Who Participates in Global Governance?

States, bureaucracies, and NGOs in the United Nations

Molly Ruhlman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317907008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why are non-state actors sometimes granted participation rights in international organizations? This book argues that IOs, and the states that compose them, systematically pursue their interests when granting participation rights to NSAs.

This book demonstrates that NSAs have long been participants in global governance institutions, and that states and bureaucracies have not always resisted their inclusion. At the same time, this study encourages skepticism of the assumption that increasing participation should be expected with the passage of time. The result is a study that challenges some commonly held assumptions about the interests of IOs and states, while providing an interesting comparison of secretariat and state interests with regard to one particular aspect of IO institutional rule and practice: the participation of non-state actors.

Addressing the regular assumption that the power of states and the efficacy of multilateral governance have simply wilted in the heat of globalization while NSAs have flourished, this work features analysis of key institutions such as UNCEF, UNDP and the Environment Programme. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, the United Nations, and NGOs.

1 Who participates, and who decides?

International organizations as complex actors

• Understanding international organizations

• Explaining variation in NSA engagement

• Identifying preferences

• Conclusion

Although we have learned a great deal about how international organizations (IOs) operate and behave, we have not done a good job of applying what we know about institutional design and IO agency to this question of non-state actor (NSA) participation in international institutions. This chapter reviews what we know about IOs, and presents a theory to explain the origin and type of NSA participation rules implemented in IOs.

There are three categories of interested actor to consider when studying IOs: the secretariat, an assembly of states, and individual member states. It is necessary to consider each of these three aspects of IOs, and their unique interests as distinct actors, in order to understand IO decision making. Once we understand the primary interests of each of these three actors, we can predict the circumstances under which each will favor participatory engagement with NSAs. This approach, in fact, allows us to make more than broad predictions about engagement of NSAs, but to know something about the type of engagement to expect: will engagement of NSAs be about participation or access, part of upstream decision making or downstream implementation, extended broadly or to select organizations, and will these links be established within the member state assembly or to the secretariat? If one does not distinguish between the secretariat of an organization and its member states, and recognize that each makes unique decisions with regard to NSA engagement, then a complete understanding of decision making and NSA participation outcomes is not possible.

Several hypotheses can be drawn from the application of this complex-actor approach to IOs and the question of NSA participation. This chapter presents these, and explains how the book will test the propositions through an extensive exploration of a small number of cases.

Understanding international organizations

Although we observe international organizations engaging in the work and politics of international relations on a daily basis, our understanding of how these organizations act, and where they derive their interests is incomplete. While there continues to be some deliberation within international relations (IR) theory about the ability of IOs to be independent actors,¹ this book accepts that formal IOs in fact act independently of the states that compose them, although they are tied to states in a contractual relationship. It is clear that conceiving of IOs as empty containers for state interests, driven entirely by state dictate is an overly simplistic understanding of international organizations. IOs are best understood as bureaucracies that are more or less managed by the states that create them.

International organizations are composed of member states, which establish the treaties and charters that determine the organization’s existence. However, formal intergovernmental organizations have bureaucracies and legal personalities that exist separate from the states that compose them. Thus, as organizations, IOs are complex actors, partly autonomous agents and partly platforms through which states themselves act. Because of the primacy of states in international law and politics, conceiving of an IO as international actors with autonomous interests, independent from the actors that compose it, has been controversial among international relations and international organization theorists, but is approaching status as an ordinary proposition.² Approached from several different epistemological directions, IO theory now recognizes international organizations as interested actors existing apart from states. Scholars study international organizations as a unit of analysis themselves, increasingly looking to explain the behavior of organizations and finding that behavior to be, at times, distinct from the direct interests of the member states.³

Aiming to take into account the interests of all of the relevant powerful actors in IO decision making, my approach adopts the lessons of principal-agent (PA) analysis: recognizing that the principals of IOs (states) have purposely designed some degree of autonomy for their agent (the secretariat) in order that it may accomplish a set of delegated tasks.⁴ The PA approach is now one of the primary methods by which we understand IO behavior.

In the creation of formal international organizations states delegate tasks to bureaucracies, and thus bureaucracies engage in autonomous behavior through both design and agency slack.⁵ Bureaucracies and IO member states are independent actors with unique sets of interests and all IO secretariats have some degree of autonomy, or range of potential independent action. We can conceptualize all IO autonomy as a consequence of delegation and agency slack, or also consider autonomy to be acquired through moral authority and reputation,⁶ but by and large we know that IOs are neither complete puppets, nor entirely free. In fact, the granting of international legal personality to IOs requires that they enjoy delegated autonomy as an actor.⁷ That autonomy provides space within which the organization may act to push or pull states towards a new understanding of the organization agenda and mission.⁸

As Barnett and Finnemore argue in their influential study of on international organization bureaucracy, “IOs may set agendas for states and create policy situations that drag states along, perhaps using publics and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] as allies.”⁹ Rather than uniformly acting as the recipient of state-led direction, IO staff can in fact lead states through the shaping of new norms and organizational missions and means to accomplish those missions.

Still, organization secretariats are not entirely free agents. The primary goals of secretariats are received from the member states that delegate them. The bureaucracy manages the process of implementation and therefore has autonomy with regard to the means by which the delegated goals are accomplished. Secretariats govern the administration of IOs and wield the power of decision making regarding their own direct consultation with NSAs, the interpretation of the rules that govern NSA participation in the assembly, and their roles in implementation. Within that window of autonomy the decisions that secretariats take vis-à-vis NSAs can be expected to vary from those that member states directly would take because IO secretariats and states are different kinds of actors. Simply, secretariats and member states make unique decisions about engaging NSAs. This makes the subject of this book an excellent one through which to study the interests and behaviors of states (individually and collectively) and bureaucracies within formal IOs.

