Diversification of International Organizations in 21st Century World Politics

Abstract

International organizations (IOs) have been diversifying remarkably over the past decades. This includes the involvement of quantitatively more organizational actors, qualitatively new types of actors, and the expansion of IOs’ policy portfolios. Today, most international governmental organizations are not only fora of national governments and bureaucratic units, but include transnational civil-society representatives, national parliamentarians, international judicial actors, for-profit business actors, and the like. What is more, these IOs have often been significantly expanding their international political work generating a plethora of interacting policies and mandates. The result is a nowadays more and more diverse formal as well as informal design and network within around IOs. As these developments have only been receiving limited scholarly attention, this panel assembles theoretical and empirical papers aiming to analyze dynamics of IOs’ organizational diversification. In doing so, the panel brings together papers theorizing macro dynamics of global IO diversification and testing propositions with new and original large-N data sets on designs of formal and informal IOs. In addition, papers employ comparative small-N case studies on UN-Organizations, WTO, IMF, OECD, and various G-Forums to trace causes and consequences of IO diversification.

Title	Details
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