Preferred Citation: Haas, Ernst B. When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6489p0mp/
 | When Knowledge Is PowerThree Models of Change in International OrganizationsErnst B. HaasUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford© 1991 The Regents of the University of California |
Preferred Citation: Haas, Ernst B. When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6489p0mp/
Acknowledgments
This little book is the result of several unsatisfactory previous attempts to grapple with the relationship between the behavior of states in multilateral encounters and the use by states of changing knowledge about nature and human affairs. It is also the result of previous efforts to ruminate about the record and fate of major international organizations. I hope I have improved on previous conceptualizations and successes in integrating the two themes.
The main stimulus for doing so was the experience of teaching a graduate seminar on international organization which, each time it was offered, left me somewhat dissatisfied. I greatly appreciate the forbearance of the participating students and value their enthusiastic and generous work in testing and improving my suggestions. I want to single out Edward Alden, Khalid Al-Ohaly, Thomas Bickford, Kenneth Conca, James Fearon, Jason McDonald, Stevens Tucker, and Takahiro Yamada as especially helpful.
Another major source of inspiration was the Berkeley Colloquium on Global Stability, a faculty group funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, devoted to the discussion of continuities and discontinuities between ecological and social theory as they pertain to international affairs. I thank my colleagues Paul Craig, John Harte, Todd Laporte, Philippe Martin, Richard Norgaard, Gene Rochlin, and Melvin Webber for more help than they realize they have given me.
Robert O. Keohane, apparently intrigued if not persuaded by these ideas, was kind enough to invite me in 1985, 1986, and 1988 to address the colloquium on international political economy he chairs at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs. In addition,
he went far beyond the call of duty in giving me a powerful critique of two drafts; he ought to be gratified by the additional work he made me do. David Collier was kind enough to let me test these ideas in his seminar on methodology of comparative studies in Berkeley.
Thanks are due to the Ford Foundation, whose grant funding a Pacific Coast colloquium on international collaboration and institutions permitted the holding of a conference in December of 1987 devoted to a discussion of the first draft.
Further constructive comments on the first draft were received from Emanuel Adler, Peter Cowhey, Jeffrey Hart, Edward Miles, John Gerard Ruggie, and Wayne Sandholtz. I thank them for the many good suggestions on which I acted and ask their forbearance for the ones I ignored. I owe a big and continuing debt to Hildegarde Haas for sometimes reminding me that it is unlikely that any single scholar will ever achieve closure.
1
Multilateralism, Knowledge, and Power
Imagine historians in the twenty-third century busily interpreting the events and documents of international relations in the second half of the twentieth century. They would note, of course, that the world was organized into separate sovereign states and that their number had tripled over the previous half-century. But they would note another curious phenomenon: even though the people who ruled these states seemed to treasure their mutual independence as much as ever, they also built an imposing network of organizations that had the task of managing problems that these states experienced in common. Sometimes these international organizations had the task of transferring wealth from the richer to the poorer states. At other times they were asked to make and monitor rules by which all the states had agreed to live. At still other times the task of these organizations was the prevention of conflict among states. In short, rulers seemed to concede that without institutionalized cooperation among their states, life would be more difficult, dreary, and dangerous. Proof lies in the number and kind of such organizations, which increased at a stupendous rate after 1945.
Our historians would also note a second phenomenon, which gathered force around 1980. Everybody seemed to be disappointed with these organizations. Some of the most powerful states sought to disengage from them. Others demanded more benefits but received fewer. The very idea of moderating the logic of the cohabitation of 160 sovereign units on the same planet with institutionalized cooperation lost its appeal. Did international organizations disappear to give rise to alternative modes of collaboration? Did states examine the reasons for their disappointment and reform the network of international organizations? Did rulers question the very principle of a world order based on sovereign and competing states? Our historians know the eventual outcome. We do not. We can only speculate about the future of international cooperation and wonder whether it will make use of international organizations. I wish to construct concepts that might advance the enterprise of systematic speculation.
The Argument Summarized
Since the speculation is to be systematic, my underlying assumptions require specification. They are as follows: All international organizations are deliberately designed by their founders to "solve problems" that require collaborative action for a solution. No collaboration is conceivable except on the basis of explicit articulated interests. What are the interests? Contrary to lay usage, interests are not the opposite of ideals or values. An actor's sense of self-interest includes the desire to hedge against uncertainty, to minimize risk. One cannot have a notion of risk without some experience with choices that turned out to be less than optimal; one's interests are shaped by one's experiences. But one's satisfaction with an experience is a function of what is ideally desired, a function of one's values. Interests cannot be articulated without values. Far from (ideal) values being pitted against (material) interests, interests are unintelligible without a sense of values-to-be-realized. The interests to be realized by collaborative action are an expression of the actors' values.
My speculations concern the future of international organizations, but my assumptions force me to consider the future as a function of the history of collaboration as that history is experienced in the minds
of collective actors: national and international bureaucracies. That history is the way "the problem to be solved" was seen at various times by the actors. What this book seeks to explain, then, is the change in the definition of the problem to be solved by a given organization . Let us take an example. In 1945 the problem the World Bank was to solve was how most speedily to rebuild war-ravaged Europe. By 1955 the problem the bank was to solve was how most effectively to spur industrial growth in the developing countries. By 1975 the problem to be solved had become the elimination of poverty in the Third World. The task of my book is to explain the change in problem definition, to make clear whether and how the implicit theories held by actors changed.
I shall argue that problems are redefined through one of two complicated processes that I call "adaptation" and "learning." These processes differ in their dependence on new knowledge that may be introduced into decision making:
|
I return to the example of the World Bank. Suppose the bank had been asked to solve problems by simply adding new tasks to old ones,
without seeking to justify industrialization as a means toward the eradication of poverty, without explaining infrastructure development projects as a means toward industrial growth, which in turn was eventually seen as a means for eliminating poverty. There was no new theory of economic development, and no cohesive group of experts that "sold" that theory to the bank's management. I call this sequence "change by adaptation." If, conversely, these successive new purposes came about as the result of a systematic pattern of subsuming new means under new ends, legitimated by a new theory of economic development advocated by an epistemic community, then the pattern conforms to what I call "learning."
I argue that adaptation can take place in two different settings, each a distinct model of organizational development. One, labeled "incremental growth," features the successive augmentation of an organization's program as actors add new tasks to older ones without any change in the organization's decision-making dynamics or mode of choosing. The other, labeled "turbulent nongrowth," involves major changes in organizational decision making: ends no longer cohere; internal consensus on both ends and means disintegrates. In contrast, learning is associated with a model of organizational change I call "managed interdependence," in which the reexamination of purposes is brought about by knowledge-mediated decision-making dynamics.
The point of the book is to suggest when and where each model prevails, how a given organization can change from resembling one model to resembling one of the others, and how adaptation can give way to learning and learning to adaptation. Therefore, a set of descriptive variables is introduced to make possible the delineation of key conditions and attributes that vary from model to model. These descriptive variables include the setting in which international organizations operate, the power they have at their disposal, and the modes of behavior typical in their operations.
Description, however, is not enough to permit us to make the judgments we seek. A second set of variables is provided to make possible an evaluation of the variation disclosed by studying the descriptive variables. These evaluative concepts stress the types of knowledge used by the actors in making choices, their political objectives, and the manner in which issues being negotiated are linked into packages.
Further evaluations are made about the type of bargaining produced by issue linkage, whether these bargains result in agreement on new ways of conceptualizing the problems to be solved, and whether new problem sets imply institutional changes leading to gains (or losses) in the legitimacy and authority enjoyed by the organization.
I foreshadow some conclusions that will be demonstrated in greater detail later. The World Bank began life in conformity with the incremental-growth model and later developed into the managed-interdependence model. The United Nations' (U.N.) collective-security practices degenerated from incremental growth into the turbulent nongrowth pattern; the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) always functioned in conformity with the turbulent nongrowth model. In the World Bank no decline in organizational power occurred. In fact, the president's autonomous ability to lead has increased over the years; merit remains the principle for selecting staff; outside consultants always serve in their personal capacity. Over the years, issue linkage was increasingly informed by technical knowledge and by political objectives of a progressively more complex and interconnected type. As new and more elaborate institutional practices developed, these also became more authoritative in the eyes of the membership, even if they did not become more legitimate as well. The innovations summarized as "peacekeeping" and associated with the special crisis management leadership style of Dag Hammarskjöld suggest that in 1956 U.N. activity relating to collective security conformed to the incremental-growth model, too. But unlike the bank, the United Nations thirty years later has become the victim of turbulent nongrowth. Earlier institutionalization and increases in authority were dissipated, no improvements in technical knowledge informed decision making, political goals became simpler and more immediacy oriented, and the leadership of the secretary-general was all but invisible. Possibly, however, the successes scored by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in 1988 will reverse this trend. UNESCO, finally, never enjoyed a coherent program informed by consensual knowledge and agreed political objectives; it suffered no decline in institutionalization and power because it had very little of these in the first place. Both authority and legitimacy declined to a nadir in 1986 after decades of internal controversy over the organization's basic mission.
