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IPSA World Congress, Montreal, July 2014

Panel: International Organizations’ Boundary Governance through Leadership

and Cooperation

Coalesce or Collapse: Further Exploration into International Organizations’ Cooperative

Behavior

(Yves Schemeil, with Wolf-Dieter Eberwein)

Abstract. This is a second cut about the expansion of international organizations following the 2005

paper on cooperation between IOs. Cooperation may vary in depth and extent, because IOs opt for

various balances between autonomy and interdependence. Some modalities of cooperation are limited in

time and space; others are multi-stakes, multilevel and enduring. Cooperation depends on one major set

of explanatory variable: in their expansion, IOs enlarge their initial mandate, which in turn produces

overlap between their activities. This in turn compels them to opt for defensive or offensive strategies over

boundary issues; and more or less intensive cooperative endeavors.

Preliminary remarks. Much time has gone by since 2005 when we presented in Istanbul our first ideas,

theoretical elements and some illustrative evidence about forms of inter-organizational interaction ranging

from coordination to cooperation among and between international governmental organizations. After

such a long time it should not come as a surprise that our approach to the issue has changed. The reason is

that the first author has further explored theoretically and empirically the management of international

governmental organizations and their adaptive behavior. In that sense the following paper takes a new

approach on international governmental organizations and international nongovernmental organizations’

cooperative behaviors. It is assumed a priori that the same theoretical proposals can help understand why

IOs tend to cooperate instead of compete, although these proposals do not apply similarly to IGOs and

NGOs. The second author had gained practical experience in the European network of humanitarian non-

governmental organizations and as a board member of a humanitarian organization in France. . With

respect to the intergovernmental organizations’ domain the approach is relatively broad. In contrast, as far

as the non-governmental organizations’ domain is concerned we will limit to a few remarks as their

elaboration would dramatically increase the length of the paper.

Why should international organizations opt for cooperation rather than competition? Although

cooperation is from the outset an issue IR theory must eventually address, little progress has been made in

recent years to answer this question and give a full and accurate account of cooperative behavior. Part of

this undesirable delay in knowing the mechanics is due to problems in theory building, and part stems

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from difficulties in importing concepts and models from other disciplines. International theorists usually

assume that intergovernmental organizations as well as non-governmental ones definitely have a limited

capacity to work with partners. Against this classical account, it can hardly be contested that international

organizations (hereafter: IOs) do cooperate on many occasions: they work together, at an accelerating

pace, and on their own initiative. Although such facts are dissonant with most theories, scholars do not

discard them. Realists themselves admit that organizations are more than “tools of statecraft”, designed

by states to foster cooperation in areas that are the least relevant to their securityi. Neo-realists

acknowledge that IOs may contribute to the international order, albeit as exogenous variables, which

weigh less than the external environment of states’ behavior (Glazer 2010: 161-166). Institutionnalist

research links regime-building to the joint regulation of a specific field by complementary IGOs and

NGOs (Keohane 1982; Krasner 1999). It views IOs as elegant solutions to avoid excessive transaction

costs (North 1990; Keohane 1984/2006). In spite of this, they do not seriously envisage that cooperation

may grow beyond economic necessity. Rationalists stand in the middle of the road, viewing

organizational cooperation either as a Nash equilibrium in prisoners’ dilemma games (Agarwall and

Dupont 1999) or as the consequence of a ‘rational design’ of international institutions with adequate

exemption and exit clauses carefully calculated to balance the constraints attached to working with others

(Rosendorff and Milner 2001; Koremenos and Snidal 2004). However, they fail to explain why

cooperation is absent where it is the most profitable, and present when it is not. Constructivists swim

against the stream. They assume, first, that IOs are the “missionaries of our time”: external cooperation

among them helps consolidate their internal organizational culture and duplicate their structures since

“the majority of international organizations are now created by other international organizations”

(Barnett, Finnemore 2004: 33, 45). Moreover, instead of linking cooperative behavior to a mere quest for

power or money, constructivist work traces it to learning and identity building. The caveat here comes

from the fact that acquiring shared knowledge and creating a distinct identity may conflict. Either in

mainstream or critical studies, cooperation between IOs is therefore unlikely, marginal, bounded by their

original constitution, or crippled by a scarcity of resources.

Section 1. Research design

In this paper, we suggest an alternative solution: IOs are not occasionally coordinating their

actions within exclusive clubs of like-units on specific issues in a limited span of time. They can work

together inclusively on full scale in the long run, because the issues addressed by each are increasingly

intertwined through mandate enlargement.

Review of the Literature

In recent years, progress was made towards a better understanding of IOs’ expansion as sources of

cooperation strategies. The issue was originally addressed by Ness and Brechin, who attributed it to a

“gap” between each organization’s mandate and its technology (Ness & Brechin, 1988) – a statement

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endorsed by Barnett and Finnemore who trace the failure of IGOs to a “mismatch” between each IOs’

goals and its actual resources. Cooperation is therefore an appropriate means to fill both gaps. Since “IOs

are active agents of their own change”, they “change for reasons that cannot be attributed to state

demands or external pressures alone” (Barnett and Finnemore 2004: 156, 158). However, although the

authors mention that IOs are “proactive” and “change and expand not only through adaptation but also

because of creative agency” (2004: 160, 167), they do not address the cooperative component of such self

generated change, as if each IO was isolated from the othersii.

Other contributions to the debate also stress the need to focus on ‘institutional interaction’ between

organizations behaving as firms competing for market shares (Loewen 2006) instead of public

administrations endowed with a legal mandate. Some scholars even try to conciliate private and public

components of IOs showing “how an international institution can influence the normative development

and the performance of another international institution”, and assigning to both a productive goal that

prevails on the market as well as an authoritative goal that goes with bureaucracies (Gehring and

Oberthür 2009: 150, our emphasis). Since both series of objectives complement each other, cooperation

may result from the need to hybridize their output (Schemeil 2013).

This means that “[i]nter-organizational cooperation, increasingly moving beyond the dyad into

more complex configurations, has begun to take the shape of a network, with a high density of links

and a common perception of boundaries” (Biermann, 2007: 2, our emphasis) which by implication

refers to a preference for cooperation. Other authors point to the fact that boundaries between IOs

have become blurred. To protect themselves against such potentially cooperative pressures IOs make

use of mechanisms they call “jurisdictional delimitating” to limit encroachment with neighboring

organizations’ jurisdiction even when their governance areas are interconnected or overlapping.

Furthermore, these authors see “interlocking structures of international governance institutions

emerging from institutional interaction” and forecast the constitution of they call “cooperative

clusters”. This “interaction” between IOs, however, is not to be mistaken with “cooperation”: there is

a “source” institution and a “target” one, the activities of the former having “beneficial (synergistic) or

adverse (disruptive)” effects on the latter (Gehring and Oberthür 2009: 142, 149). This is to say that

the study of interaction in a billiard ball way alone would be insufficient to assess cooperation if it

resulted (as we hypothesize) from simultaneous constraints stemming from the same environment. The

authors themselves acknowledge that they “cannot put forward meaningful hypotheses as to the

sufficient conditions under which institutional interaction is expected to occur” (ibid: 132).

From this brief review of the literature it seems that IOs cannot be conceptualized exclusively

as specialized “agents” of their “principals (be they governments or experts and activists), but,

contrary to states, they are described as interlocking, intertwining, interdependent, and overlapping

organizations. What are the theoretical consequences of this recent recognition?

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Research question, assumptions and hypotheses

In the process of interactive adaptation to environmental change it is very likely that IOs will

trespass the limits initially assigned to their activities by their founders. They will henceforth cooperate

with each other, except those having a comparative advantage that could make them prevail over rivals in

the competition for scarce resources – funding, member states or militants’ support, legitimacy in the

media, etc.

As a consequence our research question can be specified in the following terms: what are the

capacity, and the willingness of IOs to make “boundary-decisions” (as in Cox and Jacobson 1973) and to

engage in inter-organizational cooperation? In answering this question, we do not discard he possibility

that “organizations are extremely reluctant to give up autonomy through substantial cooperation. Strong

forces are needed to overcome this reluctance: resource dependence, issue density and duration and

learning through failure are major ones” (Biermann, 2007: 4). We will even focus rather extensively on

the factors pushing towards “institutional demarcation” instead of institutionalized cooperation. But we

also trace the drivers towards cooperation, like the fact that insulation is counter-productive because

protecting itself against potential partners inevitably leads to an unstable equilibrium as compared to

controlled mandate enlargement in which each partner tends to optimize its comparative advantage in a

Pareto-type utility function.

From these postulates we infer three major proposition, rather than hypotheses that should be

empirically tested:

Proposition 1. The more IOs expand the more likely is their engagement in cooperative activities.

In our view, an IO’s staff knows that organizational survival may be at stake if activities are not

scaled up. Our purpose is to corroborate or invalidate the conjecture that the race to mandate

enlargement empowers the most the organizations that do cooperate over their rivals, which do

not.

Our second proposition is still more tentative:

Proposition 2. IOs belong to networks because transaction costs among rival IOs are superior to

coordination costs among those that cooperate.

