How Bureaucratic are Global Networks? Complex Publicness in International Organizations

Beyond international regimes, regime complexes, clusters of IOs, and in comparison with them, networks of international organizations spare socialization costs and transaction costs altogether. However, new costs may rise from the need to maintain network sustainability. Although cooperation is now enduring and works across sectors there is still some need to coordinate activities. Such “coordination costs” may plague governance. Thanks to an advanced architecture and a sophisticated decision-making design, networks are theoretically much less bureaucratic than clusters, with no political power required to arbiter between conflicting views. Within them NGOs play their part on a quasi-equal footing with IGOs. These two facts seem to point out a “privatization turn”. But is this conjecture correct? Alternatively, when a fairly shared power is limited to a minimum, and when agreement on goals is fully achieved, what gives a public identity to a network is its concern for the guarantee of provision and fair distribution of global public goods. Hence “publicness” no longer stems from the status of the units that belong to the network, i.e. their genesis in the past: it now comes from their common goals in the future since new stakes are high enough to involve humanity in the long run. The combination of statutory publicness (or administrators-directed) and functional publicness (or end users-oriented) is what the paper calls “complex publicness”. Although it varies from one network to the next depending on the proportion of bureaucrats at top levels of decision-making as well as the ratio of “privateness” in their operations, all networks share common characteristics. They rely on a quasi mechanical mutual adjustment ­– rules are embodied to such an extent that the number of agents required to elaborate, interpret, and enforce them is reduced; they are contractual rather than institutional; finally, they are monitored by economic agents, environmentalists or humanitarian activists as much as they are ruled by an administrative staff.