TY  - JOUR
A1  - Heldt, Eugenia C.
A1  - Dörfler, Thomas
T1  - Orchestrating private investors for development
BT  - how the World Bank revitalizes
JF  - Regulation & governance
N2  - Confronted with a new wave of criticism on the in effectiveness of its development programs, the World Bank embarked on a revitalization process, turning to private investors to finance International Development Association projects and widening its mandate. To explain these adaptation strategies of the World Bank to regain relevance, this piece draws on organizational ecology and orchestration scholarship. We contend that international organizations rely on two adaptation mechanisms, orchestration and scope expansion, when they lose their role as focal actors in an issue area. We find that the World Bank has indeed lost market share and has relied on these two mechanisms to revitalize itself. We show that the World Bank responded to changes in the environment by orchestrating a private sector-oriented capital increase, prioritizing private funding for development through a “cascade approach,” and expanding the scope of its mandate into adjacent domains of transnational governance, including climate change and global health.
KW  - development
KW  - orchestration
KW  - organizational ecology
KW  - private investors
KW  - World Bank
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12432
SN  - 1748-5983
VL  - 16
IS  - 4
SP  - 1382
EP  - 1398
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken, NJ
ER  - 
TY  - RPRT
A1  - Dörfler, Thomas
ED  - Lohmann, Sascha
ED  - Vorrath, Judith
T1  - Interface challenges of UN sanctions with forums of export control
BT  - towards cohesion and consistency in non-proliferation sanctions?
T2  - International sanctions: improving implementation through better interface management
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/arbeitspapiere/WP_International_Sanctions.pdf
SP  - 23
EP  - 31
PB  - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dörfler, Thomas
A1  - Gehring, Thomas
T1  - Analogy-based collective decision-making and incremental change in international organizations
JF  - European journal of international relations
N2  - We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120987889
SN  - 1354-0661
SN  - 1460-3713
VL  - 27
IS  - 3
SP  - 753
EP  - 778
PB  - Sage
CY  - London
ER  -