As said in institutionalist, rationalist and liberal literature IOs reduce the first sort of liabilities;

when they collaborate, however, they create new adjustment costs – like repeated meetings about

power sharing and division of labor.

Of course, opting for cooperation is not only triggered by rational considerations about the

delivery of public goods, avoidance of waste, and even harmony between institutions or

organizations. In the real world central (if not hegemonic) IOs have some leverage to organize the

modalities of cooperation in each particular context.

From this, we derive our third proposition:

Proposition 3. Power is necessary to move from less cooperation to more cooperation.

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Note that this last proposal is more counter-intuitive than the first: it would seem logical to

assume that once an IO is involved in a cooperative process, division of labor only would drive

the network towards more cooperation.

Unfortunately, our first proposal is rather intuitive and it is not easy to compare it to what is suggested in

the literature on interorganizational cooperation since it is sketchy. That such topics have been given little

attention in spite of their growing relevance may be due to a lack of theoretical clarity; or, alternatively, to

an excessive paucity of concepts. Reality is richer than assumed in most explanatory models, since there

are more than two basic strategies: cooperate or not cooperate. There are various degrees and modalities

of cooperation, from a minimum standardization of procedures and division of labor in time of crisis to

maximum determination to act together in the long run, when there is less pressure to work together.

The dependant variable: modalities of cooperation

With respect to interactions between IOs we can distinguish two dimensions of inter-

organizational relations: a structural dimension and a relational one. In structural terms the issue is the

position of each organization relating to the others: this could be anything from a consortium to a

federation or confederation of organizations. In relational terms the central issue is how the interactions

among organizations take place and what the objective of these interactions is: this could take various

forms, from coordinating activities on the ground to promoting shared ideas and norms at headquarters.

Varieties of cooperation may be described as follows: it may be occasional, temporary or permanent;

bounded or extended; restricted or not; between members belonging to the same sector or system – as the

UN one – or, alternatively, to distinct populations of IOs); among partners of an equal or unequal status.

Firstly, cooperation may be exclusive (reserved to members sharing some specific attributes, as in

a club) or inclusive (open to every IO of goodwill). Secondly, it may be bounded (the goals are strictly

defined) or not (they may evolve according to changes in the environment). Thirdly, it may be limited in

time (say, between two international conferences) or enduring (with no time limit). Combining these three

criteria with the various sorts of governance format (loose or centralized) and the status of the

stakeholders (homogeneous or heterogeneous) gives many possibilities.

The minimum manifestation of a cooperative attitude is to be defensively involved in joint

programs and make collective scenarios; however, such partnerships may dissolve when threats or risks

disappear. A relevant example is he NATO/UN/EU joint operations in the Middle East. More cooperation

implies a minimum coordination, a hybrid construct which simultaneously implies both joint activities

between organizations that are parts of the same international regime (like the UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO,

UNIFEM and the World Bank in development), and bounded cooperation among agencies belonging to

the same paramount organization (e.g. the UN system, and OCHA in particular) or operating in closely

related fields (e.g. the WTO’s TRIPS and the WIPO’s Division on patents).

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When IOs are forced to adjust to each other in the long run and on any topic, to avoid being worse

off if they don’t, they explicitly agree to avoid situations that would harm both given the existing

interdependence among them. We are speaking here of circumscribed consortia, a term that has become

prominent in recent years in particular in the nongovernmental sector. The risk, however, is that the

partnership just achieved may eventually dissolve. Cases in point are some NGOs’ networks like VOICE

and CONCORD. More cooperation is the recognition of mutual dependence between at least two or more

organizations, which agree to pursue some objectives in common. In this case we could speak of a

positive sum situation since it is turned productively into longer-term based problem solving. Pooling

resources and skills for specific issues is undertaken in order to achieve desirable collective goods,

whatever the transaction costs and the inefficiencies may be for each contributor. At this stage of our

research, it is uneasy to say which IOs exemplify this process.

An important attribute of this process which leads IOs from full autonomy to full cooperation,

allowing them to escape the devil (insulation, meaning vulnerability) and the deep blue sea (absorption,

meaning disappearance as such) is that defection strategies remain possible at any time. Consequently, as

hypothesized, to fight against both inertia and exit temptations, as well as to avoid relying only on

interpersonal friendship and cultural loyalty, some external force must keep IOs on tracks.

Let’s now turn to the relevant set of independent variables that may explain why IOs opt for

cooperation or intensify cooperation. It is the expansion of IOs through their mandate enlargement.

The explanatory variable: mandate enlargement

Joint action is preceded by the preliminary enlargement of an organization’s initial mandate –

either to cooperate because missions overlap; or as an undesired consequence of trespassing jurisdiction.

Depending on the strategy adopted, mandate enlargement may either facilitate or preclude cooperation, its

extent, and its content. Mandate enlargement is exemplified in the humanitarian field. The UNHCR

established to resettle European postwar refugees progressively extended its outreach in two directions

worlwide: “internally displaced” persons (traditionally an issue for the respective governments that was

not covered by international law although it my be interpreted in giving the UNHCR a legitimate mandate

to take care of them too); and “asylum-seekers”. The International Organization for Migration established

mainly to recruit male and adult Third World workers for the reconstruction of postwar Europe (and

resettle them once their job done) now protect every migrant (and seriously consider as does the UNHCR

to include among its end-users “economic” and “environmental” “asylum seekers) instead of limiting its

activities to “productive” ones. Moreover, this move make it include fight against “human trafficking” of

women, children, and quasi slaves wherever they go or come from, a further case in mandate enlargement

and cooperation since trafficking is scrutinized by Interpol and the UN Crime and Drug Organization.

A closer look at this intriguing process is therefore required. By mandate enlargement, either in

its positive (“controlled overlap”) or negative aspect (mutual encroachment), we mean both the

successive inclusion of additional goals less and less in tune with the initial mission (as in the health

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department of an agency addressing lethal issues like the International Atomic Energy Agency); and the

progressive substitution of a recent objective to older ones (as in UNESCO, where immaterial heritage

discreetly replaced culture in a span time of a generation, with a greater potential of growth). Whereas

initial objectives may be maintained or be skipped – which also happens – new ones will be added to the

original agenda. This may occur in a horizontal fashion by adding different issues as a result of increasing

interdependence, or vertically by increasing its differentiation and specialization.

Consequently, at any point in time overlap between two or several IOs’ activities is always

possible with its undesirable side effect: the sidelining of one of the partners (e.g., WIPO in the

intellectual property issue, to the main benefit of the WTO); an increase in waste and red tape (due to

duplication of the resources attributed to the joint venture by each partner, as in the collective promotion

of knowledge by UNESCO, the World Bank, UNICEF, etc.); relative deprivation (as in communication

technologies, with ITU people resenting the domination of ICANN members).

Note that such liabilities are not per se conducive to cooperation, let alone to an IGO-driven

partnership process. As we shall see below, IGOs’ exit strategies exist at any point of network building.

States may also instruct IGOs to cooperate instead of leaving them discretion in assessing if it can be or

not a welcome remedy to the undesired side effects of a growing overlap. Accordingly cooperation

between IOs – and especially IGOs – is better explained by the enlargement of their mandate; but it is not

the only cause of their cooperation.1

Assessing the robustness of our propositions

We shall now elaborate our propositions with the help of three factors. Firstly, to benefit from

cooperation IOs must display some specific competence – like contribute to the network and profit from

its peers’ knowledge. Secondly, to be efficient IOs need resources and eventually some power – the

mandates or missions of these organizations must be supplemented with sufficient endowments and some

enforcement capabilities. Lastly, in order to succeed, they need to command some degree of legitimacy –

if an IGO intervening on the field does not command enough support nor is perceived as satisfying basic

needs, its operations might actually fail.

The underpinnings of our main proposals are that inter-organizational cooperation and mandate

enlargement can simultaneously increase the knowledge base, the power, and the legitimacy of

organizational agents therefore satisfying the conditions enumerated above. As a consequence the joint

production of global public goods and services, the protection of universal rights, and the capture of

large-scale externalities can be enhanced by resolving, at least partially, the dilemma of the functional

fragmentation of a complex environment.

The assumed inevitability of a “cooperative turn” of IOs sounds as the déjà-vu of the “spill over”

effect to which neofunctionalists owe their fame in European studies. Yet we consider change in the

organization’s agendas as resulting above all from human agency. In our view, organizations leaders must

struggle to enhance the realm of their activities; instead of blindly obeying systemic constraints they do so

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purposefully. Would they limit decision making to the domain covered by their original mandate, their

organizations would close down one after another: either the initial conditions that gave them life would

have changed in the meantime (as with NATO at the end of the Cold War), or they would have fulfilled

their mandate to such an extent that the issue originally addressed would now belong to history (as with

the IMF now fully reimbursed by default states). Consequently, we do not nest the main cause of inter-

organizational cooperation in the internal dynamics of bureaucracies and the demands expressed by staff

members, as Barnett and Finnemore do (and, before them, Ness and Brechin, 1988; or, after them,

Hawkins, Lane, Nielson and Tierney, 2006). We see cooperation between IGOs as the outcome of their

leaders’ ability to satisfy external demands from three groups of actors: states’ representatives, epistemic

communities’ experts, and NGOs’ members.

