a vast expanse of organizational forms. Importantly, he does not emphasize the agency and ability of nongovernmental actors to create their own organizations and other forms of governance beyond borders, arguing that their ability to do so is conditional on state acceptance. This dismissal is surely too strong, however. Historically, only a small set of powerful totalitarian states have ever truly eliminated the transnational linkages that give rise to international nongovernmental organizations and networks. More commonly, these entities overlap with, complement, and contest state authority.

Grigorescu’s ambitious redefining of organizations on a continuum gives important insights into the nature of global governance. Although international lawyers may insist on the value of clear juridical categories, Grigorescu’s reinterpretation can zero in on questions of power and influence. For example, there are likely many cases where an organization’s behavior is better understood by looking at who pays the budget, rather than whether the founding document was a treaty ratified by states or came about in some other fashion. It is not clear, however, that defining organizations along these dimensions always adds clarity. For example, significant scholarship has assessed the representation of nongovernmental actors in intergovernmental fora (Jonas Tallberg, The Opening up of International Orgainzations, 2013) or has studied delegation to nonstate actors (Jessica Green, Rethinking Private Authority, 2013) while still recognizing—indeed, theorizing around—the distinct public character of international organizations under international law. For some questions, aggregating “governmentalness” into a continuum risks obscuring more than it illuminates. The definition also seems to struggle to describe cases in which governments actively choose to delegate decision-making power. For example, governments sometimes constrain themselves through trustee-like bodies such as international human rights courts or even via supranational arrangements that pool sovereignty, like elements of the European Union. In such cases, governments lack decision-making power, but the resulting organizations are quite the opposite of “nongovernmental organizations.” Indeed, they are the most government-like organizations to be found in global governance. These scope conditions aside, Grigorescu offers a useful lens to answer many important questions around power and influence in international organizations.

Reflecting on their findings and implications, both books give us cause for concern about the future of global governance. Roger finds a striking difference between formal and informal organizations in terms of how well matched they are to the problem structure of the issue they seek to address. Drawing on rational design arguments about when more or less formal organizational forms should be preferred, Roger finds that whereas only 11% of formal bodies are mismatched, nearly half of informal bodies are. Although this contrast is mostly suggestive, it does imply that the greater growth rate of informal bodies in recent periods represents a “second-best” track for global governance, perhaps driven both by the rise in political polarization domestically and by the increasing “gridlock” of the system as a whole (Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock, 2013).

Similar arguments have been advanced for the rise of nongovernmental forms of governance, though Grigorescu does not make this argument. Instead, he predicts that the pendulum of global governance will “sooner or later” (p. 224) swing back toward governmentalism, driven by increasing authoritarianism and the decay of the liberal economic model. In other words, the substantial recent shift toward nongovernmental forms of governance is a reversible point on a continuum, not a structural discontinuity.

Taken together, these books seem to imply a future international order of shallow, government-oriented global governance, in which governments pursue second-best informal cooperation but constrain nongovernmental forms of governance. For a world facing growing interdependence challenges—such as climate change, technological disruptions, and migration—this is a grim possibility. As the authors’ emphasis on domestic politics reminds us, however, the form and ultimately the effectiveness of global governance are not only structurally determined. Much will depend on the agency of political actors seeking to influence the preferences of key states. In other words, the “ebb and flow of global governance” is something we can shape. Let us hope that the current turbulence in global politics allows political entrepreneurs to build the coalitions within and across states that will help calm the treacherous waters ahead.