The politics of IO performance: A framework

Abstract

International organizations, International relations, Institutions, Performance, F53, F55,

Accountability in Global Governance: Civil Society Claims for Environmental Performance at the World Bank

“…Internationally, recent research explores the importance of oversight in determining the performance of IOs (Elsig 2010, Gutner and Thompson 2010, Johns 2007, Reinalda and Verbeek 2004. The degree to which IOs can be controlled has important implications for the roles they can and should hold in international affairs ).…”

International organization: institutions and order in world politics

“…A substantial literature on "regime effectiveness" explores these issues both theoretically and empirically, with an emphasis on environmental issues (Young, 1999;Miles et al, 2002;Helm and Sprinz, 2000). Many IGOs have been subject to systematic assessments of their effectiveness, including the IMF (Vreeland, 2003), the World Bank (Flores and Nooruddin, 2009), and the UN in its peacekeeping role (Fortna, 2008), and there is increased interest in studying the performance of IGOs (Gutner and Thompson, 2010). These studies pose various methodological problems, as it is often difficult to discern the causal impact of a particular organization or set of rules in a context where many political and economic factors are at play.…”

Mainstreaming international governance: The environment, gender, and IO performance in the European Union

“…Following this introduction, the second section locates our approach in the collective theoretical framework of the IOP project (Gutner and Thompson 2010), and articulates our core hypothesis about the effectiveness of hard and soft incentives in securing IO performance on cross-cutting mandates.…”

“…2 Cross-Cutting Mandates and IO Performance: Getting the Incentives Right Gutner and Thompson (2010), in their framework article for this special issue, focus on two fundamental challenges of studying IO performance, namely the measurement of performance and the explanation of the sources of performance. On the issue of measurement, the authors offer a continuum of metrics, ranging from (1) processbased or micro indicators of narrow IO functions, through (2) "intermediate" indicators of behavior and policy agendas in IOs, to (3) the "macro" level of problem resolution and welfare enhancement.…”

“…However, as Gutner and Thompson (2010) argue, measuring IO performance through outcomes is both methodologically demanding and risks conflating the actions of member states with the performance of particular IOs. Given these difficulties, much of the previous literature on various cross-cutting mandates has focused instead on process.…”