In the remaining part of this text we show how to link cooperative behavior to the expansion of

IOs. We identify the drivers and inhibitors of inter-organizational cooperation (section 2), then, we shall

analyze inductively and empirically derived strategies that IOs have pursued either to enlarge their area of

competence, to increase their respective legitimacy basis through inter-organizational cooperation, or to

shield themselves from others, which raise a number of paradoxes (section 3). A discussion of some of

the theoretical implications of our research follows (section 4). Finally, we shall sum up our findings, note

some limitations, and suggest future work on various sorts of cooperation (section 5).

Section 2. IOs’ cooperative behavior

To address this issue, drawing from the achievements of management and organization studies

may be helpful. Firms and public administrations are engaged in a great variety of cooperative processes,

from mere linkages between distinct activities to structured relations within networks. Scholars from

various disciplines try to explain the intensity of cooperation by the motivations that drove organizations

into a cooperative cluster. This is far from being simple. In a nutshell, although network analysis is not

new (it has long been a branch in mathematical and statistical modeling before the tremendous

development of psychosocial networks called for a better theoretical understanding of this phenomenon:

Bohn, Buchta, Hornik, Mair 2014) research recently showed that organizations did not behave as

numbers or persons. Once triggered by organizational expansion the evolution of interorganizational

cooperation, its intensity and its final structure are not only determined by structural properties of

networks (like the relations between dyads, the number and solidity of ties, and the centralization or

decentralization of the network). Rational calculus, cultural differences, and environmental constraints

also matter (Abri and Aulakh 2014).

Drivers of cooperation

As for IOs as specific sorts of organizations, they can enter into an existing network or build up

a new one for the following reasons: to get access to accumulated knowledge that would be difficult to

find alone and be enlightened by its propensity to cooperate; to be empowered by its new proximity to

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more powerful organizations; to become itself a node of interactions between subaltern IOs or fill

“structural holes” that prevent interorganizational communication; and to reduce uncertainty.

Considering cooperation with other IOs a staff could privilege isomorphism or demarcation; homophily

or complementarity; asymmetry or reciprocity (Pahre 2009: 887). Staff members may look for “low

partner-specific transaction costs”; or, to the opposite, for higher status partners that may save them

coordination costs, open them access to more valuable information, or share with them the comparative

advantage of which each component benefit within the the cluster. In addition, the staff may also wish to

upgrade their minority status within a community of like-units and join the top pivotal organizations,

which will empower them (Borgattifoster and Foster 2003). Finally, their goal may be to improve their

own performance because they will benefit from their partnership with the most efficient cooperator

(Powell and al., 1999: 9-10; 24-28; 2005).

The cooperative potential of an IO also depends on the ability, the willingness of the individual

participants to engage in collective decision-making, and the windows of opportunities that will be

opened to them – or not. This may be merely instrumental and quite independent of the desirable

outcome. But it may also be that the network members do agree on specific objectives and share some

values. These may either be internal to the network (i.e. developing common standards etc.) or external

(i.e. influencing the policy process in their particular field of activity such as health, emergency relief or

development). In particular it is unclear to what extent general network studies contributes to

understanding the impact of specific networks on the absence or presence of cooperation of particular

organizations – a point that is nonetheless of the utmost importance in the world of international

organizations.

Absent cooperation and unsatisfactory performance should logically undermine any IO’s

legitimacy. Without significant moral support, no organization is able to achieve any material objective.

IGOs are permanently confronted with this issue as the states and – more recently – NGOs demand

greater accountability. Audits and evaluations in turn indirectly bring about cooperation, in order to

display more transparency, enhance performance, and therefore yield greater legitimacy since

“interaction through commitment” [to a legitimate norm] impacts on “efficiency” (Gehring and Oberthür

2009: 135-143). Moreover, becoming part of a network of institutions enables IOs to discard any

responsibility in being unable to address the current woes of any specific country. Conversely, it allows

them to benefit from any collective achievement that would in fact be independent of their own actual

contribution to the outcome.

Network studies also suggest that the specific structure of networks determines cooperative

attitudes, inversing the role of each factor – i.e., cooperative clusters are not the variable to be explained

but an explanatory one. We shall not go in that direction here. Rather, we shall assess the role of the

context in favoring, slowing or accelerating cooperative processes. For instance, interorganizational

cooperation can be explained by the relative position of each IO within the international order.

According to Gulati, a precondition for such cooperation is a function of both their centrality – i.e.

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requiring a minimum of complementarities among the most “central” IGO – and the level of structural

differentiation among them (Gulati 1999). In other words, when centrality is relevant and structural

differentiation is present among a set of international organizations, Gulati predicts an increase of each

individual organization’s propensity to cooperate.

As for the density and cooperative intensity of the network, we assume that it depends on the

particular sector in which its components operate. However, different fields and specialties also need to

be combined due to the growing complexity of the challenges faced by IOs. Such complexity implies

substantive linkages within policy domains as well as between them. The interdependence say between

the economy and the ecology for example requires a multilateral approach in interstate relations if not

the pooling of sovereignty.

We also suggest that the problems of the general relationship between organizations differ

according to their status, i.e. the class to which they belong (profit/business organizations, international

nongovernmental organizations, or international governmental organizations). In the discussion that

follows we will only include nonprofit (nongovernmental) organizations but not business organizations

as the latter work for individual gains and losses in contrast to IGOs and NGOs producing public goods.

Inhibitors of cooperation

Several inhibitors that preclude IOs’ collaboration can be singled out. To cooperate, IOs should

first fight against isolationist tendencies, a “pathology” (Barnett and Finnemore 1999: 703) that occurs

when a “free-standing organization” (Young 1989: 52-54) shuts itself off from feedbacks of the

environment. Eventually such a stance may lead to what March and Olsen have identified as the

“competency trap”: the professionals get more and more efficient but loose out of sight that their

environment has been changing, so that their activities tend to become obsolete if not inappropriateiii.

The FAO may fall into this category (Fouilleux 2009). Moreover, isolationist strategies like defending a

given mandate against potential or actual competitors or unilaterally pursuing mandate enlargement at

the expense of other organizations both have their drawbacks. In the first case, lack of openness may

lead to obsolescence; in the second case, autonomy may lead to hegemony.

Additional constraints are: geographic division of people and territories into independent states;

functional differentiation among organizations; division of labor among organizations and within them;

separation of decision making and policy making from implementation and execution (Dijkzeul and

Gordenker). IOs have initially been created to overcome the inequalities that characterize the current

community of states and bring about global justice. Functional differentiation implies that each

organization at its creation is attributed a specific realm of responsibility. But activities in one domain

are very likely to have repercussions in others as a consequence of the interdependence among the

various functional sectors. The division of labor among IOs, although conducive under specific

conditions to cooperation may nonetheless create a follow-up problem: they may “bilaterally” adjust to

each other in order to egoistically pursue their own unilateral problem-solving activities.

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Fear to be trapped in such contradictions is in itself a source of passivity, as is the international

order when it is shaped by uncertainty about the outcomes of IOs’ interventions in the economic, social

or political fabric of societies. This is a core issue in the process leading towards intervention or

abstention. All parties jointly involved in solving a problem (say a natural catastrophe) may sincerely

recognize that a sound division of labor, once achieved, will soon requires some coordination without

which the whole system will sooner or later fall apart.

However, coordination alone will not suffice to guarantee that expected and desired outcomes will

follow. Even if the need to coordinate is acknowledged, it will not necessarily take place either within a

given sector or across sectors if no stakeholder desires it and has the means to enforce it. That is

coordination is a necessary condition for cooperation. Enforcement being absent it can be related to three

levels: within any single organization; between organizations in the same functional area; and between

organizations across different functional areas (good examples are trade and social policy in the WTO;

cultural heritage and water depletion within UNESCO)iv. Minear, for instance, (1999: 300) cites a study

commissioned by the UN’s Interagency Steering Committee (IASC) in charge of the humanitarian sector

which refers to the absence of coordination as follows: “[t]he simple reality is that within the diverse UN

family, no element has adequate authority to command, coerce or compel any other element to do

anything”.

Only if these obstacles are overcome, follow-up problems can be solved. Theoretically,

international organizations should compete to consolidate their relative position within the hierarchy of

IOs, and their achievement would determine to a considerable extent the allocation of the scarce

resources accruing from governments, sponsors, experts or militants. IOs are in effect facing competitive

relations since “in a market environment, characterized by uncertainty, its interests will be shaped often

unintentionally by material incentives” (Cooley and Ron 2002)13. Such a constraint would lead IOs to give the

top preference to their survival. The side effect of such a priority is suboptimal performance: when the

expected results are unsatisfactory, the agent has every interest to withhold information about them, as

does the principal.

