How Do Informal International Organisations Govern Over Time?

Scholars of international organisations (IO) have begun to shift from an exclusive focus on formal IOs to consider the range of informal IOs that populate the international landscape. Critically, some of these organisations, such as the G20, are now at the centre of global governance debates across multiple policy domains. Despite the prominence of these organisations, we know very little about how they govern, and how their governing arrangements evolve over time. This paper attempts to address this gap in our knowledge by setting out a framework for understanding how informal IOs, that have no formal treaty, govern. First, it proposes that informal IOs will select from three modes of informal governance – collaboration, experimentalist governance and orchestration – and that to varying degrees the choice of strategy will be conditioned by functional, domestic, structural and historical factors. Second, it suggests that positive feedback effects associated with each of these informal modes of governance will make switching to an alternative governance approach more difficult over time, even when the effectiveness of the existing approach is in question. Drawing on a unique dataset built from interviews with G20 officials, three pilot cases from the domains of climate change and energy are selected to probe the empirical plausibility of this framework: fossil fuel subsidies; International Energy Agency reform; and green finance. In each case the G20, a prominent informal IO, is the governor, and the cases vary across the three modes of informal governance identified.