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The liberal international order is being challenged and international organizations (IOs) are a main target of contestation. COVID-19 seems to exacerbate the situation with many states pursuing domestic strategies at the expense of multilateral cooperation. At the same time, IOs have traditionally benefited from cross-border crises. This article analyzes the policy responses of IOs to the exogenous COVID-19 shock by asking why some IOs use this crisis as an opportunity to expand their scope and policy instruments? It provides a cross-sectional analysis using original data on the responses of 75 IOs to COVID-19 during the first wave between March and June 2020. It finds that the bureaucratic capacity of IOs is significant when it comes to using the crisis as an opportunity. It also finds some evidence that the number of COVID-19 cases among the member states affects policy responses and that general purpose IOs have benefited more.
Many international organisations (IOs) are currently challenged, yet are they also in decline? Despite much debate on the crisis of liberal international order, con-testation, loss of legitimacy, gridlock, pathologies and exiting member states, there is little research on IO decline. This article seeks to clarify this concept and argues that decline can be considered in absolute and relative terms. Absolute decline involves a decrease in the number of IOs and their authority, member-ship and output, whereas relative decline concerns a decrease in the centrality of IOs in international relations. Reviewing a wide range of indicators, this article argues that, whereas there is limited decline in absolute terms since 1945, there may well be important decline in relative terms. Relative decline is more difficult to measure, but to probe its significance this article presents data from speeches during the United Nations General Assembly General Debate. It shows that IOs were most often mentioned in 1996 and that there has been a decline since. These findings indicate that, whereas IOs might survive as institutions, they are decreasingly central to international relations.
Major international organizations (IOs) are heavily contested, but they are rarely dissolved. Scholars have focused on their longevity, making institutional arguments about replacement costs and institutional assets as well as IO agency to adapt and resist challenges. This article analyzes the limits of institutional stickiness by focusing on outlier cases. While major IOs are dissolved at considerably lower rates than minor IOs, the article nevertheless identifies twenty-one cases where major IOs have died since 1815. These are tough cases as they do not conform to our institutionalist expectations. To better understand these rare but important events, the article provides case illustrations from the League of Nations and International Refugee Organization, which were dissolved due to their perceived underperformance and a disappearing demand for cooperation. These cases show the limits of the institutional theories of IO stickiness: sometimes member states find high replacement costs justified or consider assets as sunk costs, and IOs may lack agency to strategically respond. This article refines theories of institutional stickiness and contributes to the institutional theory of the life and death of IOs.
Les principales organisations internationales (OI) sont fortement contestées, mais rarement dissoutes. Pour expliquer leur longévité, les chercheurs ont avancé des arguments institutionnels concernant les coûts de remplacement et les actifs de l'institution, mais aussi la capacité des OI à s'adapter et à résister aux défis. Cet article analyse les limites de la persistance des institutions en se concentrant sur des cas particuliers. Tandis que les principales OI sont dissoutes bien moins fréquemment que des OI moins importantes, cet article identifie néanmoins 21 cas de disparition d'OI principales depuis 1815. Ces derniers sont particulièrement difficiles, car ils ne correspondent pas à nos attentes en termes d'institutions. Afin de mieux comprendre ces événements rares, mais non moins importants, l'article propose comme illustrations de cas la Société des Nations et l'Organisation internationale pour les réfugiés, qui ont été dissoutes à cause de leur manque apparent de résultats et de la disparition de la demande de coopération. Ces cas mettent en évidence les limites des théories institutionnelles de persistance des OI : parfois, les États membres considèrent les coûts de remplacement élevés justifiés ou les actifs comme des coûts irrécupérables, et les OI n'ont peut-être pas la capacité de leur répondre de manière stratégique. Le présent article affine les théories de persistance institutionnelle et contribue à la théorie institutionnelle de vie et de mort des OI.
Las organizaciones internacionales (OI) más importantes son muy cuestionadas, pero rara vez se disuelven. Los investigadores se han centrado en la longevidad de las IO, formulando argumentos institucionales sobre los costes de sustitución y los activos institucionales, así como sobre la capacidad de adaptación y resistencia de las organizaciones internacionales. Este artículo analiza los límites de la rigidez institucional centrándose en casos atípicos. Aunque las OI más importantes se disuelven en proporciones considerablemente menores que las OI de menor importancia, el artículo identifica 21 casos en los que OI más importantes desaparecieron desde 1815. Se trata de casos difíciles, ya que no se ajustan a nuestras expectativas institucionalistas. Para comprender mejor estos raros pero importantes acontecimientos, el artículo ofrece ejemplos de casos de la Sociedad de Naciones y de la, Organización Internacional para los Refugiados que se disolvieron debido a su bajo desempeño percibido y a la desaparición de la demanda de cooperación. Estos casos muestran los límites de las teorías institucionales sobre la rigidez de las OI: En ocasiones, los Estados miembros consideran justificados los elevados costes de sustitución o consideran que los activos son costes irrecuperables, y las OI pueden no disponer de capacidad de respuesta estratégica. Este artículo profundiza en las teorías de la rigidez institucional y contribuye a la teoría institucional de la vida y la muerte de las organizaciones internacionales.