Let’s turn now to the explanatory variable, mandate enlargement, and see how IOs expansion help

overcome inhibitors of cooperation and boost its drivers.

Section 3. Mandate enlargement and the cooperation paradox

It is taken for granted in the literature that IGOs in particular cannot fulfill their specific original

mandate in a globalizing world while sticking to their initial mandate (Schemeil 2013). This may be due

to the awareness of better-understood linkages between what had been previously ignored, or because

some of the initial activities have become obsolete. IOs must select an option about the possible side

effects of their expansion in terms of overlap. Conceptually, we can distinguish between two strategies, a

defensive and an offensive one. A “niche” organization, fairly specialized, small, and predominantly

concerned with the maintenance of its autonomy vis-à-vis other organizations is likely to adopt a

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defensive strategy. Relatively powerful organizations are more likely to pursue an offensive strategy to

gradually extend their mandate. These two options are likely to be chosen by organizations’ leaders

where the primary driving force is “bureaucratic” – i.e., organizational survival. Even though power

calculations may play an important role the functional imperative needs to be emphasized as well. In the

case of offensive adaptation, the outcome can be either a strategy of partnership that more or less

mechanically occurs because of the perceived necessities to solving specific problems; or, alternatively,

a more indirect approach relying primarily on a quest for influence within a group of organizations

whose mandates necessarily imply some overlap.

The defensive approach: autonomy first?

Growing interdependence can paradoxically lead to the greater empowerment of each individual

IO. Because conventional wisdom within IOs is that cooperative ventures are dangerous, our interviews

with IOs’ staff members, permanent representatives, experts and activists converge toward the same

conclusion: there is some formal cooperation between organizations, if, and only if it is substantively

unavoidable. Consultations exist because specialists dealing with one particular aspect of a global issue

whose competence is needed to achieve diplomatic consensus are spread out across several institutions.

To give but one example, intellectual property issues are debated in several IOs: namely, the WTO, the

WIPO, UNESCO, and to a lesser extent, the WHO and the FAO, each having its own legitimacy to

address them. Interorganizational cooperation seems, according to our interviews, not to be the result of

a deliberate political strategy of individual IOs to enhance their relative power but rather akin to a

mechanical process ending in the progressive extension of the original mandate. As time passes by, the

initial legal boundaries separating each IGO from all the others do no longer reflect the current realities

of concrete policy fields. Boundaries are blurred,and IOs must address this issue.

They will not opt for a strategy explicitly designed to construct interorganizational structures,

which seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Undesirable outcomes like overlap and waste

compel them to scale up their joint efforts beyond complementary programs. Such inference is much in

tune with a widely shared general assumption in the theoretical debates that cooperation is only feasible

if the outcome is mutually advantageous and if there is no alternative to producing a global public goodv.

Defensive interaction suggests that IOs strategists do not see a priori interorganizational cooperation as

advantageous. There are, first of all, internal barriers within their own organization. When launching a

new program the experts in a given organization never involve all the possible stakeholders from the

beginning, for the simple reason, as several of our interlocutors stated, that progress would be impossible

with too many partners. Each division in each organization concerned tends to resist innovation in order

to protect its own turf and to keep its part of the budget because new projects inevitably imply a

reallocation of the available resources. Conversely, the internal reluctance if not resistance to change is

so high that inter-organizational cooperative moves are likely to reduce cooperation within the individual

organization itself.

13

These internal barriers are, secondly, exacerbated by the fact that the secretariats are excessively

cautious with respect to, if not defiant towards overlapping bureaus and liaison officers who cope with

external obstacles to cooperation. Perceived differences in culture, finance, and efficiency help explain

this lack of confidence in potential partner’s goodwill.

There are many examples of such an assumed need for discretion and reservation. During trade

negotiations, for instance, WTO officers are cautious in their statements because they fear UNCTAD

and NGOs’ critics of their allegedly liberal ideology. Under the same circumstances WIPO agents keep a

low profile in negotiations with other IGOs, thereby hoping to escape the jealousy of others because of

their organization’s wealthvi. Physicians from the WHO are not welcome in discussions on intellectual

property due to a protracted tendency to equate the protection of patents with crimes against medical

deontology or even human rights. WHO delegates allegedly torpedo any UNEP attempt to adopt a new

approach in the study of environmental impact on sanitary conditions, because they fear this could

subordinate specific health issues under environmental ones. Thus, they limit their involvement in this

realm to a restricted perimeter, those of “environmental health” – a subfield of medical knowledge –

rather than envisaging an innovating approach that could lead to closer cooperation with environmental

specialists in the “health and environment” issue area. Finally, facing an adamant U.S. government that

supports ICANN unconditionally, ITU’s technicians take any opportunity to revamp their relative power

over the Internet and justify it on technical grounds (i.e., standards of telecommunication), leaving to

ICANN the political ambition to extend a free worldwide web, and the juridical protection of individual

rights to WIPO.

Another obstacle on the road to full cooperation is: subcontracting (buying services to less global

and powerful but also more specialized bodies) or outsourcing (delegating competencies to

organizations of equal leverage and positioned at the same level in the hierarchy of IOs because they can

better do the job). “Passing the job” or “farming out” specific tasks to other IOs may be a good defensive

solution since the goal will be achieved without too much involvementvii.

Uncertainty precludes risk-taking decisions and call for contractualization, even in the guise of

incomplete contracts, which increases the level of formality among partners (Abdi and Alakh 2014).

Pooling resources and skills to achieve desirable collective goals may therefore raise coordination costs

– a perspective that may deter an IO to fully cooperate with others. Accordingly, it will tend to confine

these costs to the minimum or accept to pay them in specific issue areas only. For instance, the priority

of minimum coordination seems to be highest in sustainable development and the environment. This

field actually includes UN and non-UN organizations (the EU, the CE, the OESC, NATO, the IMF, the

World Bank, the WTO, etc.), as well as numerous NGOs and the private sector. To set up “partnerships”

(as the stakeholders call hem) between “collaborative bodies” (our vocabulary) an organization must

create, first, a specific office to serve as the interface between it and its “partners”viii.

Within the UN system, examples are numerous, like the “Money matters” initiative within the

UNDP involving private pension funds, or the UNCTAD program for small and middle sized enterprises

14

(EMPRETEC). Once some basic agreement has been achieved a shuttle begins between the IGOs

involved. Preparatory committees work out joint drafts proposals for forthcoming conferencesix. The

various UN coordination offices meet continuously devoting considerable time to help the various

specialized agencies getting along togetherx. Paradoxically, some agencies must be especially created to

coordinate other agencies’ operations and programs, which eventually fail to serve as an effective

system-wide coordinating mechanism due to its incapacity to solve funding problems. At that point, they

tend to become super think tanks, like UNEP and its predecessor, the Commission on Sustainable

Development (CSD): both were “superimposed on existing inter-organizational systems”xi. “[N]either

UNEP nor CSD were given primary responsibility to take on operational functions that might interfere

with the work of others” like UNDP and the World Bank (Weiss, Forsythe and Coate 2004: 254-5).

Coordinating agencies are not cooperative if they are deprived of the means to implement the collective

recommendations that they jointly made. Since they have little resources of their own to perform well

they only play a “performative” function. UNCTAD facing the more powerful WTO is a good example

of such an adjustment of the weaker to the stronger (Finger and Magarinos-Ruchat 2003). Since

cooperation is an asymmetric activity, be it within or outside the UN system, in order to avoid this

imbalance of power most IOs try to stop at an early coordinating stage (as UNEP and UNDP) while

some of their partners try to build an enlarged network of cooperation that is more enduring and

exhaustive (as do the World Bank, the International Maritime Organization, the UN regional economic

and social commissions in cleaning the seas). This gives consistency to our third proposition.

A variant of this strategy of mechanical and minimum collaboration can be best described as

“harmonization” of procedures, statistical methodsxii, the use of emblems, logos, and standards.

Harmonization may either be of the outward oriented partnership type or used as inward directed

harmonization. These schemes fall short of full-fledged cooperationxiii.

The offensive approach: controlled overlap

In the early 1990s security and defense institutions (like the UN and NATO) where confronted

with the risk to become obsolete: the traditional functions of peacekeeping (UN) and deterrence (NATO)

were no longer appropriate to counter the new security challenges. At approximately the same time

economic and financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank could no longer ignore

humanitarian, environmental, and developmental issues. A former managing director of the World Bank,

Jessica Einhorn, gives an accurate view of this IGO predicament. According to her, the problem at the

World Bank is that “[w]ords like ‘comprehensive’ and ‘holistic’ have come into common use as the

bank struggles to encompass its agenda”xiv. As a consequence, the organization had to put its specialized

goals into perspective with other goals being pre-requisites of its own success such as free elections, or

well-functioning state institutionsxv. The accumulation of tasks seems not only to be a major threat to the World Bank, but also to

every IO, forced against the will of its leaders into a growingly albeit unending “holistic journey”. Such

15

a “catch-all” trend is likely to entail some loss of legitimacy since the expectations about performance

will outgrow actual outcomes as a function of the growing gap between more and more diffuse goals and

an unchanging knowledge about how to implement each of them. To get around this potential dilemma

the organization can redefine its mandate in such a way as to benefit from its inclusion without being

siphoned off in this process. For instance, contrary to its constitution (its “Articles of Agreement”) the

World Bank eventually decided to address corruption issues albeit in a “non political” way, and to limit

its intervention to sponsoring free elections and good governance in the countries that were most

stridden by this economic woe.

