Tana Johnson

Institutional Design and Bureaucrats’ Impact on Political Control

Why do governmental institutions look as they do, and who controls them? International relations scholars often point to states. However, two-thirds of today’s intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) were created not by states alone, but with participation by international bureaucrats working in preexisting IGOs. International bureaucrats’ design activities can be modest or proactive. Meanwhile, their interests differ from states’ interests: insulating their organizational family from state intervention facilitates international bureaucrats’ pursuit of material security, legitimacy, and policy advancement. The more proactive the design activities of international bureaucrats, I argue, the more insulated the resulting institution will be from mechanisms of state control (e.g., financial monopolization or veto power). Statistical analyses of an original dataset support the prediction and are robust to alternative specifications as well as approaches to control for endogeneity. The implications—concerning ins...

A Strategic Theory of Regime Integration and Separation

States frequently disagree on the importance of cooperation in different issue areas. Under these conditions, when do states prefer to integrate regimes instead of keeping them separated? We develop a strategic theory of regime integration and separation. The theory highlights the nature of spillovers between issues. Positive spillovers exist when cooperation in one issue area aids the pursuit of objectives in another issue area; negative spillovers exist when cooperation in one issue area impedes this pursuit in another issue area. Conventional wisdom suggests that both positive and negative spillovers foster greater integration. We argue that negative spillovers encourage integration while positive spillovers do not. States integrate not to exploit positive spillovers between issues but to mitigate negative spillovers. To test our theory, we examine the degree of integration or separation among environmental regimes.

Cooperation, co-optation, competition, conflict: international bureaucracies and non-governmental organizations in an interdependent world

ABSTRACT International bureaucrats employed in inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) have a stake in the solidification and expansion of traditional global governance structures. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often are thought to be threats to IGOs. But international bureaucracies regularly seek cooperation with NGOs that can help in ‘cross-national layering’: the creation of formal or informal international institutions that overlay domestic institutions, seeking to replace or subsume them over time. This article develops a ‘4Cs taxonomy’ in which shared/unshared resource bases and shared/unshared values translate into cooperative, co-optative, competitive, or conflictual relations between NGOs and international bureaucracies. It then examines the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) over a 70-year period, showing how different mixes of resources and values help to explain why FAO bureaucrats have cycled through different relationships with NGOs. This exemplifies themes of the New Interdependence Approach: (1) the forces of globalization and interdependence create openings for transnational alliances among non-state actors; (2) continued globalization takes place not in a state of anarchy, but in an environment of overlapping responsibilities or principles; and (3) institutions go beyond being ‘rules of the game’ and can be drivers of power shifts in domestic and international affairs.