Abstract
Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.
Highlights
International relations research is increasingly addressing questions relating to the complexity of global governance, which has grown enormously since the end of the Second World War and has diversified in institutional form
Whereas the post-War international order was centrally based on a few well-ordered intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and treaties – the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank (WB), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – today’s global governance architecture consists of a variety of formal and informal, regional, and global IGOs, self-standing international treaties, transgovernmental networks, non-governmental organizations, and transnational public– private partnerships. This multiplication and diversification of international institutions has resulted in a much denser global governance space. This development is significant because the dynamics of global governance are fundamentally different when they occur in a dense institutional space than in a ‘wellordered’ international system
We find that IGO overlap, in general, has roughly doubled from 1970 until today, and that this process was driven mostly by the expansion of IGOs’ policy competencies rather than by membership
Summary
International relations research is increasingly addressing questions relating to the complexity of global governance, which has grown enormously since the end of the Second World War and has diversified in institutional form. Mera 2015), intellectual property rights (Helfer 2004), international civil aviation (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2021), refugee protection (Betts 2010), human trafficking (Gómez-Mera 2015), finance (Henning 2017), and security (Hofmann 2009) These analyses tend to be rich qualitative descriptions that do not rest on a generic measure suitable for applications across issue areas and geographical regions, and commonly provide snapshot pictures that neglect the evolution of complexity over time. Unlike other institutions in global governance, IGOs create binding commitments for states that are, to varying degrees, enforceable through international (and sometimes domestic) legal mechanisms (Abbott et al 2000) They commonly influence the agenda setting and framing of international problems in ways that are unrivalled by other institutions (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Knill et al 2019).
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