Given its offensive strategy the extension of the World Bank’s original mandate and the

elaboration of its programs on corruption are twofold: first, the global linkage between economic

development and political reform which eventually leads the bank “fostering democratization

movements” and supporting “community empowerment” is a redefinition of its activities that “would

have been considered off-limits for Bank funding in the past” when the Bank stuck to its questionable

assessment of “the state as providing a neutral space between market economy and civil society”.

However, departing from its initial mandate is in turn boosting the hegemonic trend of the Bank since it

can no longer just “issue statements about unacceptable high-levels of corruption while distancing itself

from the leadership changes and political turmoil that result” (Marquette 2004 : 415-8 ; 426). To solve this new

problem, the follow-up must be delegated to other IGOs and even left to some NGOs. Rather than going

it alone and bear the costs and critics of the potential pitfalls of mandate extension, the organization now

reaches out to other institutional partners who will take care of some of the components of the global

problems they initially had the mandate to solve selectively. Since “the [World] bank’s role is now

growing in matters such as biodiversity, ozone depletion, narcotics, crime and corruption”; these issues,

all “rooted in a global concern”, will be better addressed through a sound cooperation with, respectively,

UNDP, UNEP and UNCD (Einhorn 2001: 32).

This kind of expansionist strategy nonetheless produces unexpected spill over effects, and ends up

in “confused”, “unrealistic”, if not inflated and overstretched, mandates (Weiss, Forsythe, and Coate:

255) eventually resulting in “tentative” actions” (Marquette 2004: 426). They also risk being trapped in a

maze of intellectual inconsistencies, which the World Bank experienced when “[I]t assume[d] that

certain ways of organizing society are more worthy than others, while arguing that this is not an

inherently political decision” (Marquette 2004: 419). This is not all: the World Bank also had to become

sensitive to environmental issues, due to the growing pressures of its stakeholders, mostly the United

States Congress (Nielson and Tierney 2003/2005), this being facilitated by the existing departure from

its former technical and neutral stancexvi.

Towards fine-tuned strategies

Confronted to the necessity to opt for either a defensive or an offensive strategy IOs may

eventually find out that such dichotomy is more or less theoretical rather than real. In our world, there is

16

something between risk averse and risk taking attitudes: the magnitude of the networks that are jointly

built by IOs and the density of their ties matter.

Interorganizational networks of the hegemonic kind able to invest in such intermediary ventures

are still too few. Centralized networks could be eventually built around core IGOs, primarily the World

Bank and the WTO. The saliency of these two organizations is now so great that they may broke

unlikely agreements, such as the connection between the World Trade Organization and the High

Commissioner on Human Rights–“trade related humanitarian issues” being jointly addressed by

delegations of both institutions. The WTO is also constitutionally linked to the WIPO in the case of

“trade related intellectual property” problems (TRIPS). WIPO has the administrative experience and the

capacity to deal with such issues, altogether with a practical possibility to implement joint plans,

whereas WTO derives its power from the Dispute Settlement Mechanism. As far as drug patents are

concerned, the WTO is also connected with the WHO, since pandemics in poor countries justify

exemption clauses to the existing trade agreements. The WTO and the FAO jointly manage the Codex

Alimentarius, each relying on its own norms (“food availability” versus “food security”, itself a far cry

from NGO’s aspiration to “food sovereignty”).

Normally the WTO prevails in every case because its decisions are mandatory and not just

recommendations: it is therefore the most powerful organization of the trade and intellectual property

network. In most cases, however, knowledge and experience rest with WTO’s partners, which are the

only ones able to assess in terms of expertise the feasibility and the originality of the proposals

presented. Their influence may surge from the fact that the proposed measures are unpractical; or they

may already exist but are ignored and have never been implemented. Of course, in the real world it is

difficult to make a clear-cut distinction between a “powerful” organization like the WTO, and

“influential” organizations like its partners in the field. Some of them, moreover, remain dependant on

less powerful organizations because of their being functionally complementary. The WTO or the World

Bank’s achievements are conditioned to the participation of their minor partners in the networks to

which they themselves belong with UNESCO, UNICEF, UNIFEM, etc., and where their capacity to

generate money gives them leverage on major partners. Knowing this, the WTO’s (or World Bank) staff

members may be convinced that the impact of any pending decision on partner institutions needs to be

considerate. They know that a red line exists that cannot be crossed without undesirable consequences,

such as retaliation or defection in future partnerships.

In this process, institutions operating in the same realm tend to turn their occasional collaboration

on specific projects into a permanent working relationship. Admittedly, the most “powerful”, endowed

with some enforcement capacity, will have the last word. However, those that are endowed with moral

authority will use this resource by making intellectually solid proposals such as suggesting new norms.

As a rule the less powerful they are, the more creative and imaginative they tend – one could also say

need – to be. IOs that are neither linked to growth, development nor defense adopt innovative concepts

hoping that these will lead to the implementation of new norms to be enforced later on by the most

17

powerful of them. Cooperation between institutions with hard power and institutions with soft power is

therefore the most probable success route for the promotion and dissemination of new concepts and

norms (Schemeil and Eberwein 2009).xvii

Whereas deterrence concepts developed within security organizations (like the UNSC, the IPC,

NATO, ASEAN, etc.), and arbitrages made by “economic” institutions (such as the IMF, the World

Bank, the WTO) involve some actual power, institutions like UNESCO, UNEP, the WHO, the ILO, the

IPCC active in the social or environmental issue areas rely more on knowledge: they benefit from a

pervasive influence. Because hard and soft power may be elegantly combined to make joint decisions

within networks of interdependence, this relative asymmetry of leverage is an individual weakness that

eventually turns into a collective strength.

In the next section we shall now discuss with more depth some theoretical problems that remain to

be solved in future research.

Section 4. Discussion

Conceptually the different forms of cooperation among international organizations can be clearly

delineated and related to a particular set of causes within the package of mandate enlargement as an

explanatory variable. In reality, however, the distinction between modalities and degrees of cooperation

is hard to measure with precision. It is very likely that in addition to the drivers previously identified in

this paper conjuncture and context help explain why IOs privilege some modalities over others. For

instance, who has solutions to a common challenge may well benefit from the opportunity to be

positioned at the center of the cluster and helps solve a collective problem. Another difficulty in

applying theory to reality is the ratio between drivers and inhibitors of cooperation. There always are, of

course, unintended effects of the most strategic behavior, and new risks are taken just to avoid global

uncertainty. Individual IOs’ mandate enlargement and cooperative strategies inevitably affect the whole

problem-solving structure states have set up through the creation of international organizations: one’s

organization’s upgrading may imply one or even more than another organization’s downgrading. If this

is correct, the consequences of individual IOs’ strategies produce a state of unstable equilibrium in

which policies are suboptimal. In such a situation, assessing correctly the costs, risks, benefits and

promises of cooperation may be nearly unfeasible. Let’s see how this property of the global system

impacts IOs’ propensity to cooperate.

From autonomous structures to interlocked Structure

Prior to stretching out IOs’ boundaries is the successful marketing of new concepts that suggest

the necessity of integrating several functionally specific issues in order to address them globally and

convert ideas into norms – a process which is tightly associated with mandate enlargement. Stakeholders

(member states, sponsors, experts, or activists) will tacitly or implicitly accept this empowerment of IOs

for the sake of efficiency. This, in turn, ends up into the upgrading of an organization’s status from a

18

functional or local role to a more general or global mandate that is linked up with some other

specialized agencies and programs, as well as NGOs and other non profit actors. This is how the process

is spiraling into more cooperation, and more overlap, although the actors involved did not purposefully

aimed at such an endgame.

If some organizations upgrade their status once their original or additional goals are reached,

either individually or in combination with some other organizations, this will have consequences for the

structure of the whole system of international organizations. One of the consequences is the sidelining of

not the downgrading of initially predominant IGOs. Such a development is beyond the control of the

individual organizations concerned. Both the IMF and the World Bank are telling cases. The WTO, born

as an auxiliary institution, tends now to challenge them as powerful members of the club of its founding

fathers. In other words, agencies tend to overcome their principal(s) while claiming that in becoming

more general in outlook they are only fulfilling their specific functional mandate. This phenomenon can

also be observed for regional organizations such as the European Union, the inter-American

organizations, the Arab and Islamic ones, the Central Asiatic institutions, etc. (Harders and Legrenzi

2008). They all tend to duplicate functions of global institutions by continuously expanding their own

mandate in order to adjust to the pace of global system changexviii.