So what? How does the mapping of movement from one model to another help us with the future of international organizations? I want to answer a question that not only incorporates my own uncertainty about that future but also seeks to generalize from the uncertainties against which political actors try to protect themselves. We assume that their attempts are informed by interests that are shaped by implicit theories. States acting on their perceived interests, not scholars writing books, are the architects that will design the international organizations of the future. These interests are informed by the values political leaders seek to defend, not by the ideals of observers. Actors carry in their heads the values that shape the issues contained in their briefing papers. My effort to conceptualize the process of coping with uncertainty is based on this given. Scholarly concern with the question of how we might approach the international organizations of the future relies on understanding how self-conscious actors can learn to design organizations that will give them more satisfaction than the generation of international organizations with which we are familiar. If my demonstration in this book is persuasive, it will give us the tools for saying, "If an organization of type A regularly produces certain outcomes, then this type will (or will not) serve the perceived needs of its members; therefore they will seek to design an organization of type B if they are dissatisfied or will retain type A if they are happy."
Only idealists would presume to prescribe for the future by using their personal values as the definer of suggestions. I am not an idealist. The suggestions for a particular type of organizational learning developed in the final chapter are consistent with the nonidealistic line of analysis pursued in the body of the book even though they also project my views as to what ought to be learned.
A Typology Is Not a Theory
To avoid even the appearance of inflated claims, I maintain that the typological argument I offer falls short of constituting a theory. The demonstrations just made about the World Bank, UNESCO, and the United Nations are not full explanations of what happened to these organizations; nor do they display all the causes for these events. No pretense is made that these partial post hoc explanations provide all
the ingredients needed for an informed prediction. Why then offer a typology of models of change?
I want to inquire into only one aspect of organizational life: why and how actors change their explicit or implicit views about what they see as a problem requiring collaborative measures for a solution. The "problem" can be any item on the international agenda. My dependent variable is change in the explicit or implicit view of actors in international organizations about the nature of a "problem." My inquiry, however, depends on my being able (1) to specify the interests and values held by actors and (2) to show how actors redefine interests and perhaps values in response to earlier disappointments. Moreover, I want to determine whether the processes that take place inside international organizations can be credited with the redefinition of interests and values. The idealist takes for granted that such redefining is likely to occur; scholars who stress the predominance of bureaucracies and political forces at the national capitals place the locus of change elsewhere. Granting that important changes in perception are unlikely to occur primarily in Geneva and New York, we must nevertheless hold open the possibility that some of the influences experienced there have a role in the national decision-making process that produces the changes we seek to explore. If that is true, then it also makes sense to observe international organizations in their possible role as innovators. And if international organizations can innovate, then we can inquire whether and when governments look to them as mechanisms for delivering newly desired goods and services. If governments think of international organizations as innovators, finally, we are entitled to ask how they go about redesigning international organizations to improve the solution of a newly redefined set of problems.
In what follows, then, I shall not be testing a theory. I merely experiment with the explanatory power of ideal types of organizations that reflect my conviction that the knowledge actors carry in their heads and project in their international encounters significantly shapes their behavior and expectations. My perspective is more permissive of the workings of volition, of a kind of free will, than is allowed by many popular theories of international politics. If my stance is not "idealistic," it is not "structural" either.
The structuralist argues that international collaboration of the multilateral
kind is intended to provide a collective good for the parties that bilateral relations could not provide. The provision of that good, in turn, may result in a more harmonious world—though the harmony is likely to be confined to expectations related solely to the good in question. It probably cannot be generalized into the utopia associated with idealism. As for international organizations, they are important in this causal chain only if they are necessary for providing the collective good. International organizations, therefore, are not given a privileged place in the causal chain of the structuralist.
I disagree with this stance because it tends to overstate the constraints on choice and to understate decision makers' continuing enmeshment in past experiences with collaboration mediated by international organizations. Structuralism seeks to discover various deep-seated constraints on the freedom of actors to choose. Although organizations, like any other institutions, can act as constraints, I want to look at them as fora for choosing innovations. Structural constraints may be implicit in the logic of situations, such as the condition of strategic interdependence in anarchic international systems. Belief in the power of such constraints depends on the assumption that actors respond only to present incentives and disincentives, that they never try to "climb out" of the system to reshape opportunities for gain. Strategic interdependence as a permanent constraint is compelling only as long as there is no evidence that somebody works actively toward changing the rules of the game. Modern international life is replete with such efforts. However, it is equally true that the kinds of constraints on choice that structuralists stress provide the most telling explanation as to why new international organizations are created in the first place. But if we stop our inquiry with this explanation, we never proceed to ask the questions that interest me, questions about the role of changing knowledge in the redefinition of interests.[1]
I call attention to the discovery on the part of Snyder and Diesing that even the situations of crisis they investigated under structuralist assumptions showed a wide variety of actual features with too much variation in behavior and outcome to permit the positing of a small number of structural constraints as determinants. See Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), chap. 7. Robert O. Keohane, in After Hegemony (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), concludes that even under microeconomic-structural assumptions the behavior of states in regimes is highly variable and not reliably determined by structuralist assumptions. The case for institutional constraints on behavior is explored and duly qualified by James G. March and Johan P. Olsen in "The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life," American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 734-49. My nonstructural epistemological stance is spelled out in greater detail in "Why Collaborate?" World Politics 32 (April 1980), and "Words Can Hurt You," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982). The present essay is an effort to extend and apply this view to the future of international organizations.
Theorists and metatheorists customarily differ on how a given writer is to be classified in a field of contending approaches. Even though I reject the labels "idealist" and "liberal" for my theoretical position because of the characteristics I associate with the schools of thought properly so described, I am quite comfortable with being called a "neoidealist," if we follow the description of that stance offered by Charles W. Kegley, Jr., in "Neo-Idealism," Ethics and International Affairs 2 (1988): 173-98, although I would be most uncomfortable being identified as a "neoliberal" as defined by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., in "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," World Politics 40 (January 1988): 235-51. I am most content, however, to be classed with the nonrationalistic (as he defines them) "reflective" writers elaborated in Robert O. Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32 (December 1988).
Unlike structuralists, neorealists, game theorists, and theorists of regimes, I am not offering a theory; at best I am offering a probe that might lead to a theory. I am not testing my approach against rival explanations because other approaches are not rivals. Game theory or structural explanations do not "fit better" than explanations of change derived from the interplay of knowledge and political objectives, from cognitive and perceptual observations; they "fit differently." Nor is it
my purpose to subsume or colonize other theories, or to assert my hegemony over them. Other explanations, given the questions other scholars raise, may be as valid as mine. My effort should be understood as complementary to theirs, not as an approach with unique power. Cognitive explanations coexist, epistemologically speaking, with other approaches to the study of international organizations; they do not supplant them. If I persuade the reader that the history of an organization can be viewed in the context of cognitive variables, then the reader will interpret that history in a novel form, without rendering all other interpretations obsolete. But the success of my claim to novelty still falls short of a real theory.[2]
A complete theory would have to offer an explanation of what occurred in an international organization even if the emphasis on changes in the mixture of knowledge and political objective fails. An explanation that stresses changes in available knowledge ought to be able to offer an account of the origin of that knowledge. A claim that issue linkages and bargains that represent different mixtures of knowledge and political goals explain different modes of organizational development ought to be able to specify the kinds of knowledge and goals most prominent in that history. I am able to specify only that a certain mixture was or was not present, not why it was present. I am in a position to show only that knowledge was or was not available, not how or why the actors required it.
Nor do the three models around which my interpretations are built constitute a true theory. They remain Weberian ideal types; together they constitute a typology for conceptualizing organizational change, for summing up whether and how adaptation or learning occurs. Yet the models are not just heuristic; they are intended to be "real," albeit not exhaustive, representations of what took place. They seek to abstract selectively (but not arbitrarily) from a historical series of events. The crucial point is this: the notion of causation implicit in these models is as elusive and as nonlinear as in all of Weber's typologies. My approach differs sharply from the more direct ideas of causation embedded in behavioral and in rational-choice approaches to the phenomena studied here because it rejects simple notions of causality.
Basically, I anchor my approach on this bet: the knowledge available about "the problem" at issue influences the way decision makers define the interest at stake in the solution to the problem; political objectives and technical knowledge are combined to arrive at the conception of what constitutes one's interest. But since decision makers are sentient and self-reflective beings, the conceptualization cannot stop here because decision makers take available knowledge into account, including the memory of past efforts to define and solve "the problem." They know that their knowledge is approximate and incomplete. Being aware of the limits of one's knowledge also influences one's choices. Being critical about one's knowledge implies a readiness to reconsider the finality of what one knows and therefore to be willing to redefine the problem.
