The author attempts to answer the following question: in an international legal system of which States are no longer the only subjects, what is the role that the consent of IOs plays in the creation of rights and obligations that apply on the international plane? The chapter reflects on the legal agency that IOs enjoy, qua subjects of international law, in the process of formation of general international law and in the acquisition of treaty rights and obligations. In so doing, it advances two claims. The first is that even though IO practice can and should be taken into account in the identification of customary rules, it is not a necessary element in the process of formation of those rules. The second claim of the chapter is that, under current law, IOs can only be bound by treaty rules to which they have consented, which may give rise to problematic gaps between the treaty obligations of IOs and the treaty obligations of their members. In pursuing those claims, the chapter offers some reflections on the systemic and normative implications of the formal involvement of IOs in the making of rules of general and conventional international law.

The author examines how ‘consent’, traditionally taken as a foundational element in international law, fares in the context of international organizations (hereafter IOs). The central argument is that IOs, both as actors consenting to international law and as institutional spaces for other actors doing so, have changed the operation or even the nature of consent in international law as they have made the components of the act of consent disaggregate. The author argues that the IO’s expression of consent has become detached from the psychological or ‘intentional’ state that is presumed to be underlying in the legal subject. Where the organization appears as an institutional space for the consent of others, the object of consent in many instances is detached especially in substance from the normative effect created for the consent-giver.

The authors begin by observing that most obligations of international law are still regarded as ‘based’ on State consent. There are good reasons for this, especially from a democratic legitimacy perspective. Still, the principle of State consent, even in its qualified version of ‘democratic State’ consent, suffers from important shortcomings that call for correctives. The chapter starts by accounting for the democratic value of State consent in International Organizations (hereafter IOs) before addressing some of its democratic deficits. It then articulates several institutional proposals to correct or, at least, complement the role of equal State consent in the institution, the operation and the control of IOs. The authors develop a non-ideal normative argument for the latter’s political re-institution. That re-institution has to start with the replacement of the principle of equal State consent by that of equal public participation in IOs: this does not only avoid reducing State consent in IOs to State veto or refusal rights, but it also extends the personal scope of those participatory rights to other non-State public institutions.

This chapter discusses the subjects of international law: how states come into being, and how international organizations are created.

The relationship between imperialism and international organizations is a close one. This chapter charts three stages in this relationship since the early nineteenth century: first, the use of international organizations as a means of coordinating imperialism and containing or, preferably, preventing inter-imperial conflict; second, the global expansion of international organizations as a means of stratifying polities initially via a ‘standard of civilization’ and, later, through quotients of ‘modernization’; and third, the use of international organizations as a means for various forms of interventionism. Taken together, these three stages mark a shift from a limited realm of international organization to a virtually universal condition of international administration. Over the past two centuries, the rationale and competences of international organizations have been reconfigured, rearticulated and redistributed. This narrative demonstrates that international organizations in particular, and forms of international administration in general, owe core aspects of their origins, development and legacies to imperialism.

In the past two decades, scientists, think tanks, international organizations and NGOs have highlighted how climate change may lead people to migrate internally and across international borders. The International Organization for Migration has sought a role in understanding and responding to the issue of climate related migration. IOM staff began a series of workshops, conferences, research and reports on climate and migration, when most member states were reluctant to discuss, let alone finance projects, on the topic under the auspices of IOM. However, over time IOM staff successfully shifted member states’ understanding of the organization’s role to include work on climate change and migration. IOM staff worked with a few sympathetic states and other stakeholders (such as universities, NGOs and private funders) to initiate climate change projects, and over time convinced the IOM Council that climate change migration was a strategic priority for the organization. IOM reshaped its obligations to states, despite its projectized and heavily earmarked funding structure.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

In this chapter, authority and rule are considered as analytical concepts to capture different forms of domination based on recognition. Both concepts involve the social paradox of voluntary subordination, particularly evident concerning global governance and International Organizations (IOs). The chapter discusses three theoretical solutions to the social paradox, thus three conceptualizations of authority. While contracted authority and inscribed authority represent the dominant conceptions in IR, they suffer from several shortcomings. Building on a critique of these variants, the chapter introduces reflexive authority as a third response, which understands authority in global governance as deriving from epistemic foundations that include the permanent monitoring of authorities. Reflexive authority relations involve enlightened and critical subordinates recognizing authority because they acknowledge their limitations. Instead of commands, authority holders send requests to constituencies, who monitor the authorities closely. This recognition of authority as worth observing leads to deference. Primary forms of contestations include non-compliance, delegitimation, and dissidence, which aim at different targets.

Collecting and processing large volumes of both personal and non-personal data on migrants and displaced populations is an integral part of IOM’s work. Through the ongoing expansion of its primary data collection mechanism, the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), the organization has come to be the most widely-used and authoritative source of data on internal displacement in particular. This chapter outlines how IOM has positioned itself in an increasingly competitive market of migration and displacement data and discusses the normative obligations that come with this. An analysis of the use of DTM in Haiti and along migratory routes in West and Central Africa illustrates that apart from its key role in the humanitarian planning cycle, one important political function of the DTM has been to showcase the success of donors’ policy interventions. This goes hand in hand with a number of risks and pathologies like the statistical “erasure” of populations with enduring needs and the crowding out of more development-oriented data collectors that raise questions with regard to IOM’s adherence to the principle of data responsibility. Against this background, the chapter calls for a change in institutional set-up and funding structure to ensure that IOM engages in responsible data collection only.