To draw a parallel with the well documented spillover effect, we may call this new trend a

spiralling effect, since at each stage the equilibrium achieved between global organizational actors,

although unstable, is nevertheless higher and deeper than one circle earlier. Of course, such a dynamics

create winners and losers. IGOs that successfully impose to their principals (the states) an enlargement

of their mandate and force potential rival organizations to collaborate with them will benefit from a

consolidated status: accordingly, they will use their newly-acquired influence to legitimate or re-

legitimate their action. IOs suffering from insulation, or, alternatively, from undue overlap, and are

threatened by a merging process may to the opposite be downgraded if not eventually shut down. In

spite of this theoretical expectation, even powerful organizations in the real world may be reluctant to

cooperate with others. The solution of this contradiction between theory and reality may be that other

IOs may consider that cooperation will weaken their position in the inter-organizational competition for

resources and influence, which translates into limited mandates and diminishing budgets. Lacking a

guarantee that enlarging their mandate to the point where overlapping with other IOs’ assignments

becomes a source of conflict, quite a number of organizations are reluctant to engage in cooperative

ventures – or they do it with caution.

From specialization to cooperation

To avoid such a dilemma IOs may first adopt a specific individual strategy: specialization within

an enhanced division of labor. This approach provides them with a “brand name” and a greater impact

on the “market” for their “products”. Specialization makes them irreplaceable. IGOs like the WMO, and

the WHO can market forecasts about weather, climate change, draughts, and pandemics. The WIPO is

19

emerging on the “regulating the Internet” and “fighting the digital divide” scene with an increasingly

known brand name of its own. Specialization also leads structurally to greater heterogeneity, which may

either imply greater fragmentation or, alternatively, new opportunities for cooperative strategies. To

illustrate this last point, take the UN sponsored “Committee on Bioethics”. As told in its website, “[I]n

March 2003, representatives of a number of United Nations organizations and specialized agencies

established the U.N. Inter-Agency Committee on Bioethics to promote coordination and cooperation

among themselves and other regional and international inter-governmental groups that deal with the field

of bioethics, including its human rights aspects and other related issues.”xix This is quite an enlargement,

indeed: once “related issues” are understood as intellectual property and trade in services problems, the

mandate become dramatically complex. Cloning, experimenting on fetuses and animals, trafficking

human organs, attributing intellectual property rights to “inventors”, etc. seems the most difficult to

handle. One thing is clear, however: the IOs that are associated in this enterprise take the opportunity of

an emerging global problem to progress in their own quest for a renewed legitimacy, and to give a new

impulse to their mandate. The text explicitly lists the FAO, ILO, UNHCR, UNESCO, WIPO, and WHO,

with an interesting precision: “[O]ther international organizations are participating as Associate

Members” – a way to give them a minor status although the WTO, INTERPOL, the OESC, the Council

of Europe, or the World Islamic Organization could play a growing role in that matter.

Secondly, since IOs staff members prefer to retain their autonomy (Reinalda and Verbeek 1998,

2004), cooperation is not among their top priorities. Theoretically, they should indeed try to retain if not

to enhance, their respective status within the hierarchy of the IO community. In that sense their behavior

may be compared to that of the states. Yet their power base is by no means the predominant or exclusive

condition accounting for their ability and willingness to adapt to changing environmental conditions. As

a general proposition we suggest that IOs can turn their weakness into strength and their lack of

autonomy into room for maneuver by choosing the cooperative strategy that is the most appropriate to

their role, structure, culture, and status within the international community. Their first challenge is

therefore to identify this appropriate strategy and possibly change options when the context evolves.

Thirdly, a corollary to this general proposition is that such an objective can be achieved if and

only if IOs successfully convert their expertise and legitimacy into power. Every international

organization independent of its original power status with which it has been endowed by the states or by

militants can in effect prevail and improve its position by using these two resources whether or not it

lacks sufficient material and financial endowments. The accumulated knowledge within an IGO,

noteworthy when it is validated by states and NGOs as amounting to real competence, is a necessary

resource to claim that an issue is so complex that they alone can address it, instead of their potential

competitors (other IOs, or even states). The expert IGO is successful in “marketing” its ideas and

reframing a simple and specific issue into an allegedly complex problem. This contributes to enlarge the

existing power base of individual IGO as in the case of “intellectual property”, a label covering

heterogeneous issues: copyrights on creative work and industrial designs; patents; folklore; radio

20

emissions; and Internet domain names. WIPO succeeded to have its mandate enlarged through the

institutional merger of two formerly independent “bureaux”. In this process, the WIPO managed to keep

some control of these new fields, which were simultaneously explored by the WHO, FAO, and

UNESCO – all of them vying for the hegemonic power with the WTO itself. WIPO consolidated its

position relative to the WTO (as its main partner within the TRIPS agreement), and offered a common

denominator to the three other organizations. This extended mandate considerably redefined the

“intellectual property” issue beyond American expectations (since the U.S. government tried hard to

confine property issues to the WTO, and Internet management to ICANN, each strategy conceived to

eliminate the major actor of the field, the WIPO and the ITU). Knowledge or expertise may be a

necessary condition for an IO to demonstrate its importance but it is not a sufficient one. In fact acute

expertise can lead to extreme insulation. A case in point is the FAO. Since the 1960’s excellent

agronomists have been working closely together. Yet in the 1990’s they all missed the opportunity to get

involved in the global negotiations on agriculture and trade barriers conducted within the framework of

the WTO. They also refrained from connecting themselves to the WMO where irrigation issues were

debated. Whatever the reasons for this isolationism, the FAO progressively lost its leverage on

multilateral decisions dealing with hunger and growth of the primary sector’s output (Fouilleux 2005). It

even lost control of seeds and vegetal or animal species engineering, which was transferred to the WIPO,

due to the latter bandwagon effect of WTO’s victory.

Fourthly, as crucial as the role of knowledge may be, a necessary condition for its transformation

into power is that this strategy does not interfere with state interests. This is above all related to a

situation where the consequence would be the unwelcome mandate enlargement of any IO depending on

states for its funding. For instance, a lot of expertise has been accumulating over the years within NATO

by its coordination committee (COCOM). At the time the Berlin Wall fell, the COCOM had supervised

the export of dual use technologies to communist countries. Even though NATO’s mandate was

reinterpreted in order to free it from its initial exclusion of out-of-area activities, COCOM was so to

speak “outsourced” to a “quasi non governmental” forum, the Wassenaar Arrangement – a loose

grouping of governments represented by persons and shaped as an NGO.

Still different was the reaction of the states when the WHO, UNEP, the UNHCR, and the IAEA

moved into the armament field in the year 1996. Their objective was to observe and evaluate the impact

of depleted uranium weapons on human and economic life. To this end, the UN first established the

Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic radiation (UNSCEAR) that had been created in another

context, which involved some of its agencies. Within the World Health Organization depleted uranium

and ionizing radiations cancer fears are under review. The UNEP had benefited from several channels of

information on these topics, particularly on the ground (noteworthy in Iraq and the Balkans) to increase

the public awareness on the issue. The IAEA was endowed with its more confidential International

Nuclear Information System, a forum harboring studies on precedent nuclear disasters including

Chernobyl. The UNHCR adopted a more critical stance in its special reports on child and other

21

casualties allegedly due to the debated use of depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf war. This multi-

stakeholders cooperation was directed against the UN hegemonic founding fathers, the United States and

its Allies on two of the major post Cold war military theaters. As was to be expected the states strongly

opposed these activities. In the end this cooperative venture failed; even the highly specialized IAEA

was unable to convert its expertise into power.

Summing up our arguments, expertise is a critical determinant in the relative weight of an

international organization within a network; therefore accumulating knowledge before joining a network

may be an adequate strategy that will mechanically accompany mandate enlargement. This, however, is

always placed under the shadow of power. To control overlap instead of trespassing jurisdiction, IOs

will try to upgrade their expertise through access to higher and more specialized knowledge, and vie for

a central position within a network of interdependence. Discounted success in both realms may be a

strong incentive to cooperate.

Section 5. Concluding remarks

In this paper, we started from the assumption that cooperation is a necessity for an organization’s

survival; and we conditioned the occurrence, width, and depth of collaborative attitudes to an

organization’s propensity to enlarge its initial mandate. As we argued mandate enlargement is vital in

the tough competitive process among IOs for survival. To succeed in this process, IOs must

simultaneously bargain some of their individual autonomy for more cooperative relationships with other

IOs. Additional conditions to make an IO opt for more cooperation depend on utility functions (benefits

expected from building (?) or accessing an already existing powerful, resourceful and legitimate network

on the one hand; hereby diminishing transaction costs and coordination costs, on the other. Structural

and relational positions are of the essence within networks (centrality, homophily, connectedness,

betweenness) and within the international order (context, conjuncture).

