A different two-level game: foreign policy officials' personal networks and coordinated policy innovation

Abstract

ABSTRACTA well-known approach to modeling international relations treats them as a two-level game played by national governments and international organizations, in which they negotiate with one another while coping with internal constraints on their action posed by domestic politics or organizational governance. Officials in these organizations can play a different two-level game, arising from their simultaneous negotiations within their personal transnational networks and their official duties in their host organizations. In each domain, they can act in ways that improves their outcomes in the other one – informal understandings facilitate subsequent formal agreement, while actions taken within their organizations implement and cement what had been negotiated informally. Multi-organizational innovation can thus be coordinated even in the absence of formal action to do so. This process is illustrated through an examination of the role of an informal transnational network in the shifting of the policies of the government of India and major aid donors in the 1960s.