In 2006, Sophie Meunier and I convened a workshop to discuss the politics of international regime complexity (IRC). We were assistant professors, motivated by the observation of contestation and agendas pursued by state and non-state actors across a range of institutions with overlapping rules and mandates. I will call this bottom-up contestation, where IRC is an independent variable and the question is whether, how, why and to what ends overlap shaped state, international organizations (IOs) and non-state actors’ actions and the subsequent outcomes. Robert Keohane, a participant at the workshop, argued that we should be focusing on the first-order question of how overlap occurred (IRC as a dependent variable). As the room disagreed, Keohane prophesied that the IRC research agenda would not amount to much if we were not focused on generating probabilistic directional findings of whether and when IRC politics were negative, salutary, etc.

Panke and Stapel’s book International Organizations and the Management of Regime Complexity addresses Keohane’s second issue, studying outcome variation, with findings that suggest that the origin of the overlap can be important. Their book examines an arguably most likely case of consequential IRC effects, territorial overlap via regional international organizations (RIOs). The book’s goal is to develop and test a theory of when and how overlap contributes to no adverse impacts, heightened conflict, or the salutary outcomes of coordination or cooperation. The authors offer a succinct state-of-the-art review of the IRC literature, after which they zero in on Keohane’s question about the negative (e.g., duplicated efforts, resource waste, competition, instability, and decreased legitimacy) and positive (e.g., increased problem-solving capacity, learning through experimentation, and helpful division of labor) impacts of IRC.

The empirical aspirations are huge. The authors coded the mandates (aka competencies) of 73 RIOs from 1945 to 2020, generating 66,884 dyads when two organizations existed in the same year. Of this group, 10,577 dyad-year observations involve organizations where at least one member state and one policy-competency overlap (p. 33). Coding huge amounts of data creates a formalism, essentially relying on documents like treaties and statements published on IO websites. The qualitative case studies will add more sources, yet not entirely shed the formalism. Chapter 2 provides eye-opening descriptive statistics, including that there is an uptick in overlapping mandate-dyads beginning with the end of the Cold War, and today member and mandate overlap is vastly more common than the alternative of regional regimes with no mandate or member overlap (pp. 34 and 37).

Panke and Stapel then develop a “selection model,” which is basically a top-down management decision-tree for RIO officials. The authors posit that there are decision junctures that create five possible overlap choices: 1) disregard—when RIOs with overlapping membership are both doing something, yet the RIOs do not pay attention to each other; 2) confrontation—when two RIOs are acting unilaterally without accommodating the preferences or actions of the other, nor are procedural norms of coordination established; 3) collaboration—when RIOs have created procedural norms or practices to stabilize mutual expectations about future behavior; or 4) coordination—when RIOs exchange information, perhaps with consultation and invitations to observe (pp. 44–46). Given that many RIOs do not go beyond the Treaty step of defining lofty ambitions, the fifth and perhaps most prevalent outcome is coexistence—objectives overlap yet organizations are taking little to no action in a policy area, so we would not expect IRC to have a discernable impact on RIO strategies.

An important argument is that RIOs lack the resource capacity to make management decisions across the entire range of functional overlap issues (p. 243). The authors theorize that saliency (the centrality of the issue given the regional organizations larger mandate) creates the first-choice juncture: to either disregard or adopt one of the other management options. When the ideological fit (world views, regime type preferences, or macro-economic orientations) is not similar, then confrontation is a likely choice. The next juncture is shaped by the level of uncertainty (generated by fundamental changes in geopolitics or issue-specific factors) where the choice is coordination or cooperation (pp. 12–13, 44–53).

It is at this point that the book becomes unwieldy. No large N finding is offered, which is fine because the coding is so general and formal that I would not know what to do with a large N finding. The qualitative case studies are where the theoretical propositions are probed. There are four regional chapters (Africa, Americas, Europe, and Asia), with dyadic examples of each outcome, where each independent variable is discussed, thus 4 chapters x 4 outcomes x a dyad equals 16 case studies covering 32 IOs. It is hard for a reader to wrap their head around the details, and the skimpy chapter introductions and conclusions, plus the book’s limited conclusion mean that we are left with no real understanding of regional or cross-regional insights.