Summary

Some of our preliminary findings are of note here. Firstly, even in an institutionalized world power

matters: the more influential, reputational, and nodal IOs are, the more likely they will pursue a

proactive strategy and collaborate with others. Less powerful agencies in contrast will more likely opt

for defensive strategies through autonomy preservation and intensive specialization, consenting to some

coordination between substructures, or accept some selective collaboration with others. Secondly,

expertise plays a critical role in explaining which interaction strategy will be chosen. As expected, IOs

are by definition knowledge-based institutions. In a world getting more and more complex, expertise is

an asset that can be converted into power and legitimacy (Schemeil 2004). This conversion is completed if

each individual organization is successful in “marketing” specific ideas or concepts that become

integrated into the political debates and become worldviews. Alternatively, specialization in research is

another path an organization can take, thereby becoming an inevitable “service organization” for other

22

IOs (as UNCTAD did with the WTO about trade an development; or UNEP for the WHO in prohibiting

possible sources of pandemics; or South Center and the International Center for Trade and Sustainable

Development, ICTSD, with the WTO). Of course, the legitimacy of ideas overcomes the legitimacy of

functions, but both types of IOs may cohabit within the same network. At any rate, once the organization

has a certain amount of recognized legitimacy this asset can as easily be traded with other organizations

for other resources than knowledge or influence.

Thirdly, we also stated that the overall structure of cooperation is the aggregate and somewhat

unintentional outcome of considerate individual strategies. It is determined by the independent moves of

each IO, which in the end converge towards interdependent networks. Cooperation does not stem only

from a well-ordered process of mutually adjusting wills; it is also the result of the heterogeneous

mechanisms produced by the many interactions between world actors. Consequently, tactical moves and

minor changes in routine activities are all conducive to systemic changes at the global level of

cooperation. Relationships between IOs slightly and gradually moved from indifference to mutual

exchange of information, then to dialogue, before eventually reaching the level of true participation in

joint projects. In that process, the transition from a level of cooperation to another is conditioned to

learning, benchmarking, and isomorphism (imitating successive strategies).

Whether intended or unintended, interorganizational cooperation has become a central fact in the

daily life of international organizations. It seems that these agents are learning faster than their principals

still caught in the illusion of their centrality in international politics. The most advanced IGOs on the

way towards institutionalization, for instance, recently opted for an alliance with NGOs (Schemeil

2009). In this process of “mutual recognition”, in which the intergovernmental institution opens its doors

to non governmental activists who soft-pedal their critics, a reinforcement of the two kinds of

organizations occurs: this means that the states will have increasing difficulties in trying to retrieve their

power and control over the former, and ban the latter from access to major decisions taken within

multilateral forums. As a consequence, organizational networks become even denser, more

heterogeneous and multi-leveled, i.e. more difficult to control by states representatives.

Limitations

Let us conclude by telling what was left aside of our research design for the time being: the position

of governments on interorganizational cooperation. Will they help build cooperative networks or not?

States seem to be much less inclined that the most adventurous IGOs to encourage collaborative

tendencies. They prefer to see IGOs stick to their original mandate even when they endorse some

bounded and possibly reversible enlargement. Accordingly, they multiply the number of specialized

agencies operating in the same field (as the UNHCR and IOM). They also create Funds to split their

investment on particular activities (like combating pandemics or mitigating climate change) in order to

deprive IOs from excessive concentration of financial resources. They invite interest groups expected to

23

fence off IOs initiatives to world ministerial conferences, as in the medical drugs or GMO issues. They

sign bilateral agreements without passing through multilateral organizations.

Alternatively, states may encourage those IOs they control to fully cooperate with each other,

especially when some have a comparative advantage that could make them prevail over rivals in the

competition for scarce resources (funding, member state support, legitimacy in the media). In that case

and in that case only organizations that are ordinary very much risk-averse will bluntly look for

hegemony, possibly with the encouragement of a hegemonic statexx. Paradoxically, states call at the

same time for cooperation if not for a real symbiosis of those organizations that are addressing

intertwining issues. They may compel IGOs to cooperate as in fighting against crime (Interpol, UNCD,

and IOM being for instance instructed to share information and resources against mafias exploiting

migrants and internally displace persons or refugees). They ay also encourage them to outsource

activities – hence avoiding costly processes of partnership on an equal footing in realms of sovereignty

(as was the case for the USA in Iraq, Cooley 2013). In both cases, the states, not the IGOs themselves,

are building cooperation between organizations.

Hence, in the long run the germs of a system more centered on IOs exists. Whereas states’ leaders

and IGOs’ staff members resist ex ante every paramount scheme for cooperation, and in spite of the

motivations that end up in partnerships both eventually contribute ex post to establishing and

legitimating new cooperative webs.

Suggestions for future explorations of the NGO cooperation relationship

As the foregone article has shown we know more about mandate enlargement and

interorganizational cooperation between IGOs, but there still is a considerable number of issues that

need to be elaborated theoretically and analyzed empirically. This is even truer for NGOs. Generally

speaking we are safe in assuming that NGOs as well as IGOs are confronted with the same cooperation

dilemma. However, survival not cooperation is probably the primary problem of NGOs since only a few

do not have to rely on public funding (Médecins sans Frontières, Greenpeace or Amnesty International).

However, the conditions that determine their options to go alone or join forces with others differ quite

significantly for NGOs as compared to IGOs:

1. Even though both types of organizations are – at least in principle – dedicated to the production of

global public goods in different issue areas, IGOs’ creation depends on governments while NGO

survival depends on societies – in particular individuals and groups willing to join forces in order to

support them in their objectives.

2. A fundamental difference is that for NGOs, in terms of interorganizational cooperation, the

problem seems to be closer to its equivalent in the economic sector than to the way it exists in the

international political multilateral system: there are many actors active in the same field (be it an

automobile sector or humanitarian NGOs working in the assistance domain). Therefore competition is in

24

principle a central issue contrary to IGOs that were at least in principle designed to complement each

other.

3. Whereas enlargement is a sensitive external issue for IGOs as it does in fact rely on the agreement

of the principals involved (unless the agents move to bypass their principals’ authority); for NGOs

enlarging their missions is primarily an internal decision. Whether this will actually result in public

support or more public funding is another matter.

Within the general background of the central propositions so far developed in the paper essentially

for the IGOs, the following remarks will briefly assess their potential validity for the non-governmental

sector – even though we shall refer exclusively here to the humanitarian sector. There are two reasons

for this limitative choice. First of all, governments and IGOs have to rely on the services provided by

emergency relief non-governmental organizations. Secondly, NGOs in other sectors are primarily

advocacy organizations that do not deliver services as their primary task.

Let us now take up a few of the core issues addressed in the paper.

A. Mandate enlargement: for IGOs, it is in fact a function of the changing environment (i. e. climate

change), which requires IGOs to adapt to these changes, one possibility being to pursue a strategy of

mandate enlargement. As said, this is not easy to achieve for the reasons enumerated in the text, as it will

necessarily imply the overlap with other IGOs if not encroachment on their activities. For the

humanitarian NGOs in contrast the trend over the last 30 years (if not more) has been a continuous

process of mission enlargement, as a function of increasing specialization and functional differentiation,

or what one can subsume under the heading of professionalization (Eberwein and Saurugger 2013). As

the relevant humanitarian NGOs are concerned they all go in the same direction, thus potentially

increasing the competition among them.

B. Cooperation: notwithstanding the fact that competition is a structurally built in condition in the

humanitarian NGO world, this fact does not exclude cooperation at all. We can distinguish several

aspects of cooperation, according to its level and to its perimeter. Starting with the level of cooperation it

may be implemented at the top level of the organization or at the field level. Viewed by the top

management, competition seems to prevail over cooperation. This can be explained by the leaders’

desire to maintain the specific organizational culture and identity that distinguishes their specific

organization from the others. MSF is the prototypical example of this. A network like VOICE for

example is forced to find compromises in its decisions that are based on the consensus of its members.

Decisions will therefore normally be suboptimal. At field level the hypothesis in need to be tested

systematically is that cooperation dominates if and only if it serves the objective of alleviating suffering.

An example is the Somalia Resilience Consortium, SomRep, created at the initiative of World Vision,

which invested nearly one million dollars to establish it and helped it drafting its five-years program.

Other members contribute according to their resources to the funding of the Secretariat of the consortium

(with a total amount of 200.000 dollars). This Secretariat (7-12 persons) includes seven NGOs (ACF,

ADRA, CARE, COOPI, DRC, OXFAM, and World Vision itself).

25

As for the perimeter of cooperation, we may distinguish the national level, the regional level and the

professional one. At the national level, networks such as InterAction in the USA, Coordination Sud in

France, or Venro in Germany are built. At the regional (e.g European) level we find VOICE in Brussels,

or ICVA that includes NGOs belonging to the North and to the South. Notwithstanding how far

cooperation actually goes it is obvious that the networks just mentioned are primarily oriented towards

expertise and advocacy. We can further assume that cooperation will vary in terms of intensity and scope

depending on the respective level: lowest at the international level and highest at the national level. No

studies are available yet to evaluate the impact of these different networks. The last type of networks are

the so-called professional networks such as ALNAP or HAP-I, they focus on specific aspects to improve

the quality of humanitarian action.