Governance abhors a vacuum
(2023)
International organisations have become increasingly contested resulting in worries about their decline and termination. While international organisation termination is indeed a regular event in international relations, this article shows that other institutions carry the legacy of terminated international organisations. We develop the novel concept of international organisation afterlife and suggest indicators to systematically assess it. Our analysis of 26 major terminated international organisations reveals legal-institutional and asset continuity in 21 cases. To further illustrate this point, the article zooms in on the afterlife of the International Institute of Agriculture in the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Refugee Organization in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Western European Union in the European Union. In these three cases, international organisation afterlife inspired and structured the design of their successor institutions. While specific international organisations might be terminated, international cooperation therefore often lives on in other institutions.
The limitations and possibilities of the state in solving societal problems are perennial issues in the political and policy sciences and increasingly so in studies of environmental politics. With the aim of better understanding the role of the state in addressing environmental degradation through policy making, this article investigates the nexus between the environmental policy outputs and the environmental performance. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives on the state and market nexus in the environmental dilemma, we identify five distinct pathways. We then examine the extent to which these pathways are manifested in the real world. Our empirical investigation covers up to 37 countries for the period 1970–2010. While we see no global pattern of linkages between policy outputs and performance, our exploratory analysis finds evidence of policy effects, which suggest that the state can, under certain circumstances, improve the environment through policy making.
Sanctions are critical to the Security Council's efforts to fight terrorism. What is striking is that the Council's sanctions regimes are subject to detailed sets of rules and decision criteria. The scholarship on human rights in counterterrorism assumes that rights advocacy and court litigation have prompted this development. The article complements this literature by highlighting an unexplored internal driver of legal-regulatory decision-making and explores how mixed-motive interest constellations among Security Council members have affected the extent of committee regulations and the content of decisions taken by sanctions committees. Based on internal documents and diplomatic cables, a comparative analysis of the Iraq sanctions regime and the counterterrorism sanctions regime demonstrates that mixed-motive interest constellations among Security Council members provide incentives to elaborate rules to guide decision-making resulting in legal-regulatory sanctions governance, even if the human rights of targeted individuals are not at stake. For comparative leverage and to assess the limits of the proposed mechanism, the analysis is briefly extended to other sanctions regimes targeting individuals (Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan). The findings have implications for this essential tool of the Security Council to react to threats to peace as diverse as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, and internal armed conflict.
The article explores whether and to what extent expert recommendations affect decision-making within the Security Council and its North Korea and Iran sanctions regimes. The article first develops a rationalist theoretical argument to show why making many second-stage decisions, such as determining lists of items under export restrictions, subjects Security Council members to repeating coordination situations. Expert recommendations may provide focal point solutions to coordination problems, even when interests diverge and preferences remain stable. Empirically, the article first explores whether expert recommendations affected decision-making on commodity sanctions imposed on North Korea. Council members heavily relied on recommended export trigger lists as focal points, solving a divisive conflict among great powers. Second, the article explores whether expert recommendations affected the designation of sanctions violators in the Iran sanctions regime. Council members designated individuals and entities following expert recommendations as focal points, despite conflicting interests among great powers. The article concludes that expert recommendations are an additional means of influence in Security Council decision-making and seem relevant for second-stage decision-making among great powers in other international organisations.
Analogy-based collective decision-making and incremental change in international organizations
(2021)
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.
Greening global governance
(2022)
The last decades have seen a remarkable expansion in the number of International Organizations (IOs) that have mainstreamed environmental issues into their policy scope—in many cases due to the pressure of civil society. We hypothesize that International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are in proximity to the headquarters of IOs, are more likely to affect IOs' expansion into the environmental domain. We test this explanation by utilizing a novel dataset on the strength of environmental global civil society in proximity to the headquarters of 76 IOs between 1950 and 2017. Three findings stand out. First, the more environmental INGOs have their secretariat in proximity to the headquarter of an IO, the more likely the IO mainstreams environmental policy. Second, proximate INGOs’ contribution increases when they can rely on domestically focused NGOs in member states. Third, a pathway case reveals that proximate INGOs played an essential role in inside lobbying, outside lobbying and information provision during the campaign to mainstream environmental issues at the World Bank. However, their efforts relied to a substantial extent on the work of local NGOs on the ground.
Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.
Territorial reform is the most radical and contested reorganisation of local government. A sound evaluation of the outcome of such reforms is hence an important step to ensure the legitimation of any decision on the subject. However, in our view the discourse on the subject appears to be one sided, focusing primarily on overall fiscal effects scrutinised by economists. The contribution of this paper is hence threefold: Firstly, we provide an overview off territorial reforms in Europe, with a special focus on Eastern Germany as a promising case for cross-country comparisons. Secondly, we provide an overview of the analytical classifications of these reforms and context factors to be considered in their evaluation. And thirdly, we analyse the literature on qualitative performance effects of these reforms. The results show that territorial reforms have a significant positive impact on functional performance, while the effects on participation and integration are indeed ambivalent. In doing so, we provide substantial arguments for a broader, more inclusive discussion on the success of territorial reforms.
South Africa’s energy sector finds itself in a gridlock situation. The sector is controlled by the state-owned utility Eskom holding the monopoly on the generation and transmission of electricity, which is almost exclusively produced from domestically extracted coal. At the same time, the constitutional mandate enables municipalities to distribute and sell electricity generated by Eskom to local consumers, which constitutes a large part of the cities’ municipal income. This is a strong disincentive for city governments to promote reductions in energy consumption and substantially limits the scope for urban action on energy efficiency and renewable energies. In the present case study, we portray the current development in South Africa’s energy policy and trace how deadlocked legal, financial, and institutional barriers block the transition from a coal-based energy system toward a greener and more sustainable energy economy. We furthermore point to the efforts of major South African cities to introduce low-carbon strategies in their jurisdictions and highlight key challenges for the future development of the country’s energy sector. By engaging with this case study, readers will become familiar with a prime example of the wider phenomenon of national political–economic obstacles to the progress in sustainable urban development.
A growing number of expert organizations aim to provide knowledge for global environmental policy-making. Recently, there have also been explicit calls for stakeholder engagement at the global level to make scientific knowledge relevant and usable on the ground. The newly established Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is one of the first international expert organizations to have systematically developed a strategy for stakeholder engagement in its own right. In this article, we analyze the emergence of this strategy. Employing the concept politics of legitimation, we examine how and for what reasons stakeholder engagement was introduced, justified, and finally endorsed, as well as its effects. The article explores the process of institutionalizing stakeholder engagement, as well as reconstructing the contestation of the operative norms (membership, tasks, and accountability) regulating the rules for this engagement. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of the findings for IPBES, as well as for international expert organizations in general.
Motivation: Corruption is often cited as a central reason why development projects fail. The article tests this claim by assessing whether World Bank projects perform worse in implementation environments with a higher corruption level. The article focuses specifically on bribery between public officials and firms during the procurement of needed goods and services. Approach and Methods: I use data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys to avoid the often-criticized corruption perception indices and to allow for an assessment of effects at the subnational level. The analysis builds on an assessment of the performance ratings of 1,228 World Bank projects and covers 87 different countries. Finding: Overall, the article finds a small but statistically significant correlation between the corruption level and project performance. This result indicates that the corruption level of recipient countries should be considered during the design and implementation of projects. Policy Implications: Nonetheless, the relatively small correlation and the low pseudo R-squareds advise not overestimating the relevance of corruption for project performance. At least for the project level, the article finds no indication that corruption is a primary obstacle to aid effectiveness.
The digitalization of public administration is increasingly moving forward. This systematic literature review analyzes empirical studies that explore the impacts of digitalization projects (n=93) in the public sector. Bibliometrically, only a few authors have published several times on this topic so far. Most studies focusing on impact come from the US or China, and are related to Computer Science. In terms of content, the majority of examined articles studies services to citizens, and therefore consider them when measuring impact. A classification of the investigated effects by dimensions of public value shows that the analysis of utilitarian-instrumental values, such as efficiency or performance, is prevalent. More interdisciplinary cooperation is needed to research the impact of digitalization in the public sector. The different dimensions of impact should be linked more closely. In addition, research should focus more on the effects of digitalization within administration.