One problem is that the significance of the disregard, confrontation, collaboration, coordination choice ends up buried. Let me offer a few examples that intersect with RIOs I have studied. The African confrontation dyad discusses the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA in French). UEMOA was created to replace the French colonial system with a CFA Franc zone and trade practices that still orient to the metropole. UEMOA gained additional relevance as a way for smaller Francophone ECOWAS members (plus the lusophone Guinea-Bissau, but not Cabo Verde) to coordinate in the hope of developing joint stances to adopt in ECOWAS. The authors find, as I did, that ECOWAS members still find tensions between Francophone and Anglophone member. Yet the more I dug, the more I got a sense that most ECOWAS members joined to gain access to Nigeria’s market; they still struggle with the reality that true free movement would overwhelm them; and Nigeria remains the regional hegemon that drives and ignores ECOWAS rules. Could it be that structural imbalances extending beyond the UEMOA-ECOWAS divide, more than salience, ideological fit, or uncertainty, explain why confrontation is a dyad-feature? Also, what does this confrontation amount to? Has it significantly impeded policies? Is it contributing to the challenges these organizations are facing?

The Americas coordination example includes MERCOSUR and UNASUR. The two organizations have identical competencies, and the coordination finding is that the two organizations “seek to optimize resources, avoid overlapping tasks, and strengthen the efforts deployed in [MERCOSUR]” (p. 117). What is lost in the discussion is that UNASUR was a leftist project pushed by Ecuador’s then leader Raphael Correa. Correa pushed UNASUR as a means to subsume the more neo-liberal Andean Community (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia). Yes there was membership and policy overlap. But their dyadic focus means they miss that UNASUR was Correa’s solution to what was actually a triadic contestation involving MERCOSUR (which Ecuador is not part of, but at the time leftist leaders in Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina dominated MERCOSUR) and the Comunidad Andina (dominated by neoliberal leaders in Columbia and Peru). The overly formalistic analysis leads the authors to miss that UNASUR was never more than a paper tiger with lofty and unlikely goals including building a South American identity, jointly confronting global powers, taking joint positions in international forums, cooperating on infrastructure and energy projects, free movement of workers and shared worker rights, and more. No one ever moved into UNASUR’s Quito headquarters, and UNASUR fell apart in 2018 after Correa left office.

The two examples demonstrate a problem in treating RIOs as comparable widgets. We are also implicitly left with the suggestion that the just discussed Americas collaboration case study is somehow similar to the European coordination case (the EU and NATO) or the European collaboration case (the Commonwealth of Independent States, an organization to deal with Former Soviet Union legacies, and the Eurasian Economic Union, Russia’s paper-tiger imperial answer to the European Union).

Panke and Stanton’s study exemplifies the so-called KKV approach of Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inquiry in Qualitative Methods (Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, 1994). The authors have developed an ambitious, comprehensive, innovative, impressive, and a very reasonable way to explore top-down outcome variation. In some ways, this book exemplifies what is lost in the rigor. Functional case studies delving into two or three issues might have been more relatable. Yet the base problem is the difficulty of separating superficial types of cooperation from more substantive efforts, and the difficulty of knowing the stakes of the choice for coordination, collaboration, disregard, or confrontation especially where cooperation is superficial.

IRC scholars are still grappling with how to best study the reality that global governance today occurs via regime complexes, rather than within a single regime. I do not fault the authors for following the norms of the disciple. While Keohane may have been right that we need to question the origin of the overlap as part of understanding the subsequent politics, I disagree with his stress on the importance of probabilistic findings. If anything, this book suggests that it may well be impossible to predict when IRC will generate salutary cooperation or negative competition among IOs. Meanwhile, while it may be up to taste, the bottom-up contestation strategy has the advantage of inherently involving stakes that state and non-state actors care enough about to strategize and contest over.