When Can Intergovernmental Organisations Become Viable Actors?

Whether or not scholars perceive intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) as possessing genuine actorness is often given by their ontological assumptions. Yet, we observe major variation across IGOs in terms of their ability to act as independent actors. One can only suspect that the IGOs’ ability to develop autonomous actornesss is strongly influenced by how they are designed and how they work internally, as organizations. In this article, I present a conceptual and analytical framework that identifies the necessary conditions under which IGOs can become viable as governance schemes and hence under which they become viable as actors in international politics. The framework is built on insights from organizational cybernetics – a small field on the border between organizational theory and cybernetics, the general science of governance and regulation. In the organizational cybernetic perspective, the essential ingredient for the viability of governance systems is their ability to collect and process all relevant information. In this view, the problem of governance is one of sufficient information processing capacity of the governing bodies, in international politics primarily of IGOs. The key conceptual and analytical tool of organizational cybernetics is the so called viable systems model (VSM) which formally describes all the vital flows of information any governance system needs to possess in order to be able to effectively perform its regulatory functions and survive in a changing environment. This article outlines the VSM and discusses its applicability for the study of internal operations of IGOs. The model presented identifies a set of vital information flows in IGOs and points to the key functional requirements on their internal attributes. On a very general level, my discussion of VSM attempts to identify formally the conditions under which IGOs can become viable actors.