Introduction
(2020)
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the complex process of the criminalisation of squatting alongside and beyond its juridical apparatuses. It provides insights into the ways in which the substance of social citizenship has been rapidly and significantly weakened, so that life has become much more precarious for low-income urbanites as well as large parts of the middle-class. The book reconstructs the history of Berlin’s tenant referendum, which induced the passing of a new local Housing Provision Act—one of the most progressive pieces of housing legislation in Germany. It investigates the modes of doing citizenship and social rights in practice, which characterised the creation of Berlin’s Medibüro, a network of medical offices, where medical activists provide free medical services to residents lacking access to the medical insurance system, especially to illegal migrants. The book concludes by providing a brief outlook on future research on urban citizenship.
The reorganization of governments is crucial for parties to express their policy preferences once they reach office. Yet these activities are not confined to the direct aftermath of general elections or to wide-ranging structural reforms. Instead, governments reorganize and adjust their machinery of government all the time. This paper aims to assess these structural choices with a particular focus at the core of the state, comparing four Western European democracies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom) from 1980 to 2013. Our empirical analysis shows that stronger shifts in cabinets' ideological profiles in the short- and long-term as well as the units' proximity to political executives yield significant effects. In contrast, Conservative governments, commonly regarded as key promoters of reorganizing governments, are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. We discuss the effects of this politics of government reorganization for different research debates assessing the inner workings of governments.
Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerialunits in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets’ ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for futureresearch that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.
Recent debates in international relations increasingly focus on bureaucratic apparatuses of international organizations and highlight their role, influence, and autonomy in global public policy. In this contribution we follow the recent call made by Moloney and Rosenbloom in this journal to make use of “public administrative theory and empirically based knowledge in analyzing the behavior of international and regional organizations” and offer a systematic analysis of the inner structures of these administrative bodies. Changes in these structures can reflect both the (re-)assignment of responsibilities, competencies, and expertise, but also the (re)allocation of resources, staff, and corresponding signalling of priorities. Based on organizational charts, we study structural changes within 46 international bureaucracies in the UN system. Tracing formal changes to all internal units over two decades, this contribution provides the first longitudinal assessment of structural change at the international level. We demonstrate that the inner structures of international bureaucracies in the UN system became more fragmented over time but also experienced considerable volatility with periods of structural growth and retrenchment. The analysis also suggests that IO's political features yield stronger explanatory power for explaining these structural changes than bureaucratic determinants. We conclude that the politics of structural change in international bureaucracies is a missing piece in the current debate on international public administrations that complements existing research perspectives by reiterating the importance of the political context of international bureaucracies as actors in global governance.
The recently adopted German Online Access Act triggered the creation of digitalization labs for designing digital services, bringing together federal, state, and local authorities; end-users; and private-sector actors. These labs provide opportunities for boundary spanning due to organizational field and lab features. Our comparative case studies on three digitalization labs show variations in boundary spanning and reveal lab members de-coupling from their parent organizations to a varying extent. We have concluded labs offer boundary spanning that supports safeguarding the legitimacy of innovative policy designs but also raise concerns over public accountability.
Governments engage in corporatization by creating corporate entities or reorganizing existing ones. These corporatization activities reflect an interplay between political agency and environmental pressures, including (changing) notions of state-market relations. This paper discusses two ideal-typed organizational models of corporatization: the state as a marketizer and the marketization of the state. Whereas the first emphasizes the role of political design and agency in corporatization, the second emphasizes the role of (actors in) the environment for corporatization. Both models are assessed across five corporatization episodes in Norway and Sweden, where we also demonstrate the interplay between political agency and environmental pressure.
In recent years, governments have increased their efforts to strengthen the citizen-orientation in policy design. They have established temporary arenas as well as permanent units inside the machinery of government to integrate citizens into policy formulation, leading to a “laboratorization” of central government organizations. We argue that the evolution and role of these units herald new dynamics in the importance of organizational reputation for executive politics. These actors deviate from the classic palette of organizational units inside the machinery of government and thus require their own reputation vis-à-vis various audiences within and outside their parent organization. Based on a comparative case study of two of these units inside the German federal bureaucracy, we show how ambiguous expectations of their audiences challenge their organizational reputation. Both units resolve these tensions by balancing their weaker professional and procedural reputation with a stronger performative and moral reputation. We conclude that government units aiming to improve citizen orientation in policy design may benefit from engaging with citizens as their external audience to compensate for a weaker reputation in the eyes of their audiences inside the government organization. Points for practitioners: many governments have introduced novel means to strengthen citizen-centered policy design, which has led to an emergence of novel units inside central government that differ from traditional bureaucratic structures and procedures ; this study analyzes how these new units may build their organizational reputation vis-à-vis internal and external actors in government policymaking. ; we show that such units assert themselves primarily based on their performative and moral reputation.
Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers “digital overload” that decreases government employees’ job satisfaction via inhibiting their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees’ freedom to decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly, job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of ICT-use in the public sector.
Creativity is a crucial part of policy capacity in governments. Existing studies on creative behavior in the public sector assess employees' openness to new ideas and creative solutions, and they confirm the relevance of organizational and individual determinants for pro-creativity attitudes. Yet we lack systemic evidence on the explicit level of work-related creativity among policy officials in government organizations. At the same time, novel technologies and particularly social networking services change the working environment of policy officials radically, alter organizational features, and may also yield crucial individual effects. Our study analyses “policy creativity” of policy officials in three European governments. We demonstrate the importance of organizational and individual features, including the stress triggered by using social networking services. Our study captures officials' creativity explicitly and adds to debates on creativity and innovation in the public sector as well as the micro-level foundations of the digital transformation in the public sector.
Reacting, fast and slow
(2021)
The COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary challenges for governments to safeguard the well-being of their people. To what extent has leaders' reliance on scientific advice shaped government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak? We argue that leaders who tend to orient themselves on expert advice realized the extent of the crisis earlier. Consequently, these governments would adopt containment measures relatively quickly, despite the high uncertainty they faced. Over time, differences in government responses based on the use of science would dissipate due to herding effects. We test our argument on data combining 163 government responses to the pandemic with national- and individual-level characteristics. Consistent with our argument, we find that countries governed by politicians with a stronger technocratic mentality, approximated by holding a PhD, adopted restrictive containment measures faster in the early, but not in the later, stages of the crisis. This importance of expert-based leadership plausibly extends to other large-scale societal crises.
The chapter begins with a brief historical overview of Germany’s transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century from a transit and emigration country to one of immigration. The next part of this chapter looks at the challenges and problems facing German immigration policy within a multi-level federal system. Finally, the chapter gives an analysis of some of the trends in German migration policy since the refugee crisis in 2015, such as changes in the party system and in the concepts underlying migration policies to better manage, control and limit immigration to Germany.
This chapter focuses on the relationship between public opinion on migration and its media coverage. Different explanatory models, including individual characteristics, cultural factors and the impact of media and politics, have been proposed to explain public attitudes towards migrants. Understanding the local context is important, as the shares of migrants living in each region and city vary considerably. Providing correct statistical information, stressing the diversity of current migration patterns in Europe and taking part in media and public discussions are ways in which to impact public attitudes at the local level.
In this introductory chapter, the editors describe the main theoretical basis of analysis of this book and the methodological approach. The core of this book consists of 14 country-specific chapters, which allow a European comparison and show the increasing variance in migration policy approaches within and between European countries. The degree of local autonomy, the level of centralisation and the traditional forms of migration policy are factors that especially influence the possibilities for local authorities to formulate their own integration policies.
As expected, the traditions of national-state migration policies continue to play a very important role, path-dependence in this policy field remains high. The distribution of competences in migration policy and the integration of migrants in the nation states continues to be very different. When implementing integration strategies at grassroots level, the respective policies should be tailored to the profile of both the local migrant community and the native population. Besides better migration management in local administration and the interaction of top-down and bottom-up efforts to integrate migrants is of importance.
Beyond Charter and Index
(2021)
The Chapter examines the concept of local autonomy in modern European states by analysing theoretical approaches. The classical, deductive approach defines local autonomy mostly through legal, economic and financial conditions, especially by formal structures. This proves to be too weak to define the internal strength of local authorities and their real political-administrative power. A more multidimensional definition of autonomy, including indicators as importance, capacity, as well as discretion and democracy at local level is needed. The authors utilise the indicators, used by the Local Autonomy Index (LAI) developed by Ladner et al. and the European Charter of Local Self-Government to find out what is still missing. The contribution redounds to stimulate the scientific debate on local autonomy in Europe. Until the concept of local autonomy will fit for all European states with extremely differentiated local authorities, the research in this field remains a conceptual and heuristic endeavour. Especially, because local government and democracy are until now territory-based, whereas the reality is one of multilevel and cross-border governance.
