Project Description

Global and regional international organizations (IOs) have become key players in international politics, facilitating cooperation in every corner of the world and with respect to almost any issue area, from economics to security, to immigration, to the environment. This ubiquity of IOs is reflected in the enormous growth in the post-World War II era of both their institutional authority and the institutional overlap between them, that is, the growing number of IOs with similar (but not necessarily identical) membership that are active in similar issue areas. For example, the World Bank, the United Nations and the recently established New Development Bank all seek to facilitate economic development. Even though these two developments have evolved concurrently and there are good reasons to believe that they are related, extant research examines them largely in isolation.

In this project, we propose to study this poorly understood phenomenon, addressing two specific questions: 1) what are the implications of differences in IO authority for institutional overlap? And 2) given conditions of institutional overlap, which IO characteristics lead to more or less authority? We bring to bear the complementary theoretical and methodological expertise of the two PIs to answer these questions with a three-pronged approach. First, we develop a coherent theoretical framework that links the dynamics of IO authority to the question of institutional overlap by extending a state-of-the-art theory of institutional change (Jupille et al. 2013). Second, we systematically map IO authority and overlap in 1) a sample of 76 global and regional IOs from 1950 to 2020 on a worldwide scale; and in 2) the two macro-regions with the highest density of institutional overlap, Africa and the Americas. Third, we evaluate our theoretical expectations in a mixed-methods research design that combines statistical analysis of existing and novel data, and two original in-depth case studies of institutional overlap in Africa. This multi-method approach will not only shed new light on the nexus of institutional authority and overlap, but will also produce new data that opens up new avenues for further research in this area and generate policy implications for the prospects of international cooperation and the nature of global governance.

Doctoral student in the project: Mona Saleh


The two PIs, March 2019, Hannover