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the contribution advanced in this volume. First, it provides a brief overview of IOM’s history and structure. Second, it offers a primer on IOM’s entry into the UN system as a related organization in 2016. Third, it situates the book in relation to the core concepts underpinning it, including the obligations, accountability, and expansion dynamics of international organizations (IOs). Fourth, it draws out key themes running through the volume, particularly in relation to grounding assessments of IOM in international law; understanding IOM’s roles as a norm ‘breaker, taker and shaper’; analysing IOM as a protection actor; and developing more complex accounts of institutional change at IOM. Fifth, it maps out the structure, scope and limitations of book. Finally, it reflects on the legal and political implications of this volume, focusing on the need to recast the IOM Constitution to centre not only the organization’s obligations to its member states but also to the migrants it claims to serve.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the role reciprocity plays in treaties. First looking at treaty law and how reciprocity functions in the rules on reservations to treaties, the chapter goes on to examine reciprocity’s role in bilateral treaties, drawing on the examples of air transport agreements and energy agreements in particular, before looking at reciprocity’s role in multilateral treaties of the bilateralizable, interdependent, and integral types. It then analyzes treaties creating international organizations, particularly the EU and ILO, and differentiated obligations in environmental and trade law, illustrating how reciprocity operates in these types of instrument. Finally, the chapter addresses "objective regimes" and the effects of treaties on third parties. While some limitations exist on reciprocity, these do not depend on the substance of obligations but rather on the legal equality of the subjects involved.

Chapter 7 concludes Making International Institutions Work. It opens with a brief review of the main findings and the role of each stage of the empirical investigation in establishing them. I then discuss the book’s contributions to international relations, international political economy, and political science as well as other fields of social science. The third section draws out lessons for policy and practice. I identify a variety of stakeholder-specific strategies for safeguarding policy autonomy and promoting accountability reforms, contributing to a lively ongoing debate among academics and practitioners over how to achieve an effective and accountable global institutional architecture. Finally, I reflect on the book’s implications for some notable emerging issues in global governance – including responding to international crises and challenges to the modern liberal order – outlining promising avenues for further research.

Chapter 4 begins the qualitative portion of the empirical examination. I conduct an in-depth comparative case study of the three central pillars of global food security governance: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). I begin by detailing the matching strategy used to identify these institutions, documenting their similar levels of several possible determinants of performance and policy autonomy. The bulk of the chapter traces how differences in de facto – but not de jure – policy autonomy have set the institutions on divergent performance trajectories: The WFP and IFAD are autonomous and widely recognized as effective, whereas the FAO is state-dominated and notorious for performance problems. Rather than formal design features, I locate the origin of this variation in the institutions’ distinct governance tasks and patterns of operational collaboration with non-state actors. Interviews and archival data gathered during fieldwork at the institutions’ Rome headquarters adduce key pieces of evidence in this process-tracing exercise.

This chapter elaborates the book’s theoretical framework. It proceeds in three stages. First, based on a microfoundational analysis of the incentives facing states and international bureaucrats, I make the case that the former are more liable than the latter to engage in opportunistic behavior that imperils institutional performance. Second, I flesh out the concept of policy autonomy, explaining how its different components provide the basis for gains in performance and why it cannot be reliably established and maintained through institutional design. Third, I explore the true origins of policy autonomy, elaborating the causal mechanisms by which (certain types of) operational alliances and governance tasks insulate bureaucrats against state capture. The chapter concludes by summarizing the framework’s observable implications at the macro and micro levels.

Chapter 3 subjects the theory’s macro-level hypotheses to statistical tests based on a comprehensive new dataset: the Performance of International Institutions Project (PIIP). It begins by describing the PIIP’s scope, contents, and sources. The empirical analysis is divided into four sections. The first examines the relationship between performance and policy autonomy. I find a positive association when policy autonomy is measured using a survey of international bureaucrats, a proxy for de facto policy autonomy, but no relationship when it is measured using formal rules, a proxy for de jure policy autonomy. The second section turns to the determinants of de facto policy autonomy, showing that the survey-based measure is positively predicted both by the quantity, depth, and breadth of operational alliances and by the exercise of governance tasks with high monitoring costs for states. In the third section, I employ a simultaneous equations strategy to isolate the effect of performance and de facto policy autonomy on one another. The fourth section summarizes a battery of robustness checks.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.

Chapter 5 presents the book’s second comparative case study, which examines four major global health agencies: the World Health Organization (WHO); the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). The structure of the examination is analogous to Chapter 4’s. After enumerating the characteristics on which the four institutions are matched, I chronicle how differences in their de facto policy autonomy have given rise to disparate performance outcomes: The WHO and UNAIDS have been characterized by relentlessly declining autonomy and performance over their life cycles, Gavi and GFATM by the opposite trends. I then delve into the operational origins of these differences, which, once again, defy a purely design-based explanation. Like Chapter 4, the case study draws on extensive interviews and archival material.