Gary Jacobsohn and Yaniv Roznai’s (2020) book Constitutional Revolution offers a sophisticated conceptual framework with a fascinating description of empirical occurrences of substantive revolutions in the practice and understanding of constitutionalism in Germany, India, Hungary, and Israel. While the conceptualization in the book and its empirical illustration clearly draw from regime transformations or substantive changes within democratic regimes, we know little about the extent to which substantive constitutional reforms are possible and meaningful in autocratic regimes. As their concept of constitutional revolution is ambiguous and requires a substantive engagement with an individual case at hand, we cannot sim- ply expect concept equivalence when expanding its use beyond a transitory or democratic context. Hence, in this contribution I ask, What constitutes a constitutional revolution in an autocratic regime? To shed light on this question, I rely on the expectation that we do not find important differences in the substance of autocratic constitutions compared to democratic constitutions. Autocratic elites, also, under- stand the possibilities of constitutional change and respond to them as they offer regime stability and simply more power, but that is not a revolution. Therefore, I argue that the substantive meaning of an amendment must be a departure from the inherent logic of the constitution, especially outside the standard procedures for autocratic ruling. Thus, in this paper I discuss the theoretical implications of a constitutional revolution under autocracy without a regime transition and provide empirical evidence from various constitutional amendments and de facto reforms in Russia. I show that a constitutional revolution is not always the most important or most discussed constitutional change—at least, not in an autocratic context. This discussion has important implications for understanding constitutionalism and autocratic stability and the largely overlooked relationship between substance and process in nondemocratic settings.
Majorities for minorities
(2022)
Does the process of making a constitution affect the expansiveness of rights protections in the constitution? In particular, is more participation in constitution-making processes better for minority rights protections? While the process of constitution making and its impact on various outcomes have received significant attention, little is known about the impact public participation or deliberation in this process has on the scope and content of minority rights. Using a wide variety of data to empirically assess the relationship between constitution-making processes and the protection of rights for minorities, we find a positive relationship between participatory drafting processes and the inclusion of minority protections in constitutions under some conditions. The article's findings have important implications for understanding political representation and lend support to core arguments about the role of the public in constitutional design.
Jointly with the Global North, the rise of the Global South has come at a high cost to the environment. Driven by its high energy intensity and the use of fossil fuels, the South has contributed a significant portion of global emissions during the last 30 years, and is now contributing some 63% of today's total GHG emissions (including land-use change and forestry). Similar to the Global North, the Global South's emissions are heavily concentrated: India and China alone account for some 60% and the top 10 countries for some 78% of the group's emissions, while some 120 countries account for only 22%. Without highlighting such differences, it makes little sense to use the term 'Global South'. Its members are affected differently, and contribute differently to global climate change. They neither share a common view, nor do they pursue joint interests when it comes to international climate negotiations. Instead, they are organised into more than a dozen subgroups of the global climate regime. There is no single climate strategy for the Global South, and climate action will differ enormously from country to country. Furthermore, just and equitable transitions may be particularly challenging for some countries.
Despite geopolitics play a pivotal role in the energy sector, geopolitical aspects are often not considered in the quantitative assessment models aimed at supporting the energy investment decision-making process. To address this issue, this work proposes an Extended Multi-regional Input-Output model (EMRIO) that incorporates import dependence and governance along the value chain. As case study, two alternative energy investments in Mexico – a Natural Gas Power plant (NG) and a Concentrated Solar Power plant (CSP) – are assessed. The method quantifies the geographical diversification of suppliers and the quality of governance. The assessment of the case study shows that the supply chain of the CSP plant includes more countries and with better governance levels than the supply chain of the NG power plant. That means, a priori, that the supply risks of investing in CSP power plants will be lower, as will suppliers' endogenous geopolitical risk. However, a sensitivity analysis considering different providers of the solar plant components reveals that CSP plant value chain could also entail similar or even higher governance risks levels as the NG plant. The scenario where China provides some of the components entails a much higher governance risks, even higher than the NG base case. In consequence, we have proved that the method proposed allows the identification of hidden geopolitical risks that would otherwise go unnoticed. This paper enlarges the existing knowledge on assessment methodologies for energy policy decision-support by measuring diversification and imports dependence from countries with different levels of governance along the whole value chain.
This article responds to critical reflections on my Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism by Sarah Birch, Kevin J. Elliott, Claudia Landwehr and James L. Wilson. It discusses how different types of representative democracy, especially different forms of government (presidential, parliamentary or hybrid), can be justified. It clarifies, among other things, the distinction between procedural and process equality, the strengths of semi-parliamentary government, the potential instability of constitutional designs, and the difference that theories can make in actual processes of constitutional reform.
