Over the last 20 years, scholars and policymakers alike have paid increasing attention to two major debates in the wake of globalization—those on global governance and institutional emergence. Despite their prominence, these debates have largely run in parallel, rarely intersecting. For the former, much of the research has focused on the ways in which national actors, generally governments and their allied multinational corporations (MNCs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGO)s, battle with one another to gain the upper hand in defining new international standards and regimes. International governmental organizations (IGOs) are viewed mainly as forums for these battles or implementers of rules set forth by the winning coalitions. For the latter, institutional emergence and change are largely domestic affairs. For most scholars, IGOs are thus seen as one of several external conduits directing the forces of globalization onto nation-states and their stakeholders.
In fresh contrast, Tana Johnson takes IGOs as central actors, and in so doing, combines these debates, offering insights about the ways in which IGOs shape the institutional architecture of transnational integration and, in turn, how international institutions emerge. That is, by considering how different types of IGOs can be both protagonists and recipients of the ongoing construction of global governance, Johnson forces us to rethink fundamental assumptions about the mechanisms shaping both transnational integration and institutional change.
Johnson motivates the intersection of these debates by presenting a phenomenon often overlooked in the literatures of international and comparative political economy—the stunning proliferation of what she calls “IGO Progeny,” or IGOs created mainly by other existing IGOs. Through an impressive organization of IGO data—and this book is filled with excellent data analysis—she directs our attention to the fact that the vast majority of IGOs created since the 1950s are these progeny. Although all IGOs do not share the same prominence or power, their rise must be taken seriously for at least two main reasons.
First, as transnational integration expands, regardless of its fluctuations and nonlinear patterns, and governments attempt to adapt (and sometimes reduce) their own capacities, state and nonstate actors increasingly turn to IGOs to help manage numerous and varied cross-border issues. Yet thus far, this growth in global governance appears to lead IGOs into a morass of public and private rules instead of a structure of coherent regulations. Second, the main extant theories, which emerge largely from the principal–agent paradigm so dominant in political economy, have difficulty explaining this phenomenon, particularly the rise of IGO insulation. The most common are focused on states—insulation would be a product of the intention of states, especially big powers during the design stage. An alternative is that the agents, the international bureaucracy, cultivate autonomy in their own IGOs over time. But the evidence largely contradicts these views.
Johnson shows how IGOs are designed from inception with a great amount of autonomy by other IGO “parents.” This trend allows her to focus on the ways in which IGO bureaucrats do not seek insulation in the narrow sense but, rather, build their world views, identify key problems in various domains, recognize opportunity structures and potential allies, and then create strategies for new institutional solutions. Her argument has two parts. First, using their informational and expertise advantages, potential parent IGO bureaucracies can utilize their own moderate insulation from states to act instrumentally and take on leading roles in the agenda-setting and design processes of new IGOs. Second, these roles are enhanced when the parent bureaucracy builds horizontal alliances with other IGOs and international NGOs that afford them additional resources and political leverage.
The author develops an elegant research design to show how these components interact and when the scope conditions of high politics and state expertise can limit IGO insulation. She builds a unique data set on IGOs to demonstrate statistically, with the usual array of control variables, the generalizability of these claims and scope conditions. She then pursues a two-part qualitative analysis to articulate the mechanisms of interaction and agenda setting. The first involves the process tracing of the emergence of the International Panel on Climate Change, which gained significant autonomy despite its initiation by and repeated failed intervention from the United States. The second is a comparison of several prominent IGOs, notably the World Food Program, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The comparisons across domains, time periods, and issue salience allow one to see how the IGO parent bureaucracies, even when confronting the great powers, are able to carve out space for maneuver, harness allies across IGOs and NGOs, and shape the designs of the progeny.
In many ways, Johnson is attempting to build on the principal–agent framework, showing how careful analysis of IGO bureaucracy opens up the institutional design process for a variety of actors, when the agents become principals in their own right. Yet perhaps the most interesting theoretical and empirical insights come from flipping the framework on its head and continually revealing how IGO emergence is embedded in a broader community of IGO and NGO actors. This resonates strongly with growing bodies of research on institutional change and global governance. For instance, just as work on IGOs has greatly focused on the monitoring and bargaining relationships between states and the IGO bureaucrats, the initial phases of research on institutional change in emerging market societies have focused on the formal top-down designs and two-level bargaining games between state and nonstate actors. But some of the most penetrating and innovative work on the latter, particularly in the context of postcommunist countries, has shown the limitations of the traditional game-theoretic and economistic approaches, while revealing how new systems of regulations and property rights emerge from horizontal ties among stakeholder groups. As such, the design process becomes important, not so much to optimize incentives but, rather, to understand the dynamics and politics of opening the design stage to a variety of participant groups. Johnson’s cases make this all too clear.
Similarly, the more forward-thinking work on global governance focuses increasingly on the roles of epistemic communities and transnational horizontal networks of state and nonstate actors. This recent work shows how the mobilization of these ties become the critical resources in stabilizing new institutional structures, promoting domestic reforms in a number of domains, and providing key mechanisms for multistakeholder governance regimes. Johnson puts herself at the forefront of this work, as Organizational Progeny is one of the few books that demonstrate how IGO parents tap into transnational networks and reinforce them through the building of new institutions.
While there is a growing body of research that combines network and institutional analysis at the domestic and comparative levels, Johnson lays the groundwork to extend such multidisciplinary studies into the transnational realm. She also forces scholars of global governance to distinguish the designs of IGOs and consider how those differences can impact both the stability and effectiveness of new transnational regimes. At the same time, given exponential growth in private transnational regulations and actors, one must wonder whether the IGO bureaucrats, in their effort to fend off state interests, have simply pushed their progeny into the arms of private interest groups.
