Does the US administration exercise more informal influence over the World Bank when it has less control over US bilateral aid because of opposition from Congress? Replicating four studies of the World Bank, we show that years with a divided US government account for earlier findings of informal influence. This link between donor domestic politics and the exercise of influence in multilateral settings is important for understanding informality in international organizations and provides an alternate explanation to persistent questions about the role of international organizations in the international political economy.

Complex global and regional governance includes both the informality of governance institutions and informality around those institutions. National governments are only one category of actor, though an important one, among a more heterogeneous group of governors. The dynamics and evolution of globalization over time explain the emergence of complex governance in recent decades, an explanation that is complementary to those based on functionalism or domestic politics. Globalization alters actor incentive structures and reduces border effects, allowing nonstate and subnational actors to collaborate and reducing costs of participation in governance. Globalization has empowered actors: Emerging economies, INGOs, and MNCs. Globalization's future will continue to shape the prospects of complex governance.

Why do states choose informal organizations to govern global challenges? Using the global development regime as a piloting case, this article argues that different informal organizations serve different purposes. Informal intergovernmental organizations generate “club benefits” for member states, which arise from executive policy coordination behind closed doors. In contrast, transnational governance initiatives allow states to reap “risk-sharing benefits” in the production of global public goods by involving stakeholders. Using regression analysis for a set of development-related institutions, the analysis demonstrates that the two types of organizations are driven by different motivations. Complementary evidence is provided through case studies of two institutions: The IBSA Dialogue Forum (an informal intergovernmental organization) and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (a transnational public-private partnership). The findings inform conceptual discussions of the informality of institutions while contributing to a better understanding of the design determinants of informal organizations.

We assess the development of informality in international climate policy on two levels: Whether informal organizations meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation, and what role informality plays under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Proliferation of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) has enabled the move from a rigid list of countries with and without commitments, to the Paris Agreement, under which each country contributes to mitigation. Within the UNFCCC process, we find a “formality-informality cycle,” in which actors sometimes render rules and procedures more flexible and hence more efficient, only to suddenly reverse this trend at other times. Such a high-profile reversal occurred in Copenhagen in 2009. Subsequently, through the use of highly transparent negotiation procedures, trust in informality increased again, allowing negotiators to successfully override Nicaragua’s opposition in Paris in 2015. Similar formality-informality cycles can be observed on specific topics within the UNFCCC negotiations, such as international market mechanisms.

Understanding contemporary global governance requires a focus on informality. States increasingly govern through informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational public–private governance initiatives, and other informal institutions. Even within formal institutions, informal practices complement or override formal rules. And diverse informal groupings operate in the orbit of governance institutions, framing novel issues and placing them on policy agendas. We address these three aspects of informality – of, inside, and around global governance institutions. We first trace the nature and extent of the shift toward informal governance. We then consider a range of factors that may be driving the shift, drawing on major streams of International Relations (IR) theory; we treat these as candidate explanatory variables. Finally, we summarize the findings on those variables, and other theoretical insights, from the empirical chapters of this volume.

Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.

Although states of most types receive distinct advantages when they formalize their cooperation through public, legally binding agreements, we argue that absolute monarchs are uniquely able to capture personal benefits from secret, cartel-like cooperation. Domestic decision-making in absolute monarchies is unchecked, nontransparent, and highly personal, and these norms reproduce themselves at the international level when absolute monarchs cooperate with each other. We assess the explanatory strength of our theory through two in-depth case studies. First, we examine how the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian monarchs used informal agreements strategically during the Concert of Europe to suppress domestic unrest. Second, we explore how the Iraqi, Jordanian, and Saudi monarchs used secret agreements to counter domestic pro-republican sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Irrespective of geography, religion, and time period, the nontransparent and unilateral manner with which absolute monarchs implement domestic policies facilitates and encourages this type of informal cooperation.

This concluding chapter explores the future of urban planning in Africa, by identifying and analysing key theoretical insights and practical strategies in advancing sustainable, inclusive and functional urban spaces in African cities. Recognising the current urbanisation, climate change and sustainable development challenges, the chapter reflects on how the arguments presented in the book underscore the urgent need for reimagining urban planning in Africa. It also reviews some recent scholarship and stakeholder activities within the discussions of their potential implications for urban planning.