This point distinguishes my approach from that of theorists of rational
choice who are inspired by microeconomics. In the logic of game theory, for instance, what matters is not the history of a perceived preference or the way a utility (interest?) came into being, but the mere fact that at the crucial "choice points," interests are what they are because preferences are as they are stipulated in game theory. It makes sense to speak of shared interests if, at the choice point, the separate interests of the bargainers happen to be sufficiently similar to permit an agreement. In my approach the decision makers are thought to be concerned with causation, with the reasons why a particular definition of their interests matter, as compared with other possible definitions. My analysis must be concerned, therefore, with the question of why particular demands are linked into packages, why problems are conceived in relatively simple or in very complex ways. Implicit or explicit theories of causation in the actors' minds imply degrees of knowledge, not merely momentarily shared interests. My theory of causation must reflect and accommodate the notions of causation assumed to be in the minds of the decision makers, notions that are true to the insight that there is always another turn of the cognitive screw to be considered.
I reiterate: the typologies that result from this mode of analysis are not truly representative of all of reality. They capture types of behavior, clusters of traits, bundles of results from antecedent regularities in bureaucratic perception that are logically possible, but not necessarily encountered frequently. Many of Weber's typologies, although exhaustive in the sociological and cultural dimensions he wished to represent, nevertheless produced sparsely populated cells. We will find that the managed-interdependence model is rarely encountered in the real world and that learning is far less common than adaptation. But then so is charismatic leadership and the routinization of charisma into bureaucratic practice.
Therefore, we will not follow the mode of demonstration preferred by those who work in the behavioral tradition. We will not seek to cull from our large list of descriptive variables those clusters of traits that most frequently "predict" (or are associated with) either successful adaptation or successful learning. Many of the descriptive variables will be shown to be weakly associated with any pattern, any regularities; some will not vary from type to type. Nevertheless, such variables will
not be permitted to "drop out" even though they explain nothing behavioral. They are real because they describe international organizations. They matter in pinpointing what is unique about international organizations, and they may turn up as more powerful in some later analysis or some new set of historical circumstances. Remaining true to a typological commitment demands that the traditional canons of causal theorizing be sacrificed to a less economical procedure that forgoes the search for clusters or straight paths as unique explanations. I am, after all, using systematic speculation and historical reconstruction to anticipate events that have yet to occur.
Knowledge, Power, and Interest
My typological approach is anchored on an additional bet, similar to the first one but less moderate: change in human aspirations and human institutions over long periods is caused mostly by the way knowledge about nature and about society is married to political interests and objectives. I am not merely asserting that changes in scientific understanding trigger technological innovations, which are then seized upon by political actors, though this much is certainly true. I am also asserting that as scientific knowledge becomes common knowledge and as technological innovation is linked to institutional tinkering, the very mode of scientific inquiry infects the way political actors think. Science, in short, influences the way politics is done. Science becomes a component of politics because the scientific way of grasping reality is used to define the interests that political actors articulate and defend. The doings of actors can then be described by observers as an exercise of defining and realizing interests informed by changing scientific knowledge about man and nature.
Therefore, it is as unnecessary as it is misleading to juxtapose as rival explanations the following: science to politics, knowledge to power or interest, consensual knowledge to common interests. We do ourselves no good by pretending that scientists have the key for giving us peace and plenty; but we do no better in holding that politicians and capitalists, in defending their immediate interests with superior power, stop creative innovation dead in its tracks. We overestimate the resistance to innovation on the part of politicians and the commitment
to change on the part of the purveyors of knowledge if we associate science and knowledge with good, with reform, with disinterested behavior, while saddling political actors with the defense of vested interests. When knowledge becomes consensual, we ought to expect politicians to use it in helping them to define their interests; we should not suppose that knowledge is opposed to interest. Once this juxtaposition is abandoned, it becomes clear that a desire to defend some interests by invoking superior power by no means prevents the defense of others by means of institutional innovations. Superior power is even used to force innovations legitimated by new knowledge, while knowledge-legitimated interest can equally well be used to argue against innovation.
Economists prefer to explain events by stressing the interests that motivate actors: coalitions of actors are thought capable of action only if they succeed in defining their common interests . Political scientists like to explain events in terms of the power to impose preferences on allies and antagonists. Sociologists tend to put the emphasis on structured or institutionalized norms and to find the origin of such norms in the hegemonial power of some group or class. My claim is that these formulations are consistent with the use of knowledge in decision making. My argument is that we need not pit these divergent formulations against each other as explanations of human choice. We are entitled to hold that interests can be (but need not be) informed by available knowledge, and that power is normally used to translate knowledge-informed interests into policy and programs. My concern is to analyze those situations in which interests are so informed and the exercise of power is so motivated, not to deal with all instances of interests, norms, and power as triggers of choice.
I return to the case of the World Bank to illustrate the possible convergence of explanations combining knowledge with interest and power. In the late 1960s the bank changed its basic philosophy of development lending from supporting infrastructure projects that were relatively remote from the direct experiences of poor people—hence the reliance on the theory of trickle-down—to the policy of supporting the advancement of basic human needs, with its implication of much more direct and intrusive intervention in the borrowers' domestic affairs in order to gain access to their poor citizens. Was new knowledge
used in motivating the shift? The shift occurred because economists and other development specialists had serious doubts about the adequacy of trickle-down policies and claimed that new techniques were becoming available to help the poor more directly. Was this knowledge generally accepted? This knowledge was generally accepted only by the coalition of donors that dominates the bank; the borrowers frequently opposed the shift and argued that the basic-human-needs approach was not in their interest. Was the shift consistent with the interests of the dominant coalition? Indeed it was, because the coalition's common interest in supporting economic development appeared to be implemented more effectively by virtue of the new knowledge.
My account shows how interest informed by knowledge reinforces the explanation of what occurred. What about power? Let us keep in mind that there are at least three different ways of thinking about power in these situations. If the hegemonial power of the capitalist class—as expressed in the instructions issued to the delegates of the donor countries—is considered, then the decision of the bank is an expression of the persuasiveness and influence of that class in foisting a realistic conception of the common interest on the dominant coalition, even though it may also be an instance of false consciousness. Suppose we ignore Gramsci and think of power as the straightforward imposition of the view of the strongest. Even though the United States is the single most powerful member of the bank, its position is not strong enough to enable it to dictate bank policy (in part because the U.S. presidents of the bank often entertained views at variance with opinions within the U.S. government). Power as direct imposition does not explain anything.[3]
The same lesson emerges from another episode in the history of the World Bank. During the 1980s the U.S. Congress sought to link the authorization of the United States' financial contribution to instructions that no loans should be made to governments that violated a number of congressional preferences in the field of economic policy and the status of human rights. U.S. representatives duly voted against such loans, but in most instances the bank's decision was made in disregard of congressional directives and U.S. votes because the other members of the bank's dominant coalition disagreed with the U.S. definition of interests; the United States' preference did not become the common interest of the coalition. Moreover, the European countries and Japan disputed the U.S. effort to "politicize" the bank's lending policy, arguing that a knowledge of economic development needs makes such efforts illegitimate. The United States' efforts to change the knowledge-informed interests failed.
That leaves a conception of power as the ability of a stable coalition to impose its will simply by virtue of its superior voting strength or as a result of its Gramscian ability to socialize and persuade its opponents into the position the coalition prefers. The new policy, then, is the common interest of the coalition, arrived at by negotiations utilizing knowledge and imposed by threat or verbal guile on the unwilling borrowers. Far from being a rival explanation of what occurred to explanations that rely on interest informed by knowledge, power simply enables us to give a more complete account without having to offer sacrifices at the jealous conceptual altars of any single social science profession.Why International Organizations Are Important as Innovators
I am arguing that some, not all, innovations in international life result from the experience of decision makers in international organizations. I am suggesting that we study multilateral processes as agents of change, not that they are the only, or even the most important, such agents. Multilateral processes provide one avenue for the transideological sharing of meanings in human discourse, not the only one. Much more may be going on in bilateral encounters and in informal contacts outside the organizational forum. But since my task is the study of international organizations, I need to stress the role of these entities in mounting innovations without denying the importance of other channels.
Experiences such as the World Bank's permit us to use the history of key international organizations as diagnostic devices for testing when and where knowledge infects multilateral decision making. I want to explore whether international organizations can provide, or have provided, a boundedly rational forum for the mounting of innovations, not a forum for furnishing a collective good determined on the basis of optimization. If we identify the manner of attaining the collective good with pure rational choice, we forget that the choice to be made is not "pure" because it is constrained by what the choosers have already experienced.[4]
James G. March, one of the theorists of decisions in organizations on whom I rely heavily, clearly explained why this approach is not considered to be in the tradition of pure rational-choice theories. Such theories "portray decision-making as intentional, consequential, and optimizing. That is, they assume that decisions are based on preferences (e.g., wants, needs, values, goals, interests, subjective utilities) and expectations about outcomes associated with different alternative actions. And they assume that the best possible alternative (in terms of its consequences for a decision maker's preferences) is chosen" (James G. March, Decisions and Organizations [London: Basil Blackwell, 1981], 1-2). The decision-making theory of direct concern to me is that which covers decision making "under ambiguity," the opposite of the conditions associated with rational-choice theories derived from microeconomics. The "correctness" of such decisions is always a matter of debate and can never be ascertained in the absence of considerable historical distance from the events. For a telling illustration of the kind of social rationality associated with decisions made in and by organizations, see Ronald Dore's discussion of "relational contracting" in "Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism," British Journal of Sociology 34 (December 1983): 459-82.
