Collaboration among Intergovernmental Organizations

Global governance structures are increasingly described as highly complex, fragmented, and polycentric. In many issue areas, the creation, design, and effectiveness of different types of global governance institutions are fundamentally shaped by how these institutions interact with other institutions operating in their domain. Despite this increasing importance of inter-institutional interactions for the life of individual global governance institutions, we still know little about how different institutions are interconnected and what factors help to explain variation in patterns of interactions. In this paper, I contribute to closing this research gap. Based on a new dataset of 55 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) between 2009 and 2020 and a typology of inter-institutional collaboration that identifies different types of cooperative interactions among IGOs (e.g. information sharing, co-financing, and partnerships), I map inter-institutional collaboration across issue areas and over time. I also begin to theorize factors that may help to explain the observed variation in inter-institutional collaboration among IGOs. I use statistical analysis to explore the empirical implications of my theoretical discussion. My paper contributes to research on inter-institutional cooperation in global governance, orchestration, and regime complexity.