Arend Lijphart uses an average of five standardized variables – the executive-parties dimension (EPD) – to describe patterns of democracy and explain differences in democracies’ performance. The article suggests ways to improve the descriptive part of the project. It argues that the EPD maps different approaches to achieving accountability and representation, rather than differences in consensus. This re-conceptualization leads to a more coherent and valid measurement. It is also argued that more systematic adjustments are needed for differences in constitutional structures (presidentialism and bicameralism). The article presents data on a revised EPD and its components for 36 democracies in the period from 1981 to 2010. As to the explanatory part of the project, we contend that the EPD often hinders adequate causal analysis rather than facilitating it. We show this by re-analysing democracies’ performance with respect to turnout and capital punishment.
We examine how and under what conditions informal institutional constraints, such as precedent and doctrine, are likely to affect collective choice within international organisations even in the absence of powerful bureaucratic agents. With a particular focus on the United Nations Security Council, we first develop a theoretical account of why such informal constraints might affect collective decisions even of powerful and strategically behaving actors. We show that precedents provide focal points that allow adopting collective decisions in coordination situations despite diverging preferences. Reliance on previous cases creates tacitly evolving doctrine that may develop incrementally. Council decision-making is also likely to be facilitated by an institutional logic of escalation driven by institutional constraints following from the typically staged response to crisis situations. We explore the usefulness of our theoretical argument with evidence from the Council doctrine on terrorism that has evolved since 1985. The key decisions studied include the 1992 sanctions resolution against Libya and the 2001 Council response to the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that, even within intergovernmentally structured international organisations, member states do not operate on a clean slate, but in a highly institutionalised environment that shapes their opportunities for action.
Based upon the current debate on international practices with its focus on taken-for-granted everyday practices, we examine how Security Council practices may affect member state action and collective decisions on intrastate conflicts. We outline a concept that integrates the structuring effect of practices and their emergence from interaction among reflective actors. It promises to overcome the unresolved tension between understanding practices as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. We analyse the constitutive mechanisms of two Council practices that affect collective decisions on intrastate conflicts and elucidate how even reflective Council members become enmeshed with the constraining implications of evolving practices and their normative implications. (1) Previous Council decisions create precedent pressure and give rise to a virtually uncontested permissive Council practice that defines the purview for intervention into such conflicts. (2) A ratcheting practice forces opponents to choose between accepting steadily reinforced Council action, as occurred regarding Sudan/Darfur, and outright blockade, as in the case of Syria. We conclude that practices constitute a source of influence that is not captured by the traditional perspectives on Council activities as the consequence of geopolitical interests or of externally evolving international norms like the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P).
Activating norm collisions
(2020)
This article puts forward a constructivist-interpretivist approach to interface conflicts that emphasises how international actors articulate and problematise norm collisions in discursive and social interactions. Our approach is decidedly agency-oriented and follows the Special Issue’s interest in how interface conflicts play out at the micro-level. The article advances several theoretical and methodological propositions on how to identify norm collisions and the conditions under which they become the subject of international debate. Our argument on norm collisions, understood as situations in which actors perceive two norms as incompatible with each other, is threefold. First, we claim that agency matters to the analysis of the emergence, dynamics, management, and effects of norm collisions in international politics. Second, we propose to differentiate between dormant (subjectively perceived) and open norm collisions (intersubjectively shared). Third, we contend that the transition from dormant to open – which we term activation – depends on the existence of certain scope conditions concerning norm quality as well as changes in power structures and actor constellations. Empirically, we study norm collisions in the area of international drug control, presenting the field as one that contains several cases of dormant and open norm collisions, including those that constitute interface conflicts. For our in-depth analysis we have chosen the international discourse on coca leaf chewing. With this case, we not only seek to demonstrate the usefulness of our constructivist-interpretivist approach but also aim to explain under which conditions dormant norm collisions evolve into open collisions and even into interface conflicts.
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
This article draws lessons from experiences of developing the photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind power sectors in China for the development of Chinese Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) into an internationally competitive industry. We analyze the sectoral development with a framework that expands on the concept of lead markets, identifying factors that determine whether domestic industrial development paths may or may not generate export success. We find that the Chinese CSP sector has good potential for becoming internationally competitive because of a strong Chinese knowledge base, a clear eye for product quality, standard-setting, and a focus on the high-efficiency and large-storage technological routes most likely to see growing demand in future international markets. Chinese solar towers are already cheaper than international competitors and so far, appear reliable. However, continued and stable deployment support for CSP, designed to reward dispatchable solar power generation, enabling continued domestic learning-by-doing and -interacting is likely required to realize this export potential. To date, Chinese CSP policy has done many things right and, if the domestic market is maintained through renewed support, has put the Chinese industry well on the path to international competitiveness.