The game, for them, started some time ago. They are still enmeshed in its consequences and may seek to change the rules if they are unhappy with them. The fact is that the disappointments were, for the most part, associated with policies that were filtered through, and derived much of their legitimacy from, their place on a multilateral agenda. This is true even though such policies usually originated in the politics, the bureaucracies, and the think tanks of the member states. International organizations are part of everybody's experience because they are mediators of policies. They are a part of the international repertory of fora that talk about and authorize innovation. Hence we can study them as agents of innovation.We can do more. We can also make observations about relative effectiveness in the performance of these organizations and offer suggestions on how to improve effectiveness. In other words, we can contribute
to effective innovation on the basis of critical typological study, a task I undertake in chapter 9.
My treatment takes for granted that the goals valued by the states that set up organizations are the single most important determinant of later events. Nevertheless, such things as the task environment in which the organization must operate, its choice of core technology to carry out its tasks, and the institutional structure imposed on the staff must influence and probably constrain the attainment of these goals. A concern with institutional innovation must therefore consider environment, structure, and technology along with changing or constant goals.[5]
Gayl D. Ness and Steven Brechin, "Bridging the Gap: International Organizations as Organizations," International Organization 42 (Winter 1988), offer a detailed list of suggestions along these lines, on which my treatment draws.
It is useful to think about the theoretical literature on organizations as being concerned primarily either with decision making or with seeking to explain the persistence of structural forms. The literature on which I rely is essentially the literature on decision making constrained by organizational forms and practices. I am only incidentally interested in the persistence of organizational forms and make no consistent use of the literature in that area, though this theme will make a rather prominent appearance in the final chapter.
Must organizations remain the tools their creators have in mind when they set them up—means toward the attainment of some end valued by the creators? Or, alternatively, can international organizations become ends in their own right, become valued as institutions quite apart from the services they were initially expected to perform? If so, what kinds of innovations can or should be designed to bring about such a transition? One might also ask whether effectiveness is good for the survival and prospects of the organization as opposed to the welfare of the world in general; the two outcomes need not be mutually supportive. If they turn out to be contradictory, we might then think of design suggestions to mitigate the contradiction.
Some organizations are hierarchically structured; others are flat. Possibly, each form is optimal for the performance of some task, but not all tasks. Possibly, structure and effective performance are not well matched. If so, our comparative typological study may enable us to offer suggestions on how to adapt structure to effective performance. All organizations select a "core technology" to do their job, and the character of that technology interacts with institutional structure and task environment. It is possible, however, that the technology is not optimal for good performance, or not well integrated with the task environment or the structure. Innovations in design made apparent by historical study may then become appropriate. So can rearrangements in institutional structure, especially when it becomes apparent that better performance requires a different coordinate arrangement among several organizations active in the field. Our first step, then, is the application of organization theory to our study.
2
International Organizations: Adapters or Learners?
I wish to discover whether those who act on behalf of states believe that international organizations have been used effectively for collective problem solving or whether they ought to be used differently, more effectively. Collective problem solving among 160-odd states of widely different cultural commitments and with divergent historical memories would seem to depend on the ability to transcend cultural and historical boundaries, to establish transcultural and transideological shared meanings. Far from being a one-time event, the sharing of meanings is a continuous activity, partly mediated through the work of international organizations. These entities change the way they attempt to solve problems as their members debate effectiveness; they change by either adapting or learning. In this chapter I explore the difference between the two modes of change. International organizations are "satisficers," not optimizers. Changing them toward greater effectiveness involves the analysts' judgments about the ability of political institutions to act as innovators; this chapter explores that ability. Innovation, adaptation,
and learning, in turn, depend on the knowledge available to those who worry about the effectiveness of international organizations. Therefore, the first task of this chapter must be the exploration of the notion of consensual knowledge.
International Organizations as Problem Solvers
Designing an international organization is a political activity; it does not resemble problem solving in architecture. International organizations are coalitions of coalitions. They are animated by coalitions of states acting out their interests; these international coalitions often are expressions of coalitions of interests at the national level, both bureaucratic and societal. Domestic and international coalitions interact.[1]
Robert Gilpin coined the term "coalition of coalitions" to describe decision making by a state; the application to international organizations is mine. See Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18-19. Robert Putnam uses the same term to develop a theory of national-cum-international bargaining that is very similar to my application. See his "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games," International Organization 42 (Summer 1988): 427-60.
Design is a function of how the members of such coalitions think about their interests and values, what compromises they can strike, how they can come to reconsider and revalue their interests. Hence I shall draw on "political" organization theory to develop concepts about adaptation and learning, not on psychological, managerial, or other extant types.[2]Argyris and Schon distinguished "political" organization theory from five other types: organizations as group, agent, structure, system, and culture. Although the types are not mutually exclusive, the authors describe a political emphasis thus:)
Organizations are primarily understandable as interest groups for the control of resources and territory. Organizations are themselves made up of contending parties, and in order to understand the behavior of organizations one must understand the nature of internal and external conflicts, the distribution of power among contending groups, and the processes by which conflicts of powers result in dominance, submission, compromise or stalemate. (Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978], 328)
Learning, in a political perspective—they argue—can be studied in two ways: first, as a game of strategy, in which the analyst puts himself into the minds of the actors; and, second, as a way by which the actors achieve "collective awareness of the processes of contention in which they are engaged, gaining thereby the possibility of converting contention into cooperation" (ibid., 329).)
Let us suppose that after an initial period of satisfaction with the performance of an international organization, certain member states have become disillusioned with the ability of the organization to solve problems. I wish to discover whether member-state dissatisfaction has enabled the organizations to learn how to solve problems collectively so as once more to give greater satisfaction. We therefore have to be concerned with a sequence. First come demands formulated by members. Demands are then filtered through an organization. The formulation of a program of action in and by the organization follows. The immediate results of the program take the form of outputs: loans made, human rights violations inspected, desertification projects launched, or a peacekeeping force deployed. Outputs lead to the longer-range consequences of these steps, experienced as satisfaction or dissatisfaction on the part of the members. The core stages are (1) demands, (2) organizational agenda formation, (3) organizational program, (4) organizational output, and (5) experience with the results of the output, or outcome (Figure 1).
Strictly speaking, only the second and third steps in the sequence
Figure 1. The core stages of organizational action
take place in the organization. But obviously it is not possible to conceptualize changes of organizational form unless the consequences of organizational action or inaction as experienced by the members are made part of the analysis: the nature of the feedback from dissatisfaction with outcome to the formulation of a new set of demands is a crucial issue.[3]
My argument throughout this study will be based on how organizations process dissatisfaction; I will not address situations in which all member states are satisfied with outcomes. My reason for this choice is as follows. Organizations entrusted with a certain mission may certainly discharge their tasks in such a way that everybody is generally satisfied. Although this happy state of affairs is extremely rare in the lives of international organizations, very likely the Universal Postal Union and the World Meteorological Organization are entities whose work engenders minimal dissatisfaction. Therefore, they are not under pressure to change their ways—to adapt or to learn. Since my task is to inquire into processes of adaptation and learning (and the absence of dissatisfaction means that the stimulus to adapt or learn is lacking), the experience of such successful organizations is uninteresting to me.
So is the feedback from output to programming because it captures the administrative experiences of the organization's staff when it monitors its own work. If learning takes place at all, it must occur as a result of these feedback processes. Therefore, although our concern is with the shape of the organization as such, we cannot explain changes in shape without paying attention to every step in the sequence. Still, our concern is not with the moral quality of the outcomes. Their character is irrelevant to the exploration. What matters is whether member states, not the observers, are satisfied or unhappy with the outcomes. A final step in the sequence might be an evaluation (moral or not) of whether the international system as a whole, or some regime within it, also changed as a result of the preceding activity. Such an evaluation, however, is the province of the observer passing judgment on history; it is not my concern at this time. True to my commitment to the logical priority of knowledge over interest and power, I begin the exploration of the consequences of dissatisfaction with organizational performance with a discussion of consensual knowledge.Consensual Knowledge
Our concern is this: How does knowledge about nature and society make the trip from lecture halls, think tanks, libraries, and documents to the minds of political actors? How does knowledge, by its nature debatable and debated, become sufficiently accepted to enter the decision-making process? In order to give an account of this process, it is not necessary that we also explain how the relevant information and theories came into existence. We need not and do not deny that many terms and ideas that enter the process remain contentious and contested. Nor do we deny that the political interests experienced by actors are one determinant of which kind of knowledge will be preferred as a basis for decision. I make no claim that consensual knowledge is absolutely different from political ideology; on the contrary,
the line between the two is often barely visible. Some will say that consensual knowledge is merely science-derived transideological and transcultural ideology. I would contest such a claim with only a mild amendment, not challenge it fundamentally, and yet make a case that political choice infused with consensual knowledge is different from, and more pervasive than, choice informed exclusively by immediate calculations of material interest or by the availability of superior power.
