History Matters: How International Regimes Become Entrenched—and Why We Suffer for It

Abstract

International regimes are composite historical constructions. They are built-up through bricolage, as resource-strapped officials combine operational capacities, frequently turning to outside assistance. Who wins and loses-and why-when organisations are added or subtracted? What happens when inter-organisational relations are recalibrated? Why do regimes cohere as they do? By comparing the development of financial-regulatory regimes and probing other illustrative cases, I offer an explanatory framework that emphasizes the importance of timing and sequencing in determining outcomes. Thinking beyond interstate network effects and switching costs, I distil new data and theoretical insights into how and why temporality matters in global politics. I find that time structures the strategic bargaining contexts that mediate the intense distributional struggles between organisations driving key institutional reforms. The explanatory power of this framework upsets conventional wisdom whereby the distribution of state power, and the dynamics of interstate bargaining, are assumed the critical sources of institutional reform.

The global governance of international development: Documenting the rise of multi-stakeholder partnerships and identifying underlying theoretical explanations

“…In the IFCS case, states controlled the organizational design decisions, as they watered down the IMCRAM proposal put forward by IGO bureaucrats. As others have shown, bureaucratic influence over organizational design thus is limited to cases where states have no salient interests; where they lack expertise; or where they are late to the process (Johnson 2014;Johnson and Urpelainen 2014;Seddon 2017). As a result of an increasingly crowded multilateral development system, however, states are ever less able to control the dynamic implications of TGI formation.…”

Historical International Political Economy

“…But, as Allan (2019) shows, the US steadily advanced a "neoclassical growth imperative" across the postwar period, even as the content of that vision evolved over time. Regardless of the direction of change, such accounts remind us that change is the norm, that our multilateral economic institutions are always contested and always evolving, as both Seddon (2017) and Kaya (2015) describe.…”