In person icon The Performance of Global Governance Institutions

Contemporary global governance is characterized by an increasing level of institutionalized cooperation. Whether it takes the form of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international agreements, informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs), or transnational public-private governance initiatives (TGIs), scholars agree that over the past decades institutionalized cooperation among nations has been on the rise. Extant research tends to focus on the emergence and design of global governance institutions. Recent work in international relations has started to shift the focus towards the performance of these institutions, understood as the extent to which institutions generate output, outcome, and impact and through what processes (Gutner and Thompson 2010). Importantly, this includes analyses of the effectiveness, failure, dysfunctionality, and death of international institutions (Lall 2017; Gray 2018; Barnett and Finnemore 2004). While these studies provide important insights about the performance of IGOs, they neglect other types of global governance institutions, such as IIGOs and TGIs. Furthermore, they typically focus on individual organizations in isolation, neglecting the complex linkages among different types of instruments and the consequences of these linkages for performance. This workshop brings together scholars from diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds interested in better understanding the causes and consequences of institutional performance. It breaks new ground by developing a research agenda on the performance of global governance institutions that 1) explores the performance of a broader range of institutions; 2) analyzes how institutional complexity impacts performance; 3) examines the link between institutional design and performance; and 4) investigates the relationship between the legitimacy of institutions and their performance. In doing so, we understand performance in a broad sense, including goal attainment, problem solving, and efficiency, but also failure, dysfunctionality, and death of global governance institutions. First, research on the performance of global governance institutions has to take into account the full spectrum of institutionalized cooperation that constitutes today’s global governance architecture. Instead of studying specific types of institutional arrangements in isolation, we need to develop theoretically oriented comparative empirical research. Second, research needs to take into account the increasing overlap and interactions among different institutional forms as an important driver of the performance of individual institutions. Third, we need more work on the relationship between institutional design and performance (Lall 2017). Institutional formality and access of transnational actors to international institutions are two important design features that require more attention (Avant and Westerwinter 2016). Fourth, the legitimacy of global governance institutions may have an impact on their performance (Hurd 1999). Recent work has identified a gap between prevailing assumptions about the effects of legitimacy on the performance of global governance institutions and actual empirical evidence on this relationship. Important next steps for research on this topic, therefore, involve developing research designs and implementing studies that allow us to establish how the legitimacy of a global governance institution affects its authority, resources, rule compliance, and, ultimately, impact on the ground. Finally, performance may also contribute to a variety of international outcomes, such as regime effectiveness (Squatrito et al. 2018), legitimacy of institutions (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2019), and more.