By consensual knowledge I mean generally accepted understandings about cause-and-effect linkages about any set of phenomena considered important by society, provided only that the finality of the accepted chain of causation is subject to continuous testing and examination through adversary procedures. Cause-effect chains are derived from information, scientific and nonscientific, available about a given subject and considered authoritative by the interested parties—though the authoritativeness is always temporary. Consensual knowledge is socially constructed and therefore inseparable from the vagaries of human communication. It is not true or perfect or complete knowledge.
We lack a totally consensual criterion for determining truth, perfection, and completeness. It may even be true that what is claimed as consensual knowledge by a bureaucracy is known to be flawed. Yet even this guilty knowledge may be presented to the public as valid merely to protect the mission and the integrity of the organization. In so doing, the nonknowledge interests of the parties concerned are also being protected. Knowledge is not in principle opposed to interest; it is, in the extreme case, the handmaiden of interest.
Consensual knowledge may originate as an ideology. It differs from ideologies only in that it is constantly challenged from within and without and must justify itself by submitting its claims to truth tests considered generally acceptable. Unless such testing takes place, it is impossible to speak of any kind of error correction because the criteria for determining acceptable and undesired outcomes would differ according to the actor concerned. Consensual knowledge differs from ideology-derived interests because it must constantly prove itself against rival formulas claiming to solve problems better. The acceptability, the very quality, of consensus that makes the kind of knowledge of concern to us different from other claims "to know" is the fact that consensus must survive the process of social selection by demonstrating its ability to excel in solving problems.
I hold that such a process describes generally how governments and public organizations have learned to deal with most of the problems their constituents have imposed on them in the twentieth century, with the exception of changed behavior owing entirely to the success of a political revolution, which simply gets rid of competing notions of cause and effect. Our conceptions of what constitutes a problem to be solved by way of public policy have been irretrievably infected by the results of scientific knowledge about nature and society that have gained widespread acceptance.
In what ways can scientific knowledge become a shaper of political decisions? The different ways coexist in time and in space; far from being mutually exclusive, they illustrate four different routes through which scientific information can become politically relevant, even though such information is socially constructed and therefore loses whatever claim to autonomous truth it may have been able to defend.
We can think of knowledge as social epistemology, as a shaper of world views and of notions of causation whereby the intellectual commitments of the seventeenth-century scientists and mathematicians penetrated the way political economists and their disciples in governments began to see the world. That process still continues, even though the informing metaphors today come from cybernetics rather than from mechanics. Science plays a major role in giving us the concepts we use in defining and seeking to solve problems, even though the substantive character of the problem and its human dimension usually are not really elucidated by the scientific metaphor.
Scientific models show up more directly in those fields of public policy in which scientific participation is continuous alongside the work of nonscientific decision makers, such as public health, environmental protection, transportation, telecommunications, and defense production. Here the models used by scientists seriously guide the way problems are defined and solutions devised; economic, political, and legal information that constrains the use of scientific models at the margin, however, also enters the process. Models of this type tend to have universal appeal because decision makers are able to subscribe to many (but not all) of them, irrespective of cultural, religious, and ideological differences. The acceptability of such models does not depend on their being advocated by a hegemonic group or class or nation.
Still other knowledge-infused modes of choice, however, are dependent on extrascientific factors. Theories of macroeconomics, of psychology and criminology, of education, and of social reform can be heavily informed by the results of scientific thinking and research. Nevertheless, the scope of theories is constrained by the fact that a dominant social group, nation, or profession advocates and uses the knowledge in question. Without such "hegemony" it is doubtful that the persuasiveness of the theory would be sufficient to allow us to call it consensual knowledge. Hegemony-aided models of knowledge nevertheless remain subject to the normal truth test.
At a still lower level of abstraction we can identify operational forms of organizing information that result in consensual cause-effect chains, even though this is done without recourse to overarching theory and is heavily influenced by immediate political interests. Newly discovered facts and newly invented models of organizing facts can certainly stimulate the evolution of such operational models. One example is given by the conjunction of information about nuclear energy technology, demand for energy in the context of industrial development, and nuclear proliferation as a military threat. This atheoretical conjunction served to define "the problem" of nuclear proliferation. The field of economic development offers similar examples. Operational models would not exist at all if the main parties did not entertain specific nonscientific objectives. Without political values and interests there would be no incentive to draw on scientific knowledge at all.
Consensual knowledge, then, can be made politically relevant by way of several paths, all available simultaneously in time and space; it is socially constructed and not given by nature; and it is often dependent on political factors for becoming truly consensual. That admitted, we must ask how new cause-effect chains, taking the place of chains accepted at an earlier time but found wanting, can achieve acceptance.
Learning
By "learning" I mean the process by which consensual knowledge is used to specify causal relationships in new ways so that the result affects the content of public policy. Learning in and by an international
organization implies that the organization's members are induced to question earlier beliefs about the appropriateness of ends of action and to think about the selection of new ones, to "revalue" themselves. As this happens, international institutions are being used to cope with problems never before experienced.[4]
I owe this definition of learning to a personal communication from Robert Keohane, who tried valiantly and (I hope) successfully to improve on my earlier definitional attempts. I stress that this definition is intended to be different from the earlier one I offered in chapter 2 of Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964).
And as the members of the organization go through the learning process, it is likely that they will arrive at a common understanding of what causes the particular problems of concern. A common understanding of causes is likely to trigger a shared understanding of solutions, and the new chain implies a set of larger meanings about life and nature not previously held in common by the participating members. Put succinctly, learning implies the sharing of larger meanings among those who learn.Learning may involve the elaboration of new cause-effect chains more (or less) elaborate than the ones being questioned and replaced. The resulting conceptualization of the world may be more (or less) holistic than the earlier one. It may imply progress or regress, depending on the normative commitment of the observer or the preferred reading of history. At the moment, the definition of learning I offer is intended to favor no epistemological or ideological preference; I intend to cover any organizational behavior involving self-reflection leading to change. In the final chapter, however, the idea of direction and of progress is reintroduced as I emphasize my own normative stance.
Questioning an established cause-effect schema involves the disaggregation of a problem as it had been initially conceived. The problem first has to be "taken apart"; its parts have to be identified and sorted into patterns different from the ones that had been featured in an earlier round. That done, the problem has to be reaggregated into a different nested set, either more complex and comprehensive than the original one or less so. I develop an example from Karl Deutsch's work to illustrate the process as it involves shifts to greater complexity.[5]
Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1963), chaps. 5, 6. The idea of disaggregating and then reaggregating the parts of a schema underlying public policy is described in Paul Diesing, Reason in Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962). A similar idea underlies the empirical investigations of Philip Tetlock in his cognitive studies of foreign policy decision making. See "Integrative Complexity in American and Soviet Foreign Policy Rhetoric," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 6 (1985). My conception of the socially constructed basis of the knowledge that enters policy making comes from Burkhart Holzner and John Marx, Knowledge Application (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1979), chap. 4.
We have here a normative element. By what right can one describe learning as tending toward the recognition of a "higher" order of purpose? I imply that a higher order of purpose is also a better purpose, that seeing the world as a more complexly, more tightly coupled system is a more appropriate approach to problem solving in this context. My main justification for this stance comes from my reading of modern history and especially from the growing importance of systemic information in the design of public policy, a justification reserved for chapter 9.
The example from Deutsch involves ascending orders of purposes, beginning with the mechanics of warfare and ending with social transformation. The story begins with an automated antimissile battery programmed to defend the country. The purpose is to achieve immediate satisfaction. In order to make sure that this system works properly, however, a second purpose must be superimposed on it—namely,
self-preservation. In order to make the battery work so as to avoid an unwanted war, it may be necessary to subject it to a higher intelligence, a model of crisis escalation that would tell not only the battery but also the entire country about the steps necessary to avoid accidental war. If this turns out to be too difficult a task, however, a third purpose must be superimposed on self-preservation—namely, the preservation of humankind. Our crisis prevention model would then be subordinated to a more general model aimed at preventing war altogether. But then suppose it is realized that the prevention of all war is not possible without having a more comprehensive understanding of human conflict and cooperation in general. Once that is realized, a fourth purpose is superimposed on the previous three—namely, the preservation of a process. The name of the game now becomes learning all one can about all kinds of links and connections among trends and events that may illuminate human conflict. Learning, in Deutsch's sense, then means the ability to shift from lower to higher orders of purposes. Organizations that subject their causal beliefs to such a process are perpetual learners.
