Orchestrating Transnational Governance? Inter-institutional Interactions among Intergovernmental Organisations and Transnational Public-Private Governance Initiatives

Global governance structures are increasingly described as complex, interconnected, and polycentric. In fact, in many issue areas, it is now the interplay with others which shape the average global governance institution’s (GGI) creation, design and effectiveness. Despite the growing relevance of said interactions, we still know little about the nature of institutional interconnectedness and the factors which help explain variation in patterns of interactions. The few existing studies either focus on particular issue areas or pairs of organisations. We begin to fill this gap. Based on a new dataset of 55 intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and 55 transnational public-private governance initiatives (TGIs) between 2009 and 2020, and a typology of inter-institutional interplay, we map GGI cooperation across issue areas and over time. We also develop a theoretical argument for variation in inter-institutional cooperation. Drawing on orchestration theory and works on inter-organisational relations, we argue that IGOs and TGIs cooperate when another organisation’s mandate is complementary to their own. Additionally, IGOs also consider institutional flexibility when deciding to cooperate with TGIs. We use statistical analysis to explore the empirical implications of our argument. As such, our paper contributes to research on inter-institutional cooperation in global governance, orchestration, and regime complexity.