This is one of the most important recent books on global governance. It is both meticulous and comprehensive in its study of an important global development: the increased access of transnational actors (TNAs)—such as nongovernmental organizations, business representatives, and scientific experts—to international organizations (IOs). Yet the implications of its findings go well beyond this relatively narrow topic, contributing to our broader understanding of interactions between state and nonstate actors in the international realm.
The Opening Up of International Organizations asks where, how, and why IOs allow TNAs access to global policymaking. Previous literature has offered only partial answers to these questions, as research on this topic has generally taken the form of in-depth case studies. Moreover, past work has focused primarily on more visible IOs, such as the United Nations or the World Bank, implying that the trends we observe in such organizations are generalizable to all other global and regional institutions. Also, most extant studies of TNA access offer individual explanations for the opening up of IOs, without much attention to the relative importance of such explanatory factors.
This book starts out from a broad set of hypotheses accounting for TNA access. The authors posit that the variation across IOs can be explained by functional factors (demand for resolving governance problems and availability of IO resources), strategic legitimation (especially prevalent among IOs dealing with contentious issues and exposed to public scrutiny), and norm socialization (resulting from both domestic and international interactions). The study also takes into account the impact of the relative sovereignty costs that come with nongovernmental actor participation in the IO policy-shaping process, the relative homogeneity of IO member-states’ interests, diffusion effects across IOs, and supply of TNAs.
Jonas Tallberg and his colleagues test these arguments through both a comprehensive large-n analysis and several in-depth studies of carefully selected IOs. The statistical analysis is based on an original data set of approximately 300 bodies from 50 IOs between 1950 and 2010. The data set covers both regional organizations (such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and global ones (such as the International Whaling Commission). It includes prominent IOs (such as the World Bank) and less known ones (such as the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization). Each of these organizations is represented in turn in the data set through a number of different bodies (anywhere from one to 14). This allows the authors to develop a refined measure of TNA access with significant variation not just across IOs but also across IO bodies (ministerial councils, executive boards, committees, secretariats, courts, etc.), issue areas, policy functions, and geographic scope. The measure of TNA access is further refined by allowing for differentiation in terms of the depth, range, stability, and degree of legal character of TNA access rules.
The range of IO bodies included in this data set, as well as the meticulous operationalization of a large number of important variables, will likely encourage many scholars to turn to it for their tests and, perhaps, develop it even further by adding new variables and cases. Indeed, the data set contributes to the increasingly broad set of data sources for the field of IO studies.
The statistical analysis of Opening Up is complemented by four rich case studies of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Whaling Commission. These studies illustrate some of the factors that contribute to the variance of TNA access across issue areas and across the policy cycle.
The empirical sections of this book find support for most but not all of the initial arguments. The authors find that IOs allow significantly greater access to the policymaking process when TNAs can contribute to the specific governance problem. Contentious IOs are more likely to open up to TNAs. One of the most robust findings is that domestic democratic norms in IO member states are a strong predictor of TNA access to that IO. Yet it is interesting to note that the study finds little if any support for the argument that IOs experiencing public protests are more likely to open up. International participatory discourse does not seem to contribute much to TNA access. Moreover, the practices of opening up the large UN conferences to TNAs do not contribute significantly to the emergence and spread of a participatory norm across IOs.
In addition to the explanatory value of this study on TNA access, one should note that some of the most interesting findings of the book refer to the overall trends observed in the data. Perhaps the broadest and most remarkable such finding is that formal TNA access has expanded almost continuously across virtually all types of IOs, IO bodies, and phases of policymaking. With the exception of UN bodies (where the trend seems to become visible as early as the mid-1970s), the movement toward greater TNA access is much more obvious after 1990.
These observations beg the question of whether we can expect even greater TNA access now that some of the trends of the 1990s that previously spurred the opening up of IOs (such as democratization and increased interstate cooperation) appear to have plateaued or maybe have even been reversed. Indeed, the data for the last two to three years of the time period in this study (2008–10) suggest that there has been relatively little advancement in TNA access. The authors conclude with a partial and optimistic answer to this question, suggesting that there is sufficient room for improvement in IO openness. Yet future studies may want to build on the findings of this book by broadening the time frame for the analysis beyond the 1950–2010 period, going forward but also back in time. Indeed, research on TNA access has shown that in some respects, in the 1920s, such IOs as the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization were even more open to TNAs than contemporary IOs, but by the 1930s they became more closed (Steve Charnovitz, “Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance,” Michigan Journal of International Law 18 [no. 2, 1997]: 183–286). One can only wonder, therefore, whether there are certain cyclical trends across the past century that complement our understanding of the primarily linear trends observed by Tallberg and his colleagues after 1950. If so, would such broader trends lead to different expectations for future relations between IOs and TNAs?
This is just one of many possible examples of the ways in which this book opens new and exciting directions for future research on a broader set of questions, beyond those of TNA access to IOs. Its conclusions are relevant for some of the major long-standing debates about power relations among the increasing number of multiple actors in the international realm (e.g., Jessica T. Matthews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs 76 [no. 1, 1997]: 50–66; Anne-Marie Slaughter, “The Real New World Order,” Foreign Affairs 76 [no. 5, 1997]: 183–97). The contribution of The Opening Up of International Organizations to such important debates, and the meticulously gathered evidence supporting its arguments, place it on the short list of required readings for any student of global governance.