My definition of learning differs from one often encountered in the literature on international organizations. Functionalists make two interconnected arguments about learning.[6]
See Robert E. Riggs and I. Jostein Mykletun, Beyond Functionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1979), 166-76, for a full statement of the relationship between functionalist thought and learning.
One could claim that any change in behavior due to one's experience in international organizations constitutes learning, but functionalists reformulate the argument to claim that learning consists of changing one's attitude and behavior as a result of association with a successful functional (i.e., "nonpolitical") organization. Evidence of such learning is the demand that additional functional organizations, designed on the model of the first one, be set up, and that those who participated in the work of these organizations developed positive attitudes toward them.[7]Riggs and Mykletun point out that the "demonstration effect" aspect of learning can be substantiated from historical experience, but that the "positive affect" aspect of learning must be qualified so heavily on the basis of extant empirical studies as to be descriptively almost worthless. Nevertheless, and despite the shortcomings of the functionalist explanations they present, not all aspects of the functionalist argument are shown to be wrong. See ibid., 177ff.
These formulations are less than fully helpful because they do not tell us what has to be learned or how cognitive processes have to be reorganized. Most important, they fail to spell out the institutional and political blocks to the development of positive attitudes; nor do they even ask which forms of organizational design are likely to overcome such blockages. To argue that form follows function and that function follows participation and positive experience flies in the face of experience with disappointment and unintended consequences.Nor do organizations learn as do individuals, even though they are made up of individuals. Institutional routines interfere with learning: lessons learned by one bureaucrat do not necessarily become the collective wisdom of his or her unit. Lessons learned are informed by the interests professed by the learner. We do not assume that the interests will change only because a given routine used in their implementation has failed. Such approaches equate learning with error correction by individuals. But the observer then has to specify what the "correct" perception ought to be, and the "correct" perception inevitably turns out to be the one preferred by the observer.[8]
One author defines individual learning as "changes in intelligence and effectiveness" and the operationalization of the growth of intelligence as "(1) growth of realism, recognizing the different elements and processes actually operating in the world; (2) growth of intellectual integration in which these different elements and processes are integrated with one another in thought; (3) growth of reflective perspective about the conduct of the first two processes, the conception of the problem, and the results which the decision maker desires to achieve" (Lloyd S. Etheridge, Can Governments Learn? [New York: Pergamon, 1985], 66, emphasis in original).
Etheridge's book and his "Government Learning" (in Handbook of Political Behavior, ed. Samuel Long [New York: Plenum, 1981]) are among the first systematic efforts to conceptualize learning by public organizations, even if the lessons learned turn out to be the things the author preferred. The therapeutic component of the theory lies in the emphasis on internal communication, openness, heterodoxy, competition among ideas, personal creativeness, and its rewards. Etheridge explicitly equates government learning with lessons learned by single policy makers. The character of the routines suggested is thought to generalize learning to other decision makers. Abraham Maslow rides high in this approach.
If intelligence is not a useful guidepost for understanding organizational learning, neither is effectiveness. Any judgment regarding the effectiveness of one's performance pertains to technical rationality, not value rationality. Effectiveness is useful in explaining how adaptation occurs, but not how learning as I defined it takes place. Technical criteria for evaluating the performance of international organizations, although no doubt essential for monitoring staff performance, do not speak to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the clients, who may value such abstract aims as equity, quality of life, or the enjoyment of individual rights even if the organization falls short of mundane, technically effective performance.[9]
Argyris and Schon recognize as much in their distinction between "single loop" learning (which fits our notion of adaptive behavior) and "double loop" learning (Organizational Learning, chaps. 1, 2). Double-loop learning corresponds to my notion of organizational learning. Argyris and Schon differ from my approach in their emphasis on therapeutic techniques to induce double-loop learning. They identify this kind of innovative behavior with the perfection of internal communications and the relaxation of internal hierarchy—with participation. It requires an openness to criticism and the willingness to forgo stability in favor of unending change. The suggestions for designs that facilitate double-loop learning do not deal with the kinds of demands clients make, or with the outcomes of prior organizational action that have engendered disappointment with respect to values that were to be served.
If notions of affect, imitation, intelligence, effectiveness, and therapy are to be banished from our discussion of learning, who is the redefiner of cause-effect understandings? Who engages in a process that can lead to large shared meanings? Who is supposed to learn?
"An international organization learns" is a shorthand way to say that the actors representing states and members of the secretariat, working together in the organization in the search for solutions to problems on the agenda, have agreed on a new way of conceptualizing the problem. That is, it is not individuals, entire governments, blocs of governments, or entire organizations that learn; it is clusters of bureaucratic units within governments and organizations. That, of course, suggests that there can be varying rates of learning and quite different incentives to learn, depending on context, professional ethos, type of problem, type of region. The unit that learns is a particular kind of collective actor defined by its place in the organization, in world politics, in a professional and knowledge culture.
What of the presumed beneficiaries of the organization's output? Don't they matter? Organizations are supposed to contribute to the happiness and welfare of peasants, refugees, sufferers from communicable diseases, victims of malnourishment, slumdwellers, industrial workers seeking to form trade unions, and users of telecommunications networks. The demands, satisfaction, and dissatisfaction of these people do not matter in my identification of the learner because we cannot be sure whether and to what extent the demands of the potential beneficiaries actually influence the choices made by bureaucratic units. On the whole, the role of the grassroots is very remote in shaping decisions of governments and of international organizations in Third World settings. We can be certain that the disappointment of decision makers influences choice; we can be certain only of the suffering of the presumed beneficiaries, not of their power to be heard.
The stimuli that lead to learning come mostly from the external environment in which the organization is placed, not from inside the organization. As will be shown below, international organizations are hyperdependent on their environments; they can hardly be distinguished from their environments. Therefore, the main impulses that may lead to learning or adaptation are far more likely to come from the environment than from such endogenous concerns as the coordination of units, sources of revenue, staff-line relations, or internal monitoring. My investigation is therefore biased in favor of exogenous sources of change. That admitted, it still makes good sense to worry about improved organizational design because the forces emanating from the environment are far from uniform, and they push in quite different directions. It still makes sense to worry about making internal design more hospitable than it now is to learning impulses.
Can we say something about the environmental conditions most likely to lead to learning? Are there plausible predictors of learning? None is obvious; several are possible. I review them without settling the issue: the desirability of finding new cause-effect chains, the possibility of finding them, and the urgency for finding them.
Desirability refers to the incentives motivating the bureaucratic units to engage in some soul-searching. We hypothesize that actors' career goals and political opportunities to prosper are heavily identified with pleasing a certain constituency, with helping that constituency
to solve its problems. Issues that can be approached with the proper conjunction of incentives on the part of decision makers are more likely to be dealt with than issues that do not offer the same opportunities. From the vantage point of desirability, it makes more sense to reexamine one's ends and values with respect, for example, to fighting epidemics than to mount campaigns in favor of human rights.
The existence of political incentives may not be enough to trigger learning. The possibility of redefining ends along new causal chains must also exist. This possibility, of course, is a function of the state of scientific knowledge, the degree of consensus it enjoys, and the availability of epistemic communities for spreading the word, a point to which we return below. The possibility of learning refers to the availability of new means that entitle actors to consider new ends not previously accessible to them.
One would think that the urgency of the problem involved has something to do with the rate of learning. Is there a crisis that calls out for immediate action, such as a famine, the imminent bankruptcy of a large country and its creditors, or an AIDS epidemic? If the requisite knowledge exists (or can rapidly be found) and if political incentives are aligned with crisis management, we would expect rapid learning to occur. We would also expect that a crisis combined with the special salience of certain issues would increase the urgency. Is health the most salient, or is malnutrition? Is either issue more salient than economic development or debt relief? Are programs and problems involving money for economic development the most salient? It is impossible to say without comparing the learning patterns of the organizations that correspond to these issues. At this point I speculate that learning is triggered in situations showing high desirability, reasonable possibility, and the conjunction of high issue salience and a crisis.
International Organizations as Satisficers
Learners are bureaucratic entities. These are normally studied and described in the idiom of organization theory. But not all aspects of organization theory are germane to our quest. A number of assumptions commonly made by all organization theorists, who derive their ideas from studying business firms and public bureaucracies, must be modified.
One is the notion of organizations seeking autonomy from and control over their environment; another is about the dominance of technically rational decision making.
Environment Dominates Organizations
Standard organization theory assumes that the entity under study seeks a maximum of control over its environment. Organizations are envisaged as systems seeking to get the better over external elements and actors that might reduce the entity's autonomy. Boundary maintenance is therefore crucial, whether the environment is envisaged as being made up of customers, suppliers, competitors, political clients, or other bureaucracies. Although it is understood that the organization must satisfy those environmental forces on which the organization depends, maximum attainable control over them is seen as the best way to achieve autonomy. Autonomy, in turn, is valued because it guarantees the survival of the organization in a competitive setting.
