Tana Johnson. 2014. Organizational Progeny: Why governments are losing control over the proliferating structures of global governance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press)

Abstract

The past decade has seen a large volume of research on both the design of international institutions (Koremenos et al. 2003; Stone 2011) and the delegation of authority to these institutions (Hawkins et al. 2006; Hooghe and Marks forthcoming). The vast majority of this research has taken a state-centric approach to explain both the design of and delegation to international governmental organizations (IGOs). The same time period has witnessed a surge of research on IGOs and global governance that explores the impact of international bureaucracy (Barnett and Coleman 2005) and bureaucrats (Biermann and Siebenhuner 2009) in different policy areas. In her recent book, Organizational Progeny, Tana Johnson synthesizes insights from these various literatures to explain the surprisingly large role that international bureaucrats play in creating new IGOs and insulating them from state control. The most striking and novel feature of the book builds upon the observation that the vast majority of all IGOs were conceived, designed, or negotiated in whole or in part by personnel working in other pre-existing IGOs. Previous scholarship does not recognize this fact. Johnson convincingly argues that IGO personnel are under-appreciated and their role is almost completely un-theorized in the current literature on creation and design. The significance of this argument really hits home when we learn that 65 percent of all IGOs in existence today were crafted not by states alone, but with the active (and sometimes uninvited) participation of IGO staff members. This involvement becomes more pronounced by the mid-2000s, such that over 80 percent of sampled IGOs are the product of agenda setting and other IGO staff involvement. Of course, all this activity by IGO staff only Bmatters^ if their preferences systematically diverge from state principals and if the negotiation process provides IGO staff with the opportunity to shift the actual outcome away from what we would have observed if Rev Int Organ (2015) 10:513–516 DOI 10.1007/s11558-015-9224-x