Conventional theories of the opening-up of international organizations (IO) towards stakeholders stress the expertise, resources or democratic quality that these actors bring to the workings and processes of the respective IO. Since almost all IOs today integrate stakeholders of different kinds, including NGOs, third states, business actors and other IOs, past research implies that more seems to be the merrier. However, this claim does not hold true as becomes evident by cases of non-admission of certain actors or processes of incremental enlargement.
This paper develops a framework for analysing IO enlargement towards stakeholders based on legitimating needs of the IO. The framework differentiates between different kinds of actors and claims that each kind of actor carries different sorts of legitimating effects upon the IO, namely expert legitimacy, democratic legitimacy and sovereign legitimacy. The article studies the example of Arctic Council enlargement from 1996 until 2017 to showcase the plausibility of the theoretical framework and its empirical applicability.