We analyse the potential for industry entry and catching up by latecomer countries or firms in formative sectors, by deriving a framework that builds on the concept of windows of opportunity for catching up. This framework highlights differences in technological, market, and institutional characteristics between formative and mature sectors, and elaborates how this may affect opportunities for catching up. We apply this framework to the global Concentrated Solar Power sector, in which China has rapidly narrowed the gap to the global forefront in terms of technological capabilities and market competitiveness. We find that the formative nature of the sector resulted in turbulent development of the technological, market, and institutional dimensions, making it more difficult for early leaders to retain leadership, and therefore easier for latecomer firms or countries to catch up. This signals an increased role in early-stage technology development in the next phase of the energy transition.
Better land stewardship is needed to achieve the Paris Agreement's temperature goal, particularly in the tropics, where greenhouse gas emissions from the destruction of ecosystems are largest, and where the potential for additional land carbon storage is greatest. As countries enhance their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, confusion persists about the potential contribution of better land stewardship to meeting the Agreement's goal to hold global warming below 2 degrees C. We assess cost-effective tropical country-level potential of natural climate solutions (NCS)-protection, improved management and restoration of ecosystems-to deliver climate mitigation linked with sustainable development goals (SDGs). We identify groups of countries with distinctive NCS portfolios, and we explore factors (governance, financial capacity) influencing the feasibility of unlocking national NCS potential. Cost-effective tropical NCS offers globally significant climate mitigation in the coming decades (6.56 Pg CO(2)e yr(-1) at less than 100 US$ per Mg CO(2)e). In half of the tropical countries, cost-effective NCS could mitigate over half of national emissions. In more than a quarter of tropical countries, cost-effective NCS potential is greater than national emissions. We identify countries where, with international financing and political will, NCS can cost-effectively deliver the majority of enhanced NDCs while transforming national economies and contributing to SDGs. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions'.
The idea for this book arose out of discontent with essentially three shortcomings in the recent literature on the present state of politics in Western democracies and on forms of collective action. The general message resulting from research in the political economy and in forms of democracy is disastrous. We are confronted with a mix of decline, fragmentation, individualization, diminishing trust in institutions hollowed out from the inside, the hoarding of power by small political and economic elites, and the increasing marginalization and pauperization of vast parts of the population. While the accuracy of these trends shall not be called into question, it is noteworthy, and this is the first shortcoming, to what extent that literature tends to neglect one crucial aspect, namely the capacity of those suffering most from the above malaise to coming together and searching for possibilities of collectively halting, reversing, or otherwise influencing decline in defence of their needs and interests. The second shortcoming concerns the literatures on precisely these actors, namely established trade union research and research on social movements. While both fields acknowledge the extent of the current crisis and have submitted numerous books and articles on how their respective research targets are reacting to it, the situation continues to remain one of indifference. There hardly is cross-fertilization beyond the boundaries of established research traditions. At the same time, empirical reality seems to suggest that forms of joint activity by both types of actors may have become more advanced than theoretical reflection is so far prepared to admit. As observed by Fantasia and Stepan-Norris (2004: 561) students of each of the two forms of collective action "(…) mutually neglect each other". At best, trade union researchers and social movement research envisage their counterpart in purely instrumental
Divided loyalties?
(2022)
Many operational International Organizations (IOs) rely on national staff when implementing projects in member states. However, fears persist that the loyalties of national IO staff may be divided when working in their home countries. The article studies differences in more than 50,000 procurement decisions taken in 1729 projects overseen by World Bank staff working as expatriates or in their home countries. The empirical results show that when staff work in their home countries, national suppliers' probability of winning procurement contracts increases. However, these increases are not driven by restricted procurement processes—that exclude competition—which are often seen as red flags for corruption. Instead, restricted procurement processes seem to be less likely when staff work in their home countries. These findings imply that national IO staff use their country-specific knowledge to increase the development effectiveness of procurement in line with the mandate of the World Bank.
Harmful side effects
(2022)
Governments have increasingly adopted laws restricting the activities of international non-governmental organizations INGOs within their borders. Such laws are often intended to curb the ability of critical INGOs to discover and communicate government failures and abuses to domestic and international audiences. They can also have the unintended effect of reducing the presence and activities of INGOs working on health issues, and depriving local health workers and organizations of access to resources, knowledge and other forms of support. This study assesses whether legislative restrictions on INGOs are associated with fewer health INGOs in a wide range of countries and with the ability of those countries to mitigate disability-adjusted life years lost because of twenty-one disease categories between 1993 and 2017. The findings indicate that restrictive legislation hampered efforts by civil society to lighten the global burden of disease and had adverse side effects on the health of citizens worldwide.