How can social scientists best contribute to the design of international institutions? Presumably our value lies in producing knowledge about design that those designing institutions need but do not have. But what kind of knowledge is that? What should a science of institutional design be “about?”

As a discipline international relations (IR) has barely begun to think about institutional design. Anarchy makes the international system among the least hospitable of all social systems to institutional solutions to problems, encouraging actors to rely on power and interest instead. Skeptics may be right that all this activity is unimportant but policymakers apparently disagree. And that in turn has left IR with less to say to them than it might have. By bracketing whether institutions matter and turning to the problem of institutional design, therefore, this volume takes an important step toward a more policy-relevant discourse about international politics.

The articles in this volume deserve to be assessed on their own terms, within the particular rationalist framework laid out in Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal's introduction. That framework highlights collective-action problems and incomplete information as impediments to institutional design. However, offering an internal critique of the Rational Design project from any rationalist perspective is not something I am particularly qualified or inclined to do, nor was it the charge given to me when I was generously invited to contribute.