The core concept in the struggle for survival is the idea of adaptation. Adaptation implies that the organization must consistently review its operations in order to make sure that boundaries are maintained in such a fashion as to favor survival. Review implies that past errors in decision making have been identified and corrected. To adapt, then, means to so alter operations in the face of a changing environment as to be more certain of surviving and prospering. If the prevalence of competition among organizations is the challenge to survival, then principles of wise management are the techniques to assure that natural selection favors you rather than your competitor. Successful adaptation implies using the techniques of management and design found to be theoretically and practically appropriate.
Wise administration implies rational decision making. The kind of decision theorists have in mind here is the type Max Weber called "technically rational"—an "efficiency-seeking" decision. The overall purpose of the decision is to improve whatever the organization's main mission is: to make a profit in producing refrigerators, to provide software services, or to grow soybeans. In the case of public organizations the mission may be helping the handicapped, improving agricultural productivity in Mali, or perfecting a defense against missile
attack. The purpose is not questioned; the means for achieving it are constantly reviewed. It bears repeating that the exercise of technical rationality presumes an agreed, known, and stable ordering of preferences among the decision makers.
None of these assumptions is consistently met by international organizations. They normally do not compete for market shares, profits, or potential clienteles. Although their survival is not assured at all, failure to survive is not due to being a poor competitor. They strive to survive, of course, but they do so by seeking to please their clients with more appropriate programs. The point is that these programs do not result from the exclusive exercise of technical rationality. Conflict among coalitions precludes the existence of agreed and stable preference orderings. For international organizations survival implies more than simple adaptation because it may involve the questioning of underlying goals of action; then criteria of efficiency no longer suffice.[10]
Therefore, I cannot take advantage of the ingenious typology proposed by Lawrence G. Hrebiniak and William F. Joyce in "Organizational Adaptation: Strategic Choice and Environmental Determinism," Administrative Science Quarterly 30 (September 1985): 336-49. Hrebiniak and Joyce argue against the mutual exclusivity of environmental and volitional determinism in explaining organizational adaptation by proposing a reciprocal-feedback model in which both operate, albeit in uneven proportions. The proportions determine such things as innovation, search, questioning of ends, and degree of internal conflict. Since the proportions can change as a result of these activities, organizations can move from one type to another and not only adapt but also change themselves more basically. Although this view is akin to mine, it still requires a sharper differentiation between organization and environment than the international setting permits.
That questioning of goals, in turn, arises because boundary maintenance cannot be applied to international organizations. There is no hard and fast distinction between environment and organization. The clients are at the same time the masters and the paymasters. The staff and management serve at the pleasure of the clients. Suppliers are often the dominant coalition. Consumers can vote the management out of office. International organizations exist only because of demands emanating from the environment and survive only because they manage to please the forces there, which also dictate the programs these organizations must adopt to survive.
Bounded Rationality Dominates Decision Making
Consensual knowledge is certainly not an essential ingredient in the introduction of innovations in policy or institutional design. The kind of knowledge that is the property of actors who do not subject their beliefs to systematic verification tests—ideology, in short—undoubtedly is often a sufficient explanation for change. Some guidance from an ideology is required even for minor changes of the means of action. Programmatic innovation that dispenses with consensual knowledge is common. It is perfectly consistent with adaptive behavior, nationally and internationally. As such, it will concern us later in our exploration.
Innovation due to the emergence of consensual knowledge entails a
major questioning of prior cause-effect schemata.[11]
One variant of innovation results from a revolutionary upheaval; another is based on a major cognitive development in how adherents of clashing ideologies come to see the world. When a revolution sweeps away a rival view of the world and the revolutionaries succeed in imposing their unified view on the rest of the population, a new kind of knowledge certainly inspires ensuing innovations. But it is not the kind of knowledge that emerges from a confrontation and testing of rival explanations. Since political revolutions do not occur in international politics, this variant is not relevant to my enterprise.
Few such cognitive breakthroughs are on record in the histories of international organizations. The field of public health perhaps comes closest. Even the Keynesian consensus that inspired twenty years of international trade and monetary programs came to an end. Most programmatic innovations feature an unstable mixture of slowly changing political interests (rooted in values and ideologies) and bits and pieces of consensual knowledge. That knowledge is specific to professional disciplines and to discrete issues on the political agenda such as the creation of wealth and its diffusion, the interplay of wealth creation and the diffusion of technology, the link between food production and environmental protection, and the protection of population groups thought to be especially vulnerable. Consensual knowledge is not total wisdom to guide the world to eternal bliss.The questioning of prior cause-effect beliefs, in short, is not a "rational" process if judged by strict standards of rational choice. Matters proceed in a much sloppier way. Thought about environmental protection and resource conservation exemplifies the sloppiness. Here, a change in the urgency for choice made politicians seek out bodies of knowledge thought likely to advance their instrumental cause. The creators of that knowledge may also seek out friendly politicians as likely allies. Before the claims to knowledge become truly consensual, the interplay will take the form of an ideological debate, as happened in the early days of the international environmental movement when the interests of the developed and the developing worlds were at loggerheads. Because of the phenomenon of "embedded liberalism," Keynesian macroeconomics provided the consensual knowledge of the Bretton Woods system even though, ten years earlier, that same body of thought still had the trappings of an ideology in the United States.[12]
John Gerard Ruggie, "International Regimes, Transactions and Change," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982): 379-416.
Since I am unable to predict when the interplay of interest and knowledge becomes stable, I can claim only that learning has an elective affinity with the more fundamental changes in scientific and technical understanding, though not in the form of rational choice Weber termed "technical" and Herbert Simon calls "substantive.""If we accept values as given and consistent," says Simon,
if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decisionmaker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need
to distinguish between the real world and the decisionmaker's perception of it; he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decisionmaker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decisionmaker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)[13]
Herbert A. Simon, "Rationality in Psychology and Economics," in Rational Choice, ed. Robin M. Hogarth and Melvin W. Reder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 26-27. Also see Simon's Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), chap. 2, and "Human Nature in Politics," American Political Science Review 79 (June 1985) 293-304. Learning, then, consists of recognizing a different process of decision making, not the realization of specific values. The values will differ with the issue or problem in question and with the coalition undertaking the revaluation. They cannot be prespecified in principle. Can this conception of learning take hold in real organizations without overcoming the forces that make for motivated errors in decision making? We will consider this question below.
This situation represents substantive rationality. It is not encountered in the world of international organizations.
International organizations choose "under ambiguity." Decision making "under ambiguity" differs fundamentally from what is normally considered to be rational behavior by individuals seeking to optimize or maximize. Problems of ambiguity arise under the following conditions: Determined or even probable outcomes are rarely associated with a decision-making routine. Choice is often constrained by a condition of strategic interdependence in which the opposing choosers find themselves, a condition of which they are fully aware. Preferences are often not clear, or not clearly ordered, because the decision is not being made by a single individual, but by a bureaucratic entity. There may also be a mismatch between the assumed causal links constituting the problem the organization is called upon to resolve and the causal theory underlying the internal arrangements of units, plans, and programs designed to solve the problem. Decision-making models that are supposed to draw on the lessons of history, that are predicated on the assumption that actors deliberately learn from prior mistakes, are badly flawed because the lessons of history are rarely unambiguous: different actors certainly offer varying and equally plausible interpretations of past events that often mar decision making in the present. Learning, under such circumstances, consists of recognizing the desirability of a different process of decision making, a process that copes a little "better" with ambiguity. Learning explicitly avoids specifying what, substantively speaking, ought to be learned. Under procedural rationality, learning means designing and mastering an alternative process.[14]
James G. March, Decisions and Organizations (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 12-14. March mentions a final ambiguity—"decision-making is a highly contextual, sacred activity, surrounded by myth and ritual, and as much concerned with the interpretive order as with the specifics of particular choices" (ibid., 14)—which strikes me as being more applicable to the study of the World Council of Churches than to the United Nations and its agencies.
It follows that, given these constraints on substantive rationality, a decision cannot be rational normatively as well as descriptively. Decision making designed to seek optimal outcomes is normatively rational; any account of why such decisions fail to attain optimum outcomes is
both descriptive of a process and evaluative about its consequence. Decision making conceded to be less than substantively rational can only be described accurately, not evaluated normatively. Decisions made "under ambiguity" remain rational because the choosers do the best they can under the circumstances. They do not act randomly. They attempt to think about trade-offs even though they are unable to rank-order their preferences. In short, they "satisfice." Nothing that is capable of being described systematically is truly irrational even if the rational content cannot be stated normatively.[15]
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman suggest that decisions constrained by all of the unmotivated cognitive errors to which people are subject are still rational according to the canons of bounded rationality. See their "Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions," in Rational Choice, 67-94.