In South African cities, achieving sustainable urban development requires reckoning with segregated and unequal geographies of apartheid. Apartheid-era planning logics were deliberately designed to sequester and exclude the majority of city residents and remain systemic impediments to sustainable urban living. While scholars typically consider sustainable physical infrastructures, this chapter considers the need for equitable digital infrastructures as complementary sustainable urban interventions across apartheid’s fault lines. Drawing on critical scholarly engagements with urban sustainability and infrastructure, and ethnographic approaches with employees and customers at a grass-roots ICT centre in Cape Town, it was found that while digital infrastructure appears highly formal and planned, residents often gain access to that infrastructure from grass-roots initiatives achieved through socio-technical and relational assemblages, themselves infrastructural in nature. Scholars and practitioners must attend to these assemblages: they offer potential for a reimagined African urban planning regime in which sustainable urban development exists alongside community self-sufficiency and enhanced democratic engagement.

Urban planning in Africa is linked to elements of colonisation, production of informal spaces and socio-spatial segregation. Discussing it often provokes considerable emotions. How do urban planning histories fit into current planning practice? What constitutes reimagined urban planning in African cities? And how do current urban planning practices promote or limit urban planning reimagination and sustainable urban development? This chapter addresses these questions by highlighting the importance of planning histories in framing current planning theory and the production of urban spaces in Africa as well as their implication for sustainable urban development. The chapter shows how pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial planning narratives continue to dominate and frame twenty-first-century planning practice across African cities. Drawing from published literature, policy documents and international reports, the chapter advocates for a participatory narrative in deconstructing planning,and promoting inclusiveness and spatial integration toward a reimagination of urban planning in Africa.

We review evidence on the institutional weaknesses underlying economic development problems in Benin, analysing various sources of information including cross-country databases and an original opinion survey among decision makers in Benin. Three pressing institutional issues are found. First, the most serious impediment is corruption, which is seen as responsible for several key dysfunctions in almost all sectors: the political and electoral systems (vote buying), the relationship between business and the public administration (rigged procurement) or the judiciary system, land rights, or complicity between politicians and the media. Second, weak public management deteriorates the quality and the delivery of public services. It is most characterised by opacity of government policy-making to the public, ineffective regulation of the power sector, and a complex tax administration grossly inefficient in tax collection. Third, the level of informality is much higher in Benin than in the average sub-Saharan African country. This generates several economic costs including tax revenue loss, job precariousness, unfair competition for formal firms, and lack of control over the economy.

Living standards in Benin have remained low over the last decades because of sustained demographic pressures and the absence of a growth-enhancing structural transformation. Its two leading sectors have not been engines of sustained growth. The cotton sector has been constrained by institutional instability and political interference. Cross-border trade with Nigeria has nurtured informality but also corruption, tax evasion, and political capture. Adjustment to the decline of the agricultural sector has been passive, its labour migrating to informal activities and low-productivity sectors. Capital deepening is absent, and misallocation of resources has resulted in efficiency losses and slow technological change. Weaknesses in domestic resource mobilisation and inefficiencies in expenditure management have prevented the government from addressing key challenges of economic and social development, like providing good-quality physical infrastructure, significantly improving the performance of the education and healthcare systems, or fighting persistent poverty and inequality. Benin needs to reorient its development strategy and deal with its specific institutional weaknesses.

Informal borrowings are defined as expressions taken from a foreign language and used in informal American English. They conform to the traditional typology of borrowings and include such main types as loanwords and loan translations, but there are other finer distinctions, much as there are certain terms often confused with borrowings, such as code switches or nonce borrowings. Informal language, in turn, refers to a type of vocabulary which is stylistically “lower” than the standard language and “below” the formal and neutral registers on the formality scale. It includes two subsets: colloquialism, which is composed of moderately informal and casual expressions, and slang, which is composed of highly informal and unconventional expressions, strongly linked with a sociocultural context. Again, there are numerous similar terms to account for this type of lexicon, but their semantic scopes are different.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.

Chapter 7 dissects power dynamics among actors involved in immigration policy in Tunisia through the 2011 regime change: democratic state institutions and the administration; CSOs and migrant associations; international organizations, legal actors, and the private sector. I show how democratization affected immigration policy processes in ambiguous ways and explain why the increase in citizens’ political freedoms and civil society activism has not spilled over into more openness towards immigration. After 2011, policy processes became more inclusive, as the role of Tunisia’s parliament and civil society was strengthened. However, democratization also brought inter-actor dynamics to the fore that put a break to immigration reform plans, such as turf wars within the administration or governmental volatility. At the same time, the democratic transition has only partially affected immigration policymaking, as dynamics of international norm adherence and the ambiguous role of employers in Tunisia’s largely informal economy remained relatively unaffected by the regime change. In this context, political elites opted for restrictive policy continuity instead of translating migratory experiences and democratic ideals into liberal immigration reform.