21st Century International Organizations: Power, Politics, and Policy-Making

This Section addresses various aspects of the design, decision-making, effectiveness, resilience, and legitimacy of international organizations (IOs) in the early 21st century. Panels cover IOs that seek to address cooperation problems in diverse policy areas, such as environment, health, security, development, and financial stability. Contributions focus on formal as well as informal IOs. The Section embraces theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical diversity to reflect the depth and breadth of research on international cooperation and IOs. It promotes dialogue among all disciplines that study IOs, including (but not limited to) international relations, international political economy, public administration, organizational aociology, and global public policy. Panel 1: Institutional Innovations in Global Governance Chairs: Benjamin Faude (Newcastle University), Kenneth W. Abbott (Arizona State University) Global governance has recently confronted numerous crises, from the Global Financial Crisis to Covid-19. The immediate threats inherent in crisis situations frequently induce governance innovations, such as the multi-stakeholder COVAX initiative for Covid-19 vaccines. However, crisis innovations often fail to achieve their goals. Against this backdrop, this Panel aims to undertake a systematic analysis of how and with what effects crises prompt governance innovations. The Panel puts particular emphasis on how institutional diversity ꟷ the presence of various types of formal and informal institutions ꟷ affects the frequency, form, effectiveness, and longevity of crisis-fuelled governance innovations. Panel 2: The Legitimacy of Global Governance: Theory, Ethics, And Empirics Chair: Farsan Ghassim (University of Oxford) Is global governance legitimate? Scholars traditionally distinguish between the concepts of normative and empirical/sociological legitimacy. The former refers to a purported objective legitimacy based on normative standards pertaining to democracy, equity, or effectiveness, for example. The latter concept relates to subjective legitimacy based on perceptions by the subjects of governance; for example, citizens. This Panel aims to bring these two perspectives together to stimulate fruitful debates between political theorists and empirical social scientists. By promoting dialogue between scholars from different disciplines and subfields, the Panel aims to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration on a much-debated and important topic in contemporary world politics. Panel 3: Going On-GRID: Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development and International Organizations Chairs: Bernhard Reinsberg (University of Glasgow), Saliha Metinsoy (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Many international organizations, especially International Financial Institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have started to embrace issues like climate change, disaster reduction, gender, and inequality in their day-to-day operations, even when those issues are beyond their core mandate, and have been neglected for decades. This Panel invites Papers that speak to the causes and effects of this recent policy change in international organizations. It also seeks Papers that analyse the causes and effects of their historical neglect of such issues. Panel Chairs welcome in particular contributions of new data, and seek to ensure methodological plurality. Panel 4: The Far Right and International Organizations Chairs: Lisbeth Zimmermann (Goethe University Frankfurt), Alexandros Tokhi (Goethe University Frankfurt) In recent years, a plethora of right-wing governments, populist opposition parties, and transnational coalitions of ultra-conservatives have put pressure on the validity and applicability of global norms and rules in world politics – often with unexpected success. There is an ongoing debate about the type of challenges, the strategies and instruments challengers employ to politicize global norms and their eventual effect on international institutions. This Panel sheds light on these questions by focusing on the Far Right and its contestation of international organizations. The Panel is open to Papers from all fields of political science that investigate the Far Right. Panel Chairs invite contributions from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, and from researchers at different career stages. Panel 5: Administrative Politics of IOs: Agency, Influence and Policymaking Behind the Scenes Chairs: Hannah Davies (Ulster University), Katja Hemmerich (University of St. Gallen) The ability of international organizations to address cooperation problems depends on the financial and human resources allocated to them. Key decisions like the allocation of resources, staff appointments, and the execution of programs usually arise from contested administrative politics, whereby complex principal and agent dynamics frequently result in incoherence and frustration for principals and agents. Such contestation can also be internal to an international bureaucracy. This Panel brings together academics and practitioners in conversation to highlight how the practice of administrative politics can influence or undermine policymaking and implementation by international organizations. Panel 6: Advancing Text-as-Data Analysis of International Organizations Chair: Michal Parízek (Charles University) Two major forces are reshaping text-as-data research of International Organizations (IOs). One is the volume of relevant text that is readily accessible for IO-focused analysis. The second is the unprecedented expansion of the set of high-powered text-analytical tools. This includes – but is not limited to – large embeddings-based language models, such as BERT, and various Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This Panel brings together contributions that use text-as-data techniques to study how IOs are talked about (e.g., in policy-relevant documents, in traditional and social media, by political leaders), what IOs say (their textual output), and other related important questions. Panel 7: Formal International Organizations beyond the COW Chairs: Alexandra Bögner (University of Salzburg), Markus Gastinger (University of Salzburg) The Correlates of War (COW) dataset has long set the boundaries for IO research. Since the 21st century, scholars have been pushing the envelope of what is considered an IO. In this Panel, we focus on formal IOs not included in the COW and which have only recently entered the fray of IO research, such as emanations or joint bodies (IOs without independent secretariats and set up in all policy areas). Panel 8: Decision-making in International Organizations Chairs: Kseniya Oksamytna (City, University of London and King’s College London), Mirko Heinzel (University of Glasgow and LSE) Research on international organizations (IOs) has gone beyond conceptualizing their decisions as based on the preferences of (powerful) member states. Instead, scholarship has increasingly highlighted that IO decisions are taken by diverse coalitions of actors with varying preferences, roles and capabilities. Member states, bureaucrats, non-state actors and other stakeholders vie for influence on their decisions. This Panel brings together diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives on the causes and consequences of IO decision-making.