International cooperation has undergone a fundamental transformation in recent decades. While international organizations (IOs) were long the exclusive preserve of national governments, the past 20-30 years have witnessed a shift from interstate cooperation to more complex forms of governance, involving participation by transnational actors (TNAs), such as NGOs, social movements, philanthropic foundations, and multinational corporations. Increasingly, states and international organizations are engaging transnational actors as policy experts, service providers, compliance watchdogs and stakeholder representatives.
This development effectively spans all areas of global governance. International organizations with an historical record of no or limited access, such as the World Bank and the WTO, have gradually opened up to TNAs, while international organizations that already had a tradition of interaction, such as the UN and international environmental bodies, have become even more open. An absolute absence of TNA access to international organizations is today exceedingly rare, which testifies to the breadth of this transnational turn in global governance.
The purpose of this paper is to map and explain the diffusion of TNA access within and across IOs. Therefore, we build on a theoretical and methodological framework from the study of policy diffusion. Theoretically, we assess the explanatory power of three alternative mechanisms of diffusion: rational learning, as states and IO bureaucracies witness the functional benefits of involving TNAs; strategic mimicking, as states and IO bureaucracies copy participatory models perceived as legitimate in order to quell opposition and protest; and norm socialization, as states and IO bureaucracies adopt the appropriate design prescribed by a new participatory norm in global governance. Empirically, we draw on a novel data set on TNA access to 50 international organizations and over 300 sub-bodies over the time period 1950-2010, which makes it possible to identify the principal patterns and paths of diffusion in TNA access over time, across issue areas, and across stages of the policy process.