What needs to be remembered though is that at least in part coordination and cooperation have not

been initiated by the NGOs alone. The consortium approach, for example, has been more or less been

enforced by the donor community. Another example of imposition from above is the humanitarian

reform process launched by the UN in 2005, which has contributed to improve coordination and

cooperation in the field through the so-called cluster system. This is just to indicate the relative

vulnerability of the humanitarian NGOs because of their dependence on public funding. This is also true

even though not so pronounced for private funding.

What is unclear and in need of systematic research are the mechanisms of coordination and

cooperation between NGOs and IGOs. The first step towards working together is the accreditation

process. Over the years IGOs accredited more and more NGOs, some being privileged over others by

their staff. Obtaining registration by ECOSOC in New York, for instance, is less attractive for an NGO

than having direct access to the specialized UN agencies through accreditation. Because it is more

exclusive, recognition by the WTO is particularly praised.

IGOs in turn may use NGOs in order to increase their legitimacy and to use the specialized

knowledge NGOs with their field experience command. This could lead to the building of coalitions

between IGOs and NGOs in order to increase their mutual leverage against governments (Schemeil

2009). In some cases there already exist such formalized coalitions such as the International Union for

the conservation of nature or ILO.

To sum up this brief overview it is obvious that we are – as stated earlier – only at the beginning to

identify the domain of interorganizational relations, both for of IGOs and NGOs. Complex structures

have developed over the years, which have only been superficially identified thus far. Much more

research is needed to explain their appearance and their evolution. Although we made occasional

reference to network analysis much more research is required before including its most recent

advancements in a theory of global interorganizational cooperation. It will also be necessary to delineate

with more precision the formats of cooperation that may be either selected among existing models or

develop new ones fitting particular IGOs or NGOs. Finally, clarifying the distinction, as well as the link,

between coordination and cooperation is from now on an imperative.

26

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Endnotes

i Jervis, 1999, 43, assumes that realists accept “that cooperation and the presence of institutions are

correlated”; however, “it does not follow that cooperation can be increased by establishing institutions”. ii The words “cooperation”, “coordination”, and “collaboration” are not included in the index of the

Barnett and Finnemore’s book about international organizations (2004). iii March and Olsen 1998: 956. That could also be due to the irrationality of rationalization, or

bureaucratic universalism. iv Even if agreement exists at the strategic or policy making level, the implementation of a jointly agreed

upon program may not work: this would noteworthy be a consequence of the separation of decision making and policy making at the international level from implementation made at the domestic level. Good examples would be the Millennium Project, with the reduction of poverty by 50 percent; or the Kyoto Protocol to ceil the CO2 emissions by 2012 to the levels of 1990. These are clearly strategic decisions: how they are eventually translated into concrete action plans is but one part of the problem, the other part is whether the implementation of these action plans leads to the desired outcomes.

v According to Waltz, however, international structures are not markets: hence, states cannot make common efforts to achieve « the joint production of goods for their mutual benefits. » (1979: 107).

vi Actually it is so rich that its former Secretary General proposed the cancelling of state contributions to its budget. This proposal was rejected because the majority of the member states were determined to retain some control of the organization’s policy.

vii According to Einhorn, again, “there is no compelling reason as to why the bank should consider judicial reform as a development task under its umbrella rather than passing the job to an organization staffed by lawyers and judges. (…) Similarly, the bank’s great vision and (much maligned) adoption of cultural heritage as a development objective would stand to gain if such an objective could be farmed out to an organization with more corresponding interests.” (Einhorn 2001, 33).

viii One example of this process of cooperation between UN and non-Un structures is the WTO’s SG participating regularly (four times a year) to the UN structure of coordination, whereas less prominent members of the WTO’s Secretariat are invited from time to time to attend specific meetings (WTO interview, 24-1-07).

ix Of course, there is a “Bureau for the Prepcoms” which coordinates the work of the preparatory committees (the BGLS Guide for NGOs, 2003, 23). This shows how challenging coordination is, since coordinators themselves have to be coordinated.

x There is at least one domain where cooperation is more or less taking place automatically: organizing joint conferences, like the Earth summit, the Rio Conference, and world symposiums on women, climate, AIDS, biodiversity, etc. This is of course a privilege of the UN system. Nevertheless, several non-UN and even non-governmental organizations join the UN agencies in these ventures. The private sector is also invited to contribute, bringing ideas, funds, and products, like the “Partners for Development Summit” held by UNCTAD in 1998. This same organization also sponsors country conferences, such as the 1995 summit on Uzbekistan, jointly organized with UNDP and UNIDO, and global summits like the 1999 “World Alliance of Cities Against poverty” co-sponsored by UNDP and HABITAT (Weiss, Forsythe and Coate 2004, 251). Actually, its intense activity in the cooperation business seems proportioned to its decaying operational capability since 1995 at the time the WTO was established. Because this kind of cooperation bypasses the “routine” exchanges of views, the word used to describe this kind of collaborative framework is not cooperation but “partnership” (Mezzalama and Ouedraogo, 1999). Yet as is well known this kind of partnership is clearly limited and does not necessarily translate into inter-organization cooperation.

xi However, it made possible cooperation with other IGO, like the Organization of American States (OAS) created in 1996 “to suggest the establishment and monitoring of effective collaboration and coordination mechanisms among the OAS, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and other bodies, agencies and entities of the United Nations system, along with such bodies, agencies and entities of the inter-American system as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), and other regional and sub regional organizations, institutions and programs of the Hemisphere.” (OAS website).

xii According to ESCWA website, “The Statistics Coordination Unit coordinates the activities of the "Comparable Statistics for Improved Decision-Making" subprogram, which aims to improve the statistical capabilities of countries in the region [South-East Asia] for informed decision-making and improve the availability and timeliness of comparable statistical

31

information. These activities are conducted in collaboration with the United Nations Statistics Division and other United Nations international and regional agencies for the use of harmonized statistical concepts, methodologies and questionnaires compatible with internationally recognized statistical standards. This contributes to the development of reliable, timely, standardized and customized national and regional statistics and indicators needed by policy makers, analysts, decision makers, public and private enterprises, researchers and regional and international organizations in the region.”

xiii As mentioned in the Joint Inspection Unit 1999 report “The Inspectors wish to underline, however, that sharing information and harmonizing policies and procedures should not necessarily lead to the adoption of one single set of standard guidelines for the whole United Nations system. In fact, many agencies caution that the diversity in their mandates and activities would probably not allow them to agree on anything but very general principles, and that excessively rigid procedures must be avoided at all costs. Others, however, stress the need for some common point of reference from which each Organization can make appropriate decision.”

xiv Einhorn 2001: 32. Here is indeed a vast area of investigation for the constructivists: the constructed “holistic” realities the actual professionals in charge of them struggle to give any practical meaning to, in order to be capable to implement them at some stage.

xv This is reflected in Einhorn’s statement: “Fundamentally committed to open trade, the bank initially emphasized loans to build public infrastructure (…) It believed such projects could do the most to trigger development (…) The bank then learned lessons along the way (…) and money became the vehicle for policy advice, displacing the old notion that foreign capital alone would spur (…) development (…) Economists observed a correlation between economic growth on the one hand and literacy and low population growth on the other, and eventually they accepted these and other social goals as essential inputs to development (…). By describing social goals as inputs rather than results, the bank cleared the path for a cumulative piling on of tasks over the decades, including issues of governance, participation by the poor, and anti-corruption.” (Einhorn 2001 : 23-4).

xvi In the same realm, with the creation of UNEP, “[T]he Commission on Sustainable Development was dropped into an even more complex and somewhat chaotic multi-organizational system” (Weiss, Forsythe and Coate 2004, 254). That is to say, the legitimate desire to upgrade environmental activities within the UN system ended up in some organizational mess itself detrimental to the new agency and its officers. To this ever possible organizational failure, cooperative agencies must add a “creeping politicization”, which may drift them away from their goals, upgrade conditionality criteria, and paralyze their activities, as happened to the WTO in Seattle and Cancun. Rather than gaining in flexibility and capability to adjust to a new context, IGO may be rigidified by excess in cooperation.

xvii What Judith Kelley accurately wrote when studying the cases of minority rights in former socialist countries that were candidates for EU membership, supports this proposition: “[T]he relationships between the OSCE, the CE and the EU often became intertwined because the EU relied on the OSCE and the CE for evaluation and information (…) It is quite possible (…) that the EU would not have framed the issues [of naturalization, stateless children rights, etc.] the way it did without the OSCE involvement or–more generally–that the softer actors influence the content of norms that the more instrumental actors apply” (Kelley 2004: 450).

xviii Beyond this, they also are bureaucracies, and as told by Barnett and Finnemore (2004: 43), “bureaucracies, by their nature, tend to expand in both size and scope of tasks.”

xix Emphasis added. Reference missing (website). xx Note that hegemony is not paramount, contrary to what is the rule in security issues: in each particular realm one or

several states are prominent due to the structure of their endowments–like Saudi Arabia and Iran in energy; Brazil and Indonesia in forestry; or India in fisheries. Because such hegemonic conjunctions are scarce, however, mandate enlargement for all may become an essentially uncontested imperative.