The Informalization of Global Governance

This workshop will break new ground in the study of informal global governance—a research area that has recently attracted a significant amount of scholarly interest and generated a wave of new work. The academic debate points us into the direction that informal governance refers to the systematic influence of unwritten rules, shared expectations, or norms within the international system. It includes informal practices within formal international organizations (IOs), informal institutions, and a broad array of regulatory networks constituted by state and non-state actors. The first wave of research on the topic approached informal governance from a functionalist perspective and emphasized its efficiency advantages vis-à-vis formal agreements. More recent contributions focus on the political dimensions of informal governance. We build on this work to further develop the evolving research agenda on informal global governance. We do this by taking a political perspective on informal governance by emphasizing that actors that cooperate through informal arrangements typically pursue conflicting agendas, compete for scarce resources, and struggle for influence over policy-making, implementation and institution-building. The workshop we propose will break new ground in the study of informal global governance by focusing on the blind spots of the existing literature: 1) mechanisms of informal governance, 2) weak players in informal global governance, 3) informal interactions among IOs, and 4) informal governance outside IOs, including by non-state actors. We welcome papers that address one or more of these four main research areas as well as on related topics. Papers that combine innovative theoretical arguments with original empirical research are particularly welcome. Methodologically, contributions using comparative case study approaches, statistical analysis, and formal methods are equally welcome. We also value papers that examine the conceptual issues involved in the study of informal governance.