Kenneth W. Abbott | Arizona State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Kenneth W. Abbott

Regulation & Governance, 2021

Regulators and other governors rely on intermediaries to set and implement policies and to regula... more Regulators and other governors rely on intermediaries to set and implement policies and to regulate targets. Existing literatures focus heavily on intermediaries of a single type – Opportunists, motivated solely by self‐interest. But intermediaries can also be motivated by different types of loyalty: to leaders (Vassals), to policies (Zealots), or to institutions (Mandarins). While all three types of loyalists are resistant to the traditional problems of opportunism (slacking and capture), each brings pathologies of its own. We explain the behavioral logic of each type of loyalty and analyze the risks and rewards of different intermediary loyalties – both for governors and for the public interest. We illustrate our claims with examples drawn from many different realms of regulation and governance.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2017

International Organization, 2016

The institutions of global governance have changed dramatically in recent years. New organization... more The institutions of global governance have changed dramatically in recent years. New organizational forms—including informal institutions, transgovernmental networks, and private transnational regulatory organizations (PTROs)—have expanded rapidly, while the growth of formal intergovernmental organizations has slowed. Organizational ecology provides an insightful framework for understanding these changing patterns of growth. Organizational ecology is primarily a structural theory, emphasizing the influence of institutional environments, especially their organizational density and resource availability, on organizational behavior and viability. To demonstrate the explanatory value of organizational ecology, we analyze the proliferation of PTROs compared with the relative stasis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Continued growth of IGOs is constrained by crowding in their dense institutional environment, but PTROs benefit from organizational flexibility and low entry costs, w...

International Standards and the Law, Bern: Staempfli. …, 2005

The chapters of this book paint a mixed and not particularly optimistic picture of the prospects ... more The chapters of this book paint a mixed and not particularly optimistic picture of the prospects for harnessing transnational business governance interactions (TBGIs)—the myriad overlaps, intersections, conflicts, collisions and synergies amongst the actors and institutions involved in transnational regulation of business activity—to improve the quality of transnational regulation and advance marginalized interests. This chapter synthesizes key findings about the impact of TBGIs of regulatory quality and marginalized actors, explores the implications of these findings for identifying and shaping TBGIs that foster regulatory quality or advance marginalized interests, and presents concluding reflections on lessons learned and future research directions.

International Theory, 2020

Contemporary global governance takes place not only throughs formal inter-governmental organizati... more Contemporary global governance takes place not only throughs formal inter-governmental organizations and treaties, but increasingly through diverse institutional forms including informal inter-governmental organizations, trans-governmental networks, and transnational public–private partnerships. Although these forms differ in many ways, they are all what we call ‘low-cost institutions’ (LCIs): the costs of creating, operating, changing, and exiting them, and the sovereignty costs they impose, are substantially lower on average than those of treaty-based institutions. LCIs also provide substantive and political governance benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability, and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions. LCIs are poorly-suited for creating and enforcing binding commitments, but can perform many other governance functions, alone and as complements to treaty-based institutions. We argue tha...

The Governor's Dilemma, 2020

Virtually all governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Governors prefer both t... more Virtually all governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Governors prefer both to engage intermediaries that are competent and to control intermediary behavior. But governors face a pervasive tradeoff between competence and control. Competent intermediaries are difficult to control, even with complete information, because their capacity to advance or threaten the governor’s policy goals gives them power over it. At the same time, governor control can weaken important intermediary competencies, constraining their development or exercise. The governor thus faces a dilemma: if it emphasizes control, it limits intermediary competence and risks policy failure; if it emphasizes competence, it empowers potentially opportunistic intermediaries and risks control failure. Competence–control theory explains many features of governor–intermediary relationships that other theories of indirect governance cannot: why such relationships are not limited to principal–agent delegation...

The Review of International Organizations, 2020

Yale Journal of International Law, 2000

No governor has sufficient capabilities to govern single-handedly; all governors rely on agents, ... more No governor has sufficient capabilities to govern single-handedly; all governors rely on agents, and thus become principals. The "governor's dilemma" results from the tradeoff between agent competence and principal control. Competent agents are difficult to control because their policy contributions give them leverage over the principal; principal control impedes agent competence by constraining the development and exercise of agent capabilities. If a principal emphasizes control, it limits agent competence and risks policy failure; if it emphasizes competence, it provides opportunistic agents freedom to maneuver and risks control failure. This competence-control tradeoff applies in all governance domains: democratic or autocratic, domestic or international, public or private. We extend principal-agent theory by identifying four modes of indirect governance based on ex ante and ex post control relations: delegation, trusteeship, cooptation and orchestration. We then th...

Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World, 2002

Regulation & Governance, 2013

The landscape of global governance institutions is increasingly dense, and its composition is cha... more The landscape of global governance institutions is increasingly dense, and its composition is changing. In recent years, growth in the number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) has slowed markedly, while other organizational forms — from transgovernmental networks to private transnational organizations (PTOs) – have emerged and are expanding rapidly. These system-level trends can be explained, at least in part, with organizational-level variables using the lens of organizational ecology. Two different populations of organizations – IGOs and PTOs — behave differently under conditions of institutional density, because they vary in power and strategic flexibility. IGOs are more powerful, as they are granted authority by states. Accordingly, IGOs seek to dominate and protect their “turf;” they have expanded to fill most available regulatory space, constraining further growth. But PTOs are more nimble, and so can more easily adopt strategies to avoid conflict, such as finding unoc...

The Review of International Organizations

Most issue areas in world politics today are governed neither by individual institutions nor by r... more Most issue areas in world politics today are governed neither by individual institutions nor by regime complexes composed of formal interstate institutions. Rather, they are governed by “hybrid institutional complexes” (HICs) comprising heterogeneous interstate, infra-state, public–private and private transnational institutions, formal and informal. We develop the concept of the HIC as a novel descriptive and analytical lens for the study of contemporary global governance. The core structural difference between HICs and regime complexes is the greater diversity of institutional forms within HICs. Because of that diversity, HICs operate differently than regime complexes in two significant ways: (1) HICs exhibit relatively greater functional differentiation among their component institutions, and hence suffer from relatively fewer overlapping claims to authority; and (2) HICs exhibit greater informal hierarchy among their component institutions, and hence benefit from greater ordering...

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Regulation is typically conceived as a two-party relationship between a rule-maker or regulator (... more Regulation is typically conceived as a two-party relationship between a rule-maker or regulator (R) and a rule-taker or target (T). We set out an agenda for the study of regulation as a three- (or more) party relationship, with intermediaries (I) at the center of the analysis. Intermediaries play major and varied roles in regulation, from providing expertise and feedback to facilitating implementation, from monitoring the behavior of regulatory targets to building communities of assurance and trust. After developing the basic regulator-intermediary-target (RIT) model, we discuss important extensions and variations of the model. We then discuss the varieties of regulatory capture that may appear where intermediaries are involved.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of "Orchestration" to explicate the role played... more In this paper, we introduce the concept of "Orchestration" to explicate the role played by international organizations (IOs) in an emerging form of international governance. 1 Orchestration is an approach to governance that is especially valuable for actors (such as IOs) that are weak, lack direct access to private actors or other targets of regulation (because they do not have either the authority or regulatory capacity), lack adequate decision-making capacity (because they operate under consensus-oriented decision rules in a context of heterogeneous preferences), and/or lack adequate monitoring and enforcement capacity (because they have limited authority, revenue and administrative staff). The key to Orchestration is to bring third parties into the governance arrangement to act as intermediaries between the IO and the targets of regulation, and to facilitate and coordinate the intermediaries" regulatory activities rather than try to govern the targets directly. The...

International Organizations as Orchestrators, 2014

Contemporary global governance takes place not only through formal inter-governmental organizatio... more Contemporary global governance takes place not only through formal inter-governmental organizations and treaties, but increasingly through diverse institutional forms including informal inter-governmental organizations, trans-governmental networks and transnational public-private partnerships. While these forms differ in many ways, they are all what we call “low-cost institutions” (LCIs): the costs of creating, operating, changing and exiting them, and the sovereignty costs they impose, are substantially lower on average than those of treaty-based institutions. Thus it is analytically fruitful to treat them as a distinct and common class. LCIs provide substantive and political governance benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions. LCIs are poorly-suited for creating and enforcing binding commitments, but can perform many other governance functions, alone and as complements to treaty-based institutions. We argue that the availability of LCIs changes the cost-benefit logic of institutional choice in a densely institutionalized international system, making the creation of new institutions, which existing research sees as the “last resort,” more likely. In addition, LCIs empower executive, bureaucratic and societal actors, incentivizing those actors to favor creating LCIs rather than treaty-based institutions. The availability of LCIs affects global governance in multiple ways. It reduces the status quo bias of governance, changes its institutional and actor composition, enables (modest) cooperation in times of polarization and gridlock, creates beneficial institutional divisions of labor, and expands governance options. At the same time, the proliferation of LCIs reduces the focality of incumbent institutions, increasing the complexity of governance.