PA analysis helps us to understand this relationship between the organization and member states in a way that accepts each as an actor with preferences. While the PA approach is often misunderstood to strip IOs of autonomous preferences or action, turning IOs into nothing more than agents of states, the acknowledgement of unique IO preferences and ability of autonomous action is inherent to the PA approach.¹⁰ Further, the PA model does not supply any specific theory about actor preferences. Accordingly, the PA understanding of the relationship between states and international organizations can be utilized by authors writing from different theoretical perspectives and applying disparate assumptions about interests. In this book I shall make some specific claims about the interests of IOs and of states, but these assumptions are not inherent to the PA approach. Instead, the theoretical assumptions I make are laid atop the PA model that describes the relationship between the actors I purport to explain.

While we now have a means of understanding the relationship between organization bureaucracies and states, we should not forget that “states” within IOs operate as both a collectivity in the assembly and as individual actors. The collective interests of the states and their individual interests interact within IOs and each should be considered when seeking to understand IOs. Accordingly, to explain IO behavior with regard to NSA participation rules I distinguish IO secretariats, IO state assemblies, and individual member states as three actors with preferences and potential impact on outcomes. I use this understanding of IOs in combination with rational institutionalist assumptions about the interests of each actor to make a number of predictions about the kinds of NSA engagement patterns that we will see across IOs.

Explaining variation in NSA engagement

Efforts to explain the pattern of NSA involvement in global governance frequently emphasize the transformative power of transnational activists to engage in successful global movements and to pressure states and IOs to let them in. The assumption is that NSA power forces IOs to yield and accommodate them in governance processes.¹¹ Alternatively, and less frequently, some view international organizations themselves as the vanguard in shaping norms of global democracy. From this perspective IO secretariats are “intellectual actors” that develop and spread norms of participatory democracy, which results in increased practice of NSA participation across institutions, particularly within the United Nations (UN) system.¹²

The most common approach, however, is to rely on some version of a supply and demand-oriented rational institutionalism.¹³ As Steffek observes, even when not elaborating a complete theory of variation in IO-NSA engagement, many authors have applied a functionalist analysis to this question and written about the incentives that states and institutions face (or do not face) for engaging with NSAs.¹⁴ A broadly rational-institutionalist approach, explaining NSA roles in global governance as an exchange between states and non-state actors, envelops two different perspectives. One begins from an assumption of state weakness, and the expectation that multilateral institutions are compelled to engage NSAs because of increasing failures of traditional governance. This argument says that states and IOs face a strong demand for NSA involvement in global governance as they flounder in the wake of globalization, which has produced marked “governance gaps” in the capacity and legitimacy of multilateral institutions.¹⁵

In contrast, a supply-oriented argument recognizes the advantages that states (and their organizations) obtain through the engagement of NSAs and argues that the rise of NSAs (NGOs in particular) is in fact a result of state strength and not state weakness. In this view states foster NSAs in a way that reinforces their own power.¹⁶

In general, the dominant explanations for both the rise in number of NSAs and their increasing role in governance have been bottom-up explanations where NSAs are seen as burgeoning powers organically filling the governance gaps of globalization that have cracked the foundation of multilateral governance. However, this approach to understanding the NSA role in global governance does not take us far in explaining variation across intergovernmental institutions. The complexities of globalization are felt system-wide and most, if not all, IOs have a need for good information, skills and expertise. The challenges of “governance gaps” should be seen across multilateral institutions while NSAs supply a similar set of goods to all IOs. Yet, each international organization decides differently about whether, and how, to obtain those goods from these actors.

The “governance gap” argument has much in common with the “power of social movements” argument. This category of explanations for NSA participation in global governance also frames states and IOs as bending to accommodate NSA inclusion, but where the former assumes that IOs experience a great demand for NSA powers and skills to replenish their own waning powers, the later paints IOs as the yielding targets of powerful social activism for the democratization of global governance. This argument says that civil society activism works:

Social movements, mostly originating in the developed world, have stepped-up demands for more inclusive and democratic global governance. International organizations are adjusting their modus operandi to cope with these pressures. The IMF [International Monetary Fund], the WTO [World Trade Organization], the United Nations, the World Bank, the regional development banks (including the IDB [Inter-American Development Bank]), have all undergone a paradigmatic shift that affects mandates, procedures, and decision-making processes.¹⁷

Authors writing from each of these perspectives, however, rarely explain specific relationships between NSAs and IOs or states. They instead focus upon the general phenomenon of NSA involvement in global governance, the overall pattern of increased inclusion, or the apparent increased influence of transnational social movements, civil society organizations, or NGOs.

The theoretical orientation of this book aligns most closely with the “supply” argument. However, authors who explore the supply and demand incentives between NSAs and IOs often provide little to no distinction between states and the international organization itself. The two are often written about as conceptually synonymous. For example, Raustiala¹⁸ only discusses the demands of states and Steffek¹⁹ considers only the demands of IOs, but each identifies very similar demands, or “pull factors,” and the thrust of their theoretical approaches is similar. Carefully identifying IOs as complex actors composed of three parts—individual states, an assembly of states, and secretariats—and accepting that each of these actors has preferences and potential autonomy and power, allows for the creation of hypotheses that offer much greater specificity about NSA engagement rules and practice.

Table 1.1 Explanations for NSA participation in global governance

Explanation for NSA participation in global governance	Thesis	Examples
Activism	Social movements have pressured IOs to democ...