Hence the notion of "error" and "error correction" becomes problematic.Learning Adaptation in "Error Correction"
Adaptation and learning, in the literature on biological and cultural evolution, are synonyms. Both are tied up with survival and stability. Neither is a serviceable concept for me, as derived from Neo-Darwinian thinking, because both depend on the idea of homeostasis. Since few international organizations possess this property, we must first show how the notions of adaptation and learning differ in this context from the more familiar usage in biology and anthropology. In cybernetic-biological discourse the organism learns in order to adapt. What does it learn? It develops behaviors (which are often not based on genetic endowment) that enable it to survive under changing environmental conditions. It does so by keeping its main bodily functions within a physiologically favorable range: the organism's functions are stable if changes remain within a range that permits it to survive. Survival and stability are linked concepts; stability makes survival possible. What is learned is to compensate behaviorally for some challenge to stability. This involves short- and long-term feedback mechanisms of varying complexities. Conceptually, then, stability and survival are brought about through adaptive behavior, which is always behavior that leads to an improvement on the organism's life chances. Adaptation—"learned behavior" in the biologist's language—is always for the better.[16]
I am indebted for this conceptualization to W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, 2d ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1960), esp. chaps. 1, 5, and 9. My treatment of adaptation eschews an argument using evolutionary theory either as metaphor or as analogy. I find no equivalent to natural selection, variation, differentiation, and niche seeking based on automatic processes in the behavior of international organizations. If anything, that behavior is to be associated with the deliberate creation of new niches, as described by Herbert A. Simon in Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), chap. 2. The only concept that suggests an analogy with biological evolution is the core idea of survival, without also implying the related idea of fitness.
Donald T. Campbell, however, considers this approach to be quite consistent with his view of evolutionary dynamics. Campbell demonstrates that behaviors that are less than rational by microeconomic criteria are more adaptive in evolutionary terms than behaviors that meet the canons of substantive rationality. Biological adaptation is, for Campbell, what I call learning, and it implies the development of traits such as reciprocity and fairness that, in turn, make survival more likely. See his "Rationality and Utility from the Standpoint of Evolutionary Biology," in Rational Choice, 171-80.
Whether adaptation is always for the better depends on who assesses the outcome. Adaptation, in our context, is the ability to change one's behavior so as to meet challenges in the form of new demands
without having to revaluate one's entire program and the reasoning on which that program depends for its legitimacy. This, of course, assumes that the challenges come slowly and can be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion. Adaptation is incremental adjustment, muddling through. It relies largely on technical rationality. Because ultimate ends are not questioned, the change in behavior takes the form of a search for more adequate means to meet the new demands.
This is no mean feat. Organizations are usually bombarded with divergent demands from a variety of coalitions, and their survival is by no means a certainty. Being able to adapt without basic revaluation is a considerable achievement for the organization's leaders and members. It is a very worthwhile enterprise to try to understand how mere survival is made possible given the world setting. To be able to adapt is to be very skillful in living with one another in a conflict-ridden world.
It is common to equate adaptation (and learning) with trial-and-error processes of changing one's behavior, with relatively un-self-conscious experimentation, again suggesting a misleading parallel to natural selection. I argue that the identification of both adaptation and learning with simple error correction is inappropriate in the study of international organizational behavior.
Error occurs when decision makers take the kinds of shortcuts described by cognitive psychologists: errors of bias, judgment, and attribution. Such errors certainly violate the canons of technically rational choice. A different kind of error arises in prisoners'-dilemma situations. The "less than fully rational" result of a "rational" choice is caused by the situation constraining the choosers. In both cases the decision makers could, in principle, avoid their mistakes if the institutional constraints and incentives conditioning the choice had been different, or if the source of their errors had been pointed out to them.
Why are these flaws in decision making relevant for us? The prevalence of cognitive shortcomings is undeniable; but they refer to individual decision makers, not bureaucratic entities. If entire units were often characterized by such traits, it is doubtful that they would survive for long. If they do show these attributes and survive anyway, the cognitive shortcomings cannot be very debilitating. Adaptation can still occur. In short, cognitive errors are relevant only if the error-prone
chooser is "really crazy" and if the psychological mechanism underlying it is "hard-wired."
Errors associated with strategic interdependence are the stuff of microeconomic decision theory. Again, some mechanism for adapting to such constraints must be available because the casualty rate among international organizations is very low. No learning or adaptation at all would be in evidence if such errors were normal. However formidable they look in logic, their practical impact cannot be very great.
But what are we to make of such "errors" as an unwanted war, or an unintended arms race, or the continuation of an ineffective policy (such as area bombing after its shortcomings had been documented at the end of World War II)? Why do these "motivated" errors recur? They recur, we are told, because actors use unsystematic methods of analysis resulting in the nonuse of available knowledge. They recur also because of bureaucratic rivalries. Institutional missions become encapsulated in routines that aid the career patterns of officials rather than solve problems. Operational codes are enshrined even though they militate against the calculation of trade-offs.
Such behaviors are rooted in the routines of collective decision making. Institutionalized conduct and expectations, triggered by such things as civil service rules and bureaucratically sanctioned codes of interpersonal ties and loyalties, are the culprits. These, to be sure, may be aggravated by cognitive errors committed by individual decision makers.
Motivated errors are due to ailments common to all organizations. But they are not necessarily irrational. Since these organizational ailments are part of a larger culture that has adapted, and since they occur in organizations that have survived, they cannot be obviously self-destructive. It seems that there must be good organizational reasons for the persistence of these practices even though they do lead to unwanted consequences. Motivated errors are part of normal organizational life. We should therefore not treat them as a simple mismatch of ends and means that can be corrected by appealing to the canons of technical rationality. But can the persistence of motivated error be considered allowable in an organization that is expected to adapt or to learn?
Adaptation, Learning, and Institutional Constraints
If the notion of error means anything, it must mean that actors recognize as wrong the organization's persistence in making decisions that produce outcomes not desired by the members. Successful adaptation implies the willingness to reconsider the tie between means and ends, and to reformulate the organization's program accordingly. Successful adaptation may also call for adding new purposes or dropping old ones, without also involving a searching examination of assumptions about cause-effect links. Both activities also imply error correction.
But I argued that the persistence of motivated errors not only is natural but also may actually contribute to the continued functioning of the organizations; how, then, can I argue that adaptation includes the correction of some motivated errors? The answer is that small, incremental institutional change is required by adaptive behavior even though sudden and drastic reform is not to be expected. Civil service rules may be relaxed. New interdepartmental committees may weaken the force of tenacious bureaucratic politics. Information gathering and monitoring may be expanded by means of new routines. All these constitute marginal changes in practices that may have led to motivated errors in the past; they do not add up to a complete self-examination. But they are adaptive in the sense that recognized flaws in decision making are removed. Adaptation is change that seeks to perfect the matching of ends and means without questioning the theory of causation defining the organization's task. Adaptation does not require new consensual knowledge.
I reserve the term learning for the situations in which an organization is induced to question the basic beliefs underlying the selection of ends. True revaluation is attempted when beliefs of cause and effect are examined. Revaluation involves the recognition of connections among factors thought to constitute causes of whatever problem is to be solved, connections that had previously gone unrecognized. Revaluation implies shifting one's cognitive horizon toward beliefs about causes that are different from previous beliefs. Revaluation is made possible by the existence of bodies of knowledge not previously available. Learning involves the penetration of political objectives and programs by new knowledge-mediated understandings of connections.
Once the membership of an organization questions older beliefs and struggles to institutionalize new ways of linking knowledge to the task the entity is supposed to carry out, it must necessarily also question behaviors identified with past failures. These behaviors may well have been rooted in practices we identify as "motivated errors." Although some of these practices undoubtedly contributed to the past survival and adaptation of the organization that is now questioning itself, some other practices (such as the mode of recruiting personnel and the kind of professional training required of personnel) will now appear to be wholly indefensible. The persistence of practices recognized as motivated errors is incompatible with learning: overcoming them is a core aspect of learning.
Innovation based on the unstable interplay of consensual knowledge and interest can be of either the adaptive or the learning variety. Organizational programs may be changed in response to bits and pieces of information that are accepted as true and relevant by everybody without also evoking the need for a major soul-searching about the adequacy of the organization's basic thought patterns. The World Health Organization (WHO) could alter its family-planning programs in response to the introduction of new contraceptives without having to question the program itself; the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) creation of various temporary compensatory-financing facilities did not call into question its overall thinking about balance-of-payments equilibrium. In short, adaptive behavior also makes use of such relatively uncontroversial knowledge as becomes available.
Adaptive behavior is common, whereas true learning is rare. The very nature of institutions is such that the dice are loaded in favor of the less demanding behavior associated with adaptation. This dictum is as applicable to domestic bureaucracies as it is to international ones. I shall now review several treatments of constraints on organizational learning and adaptation that draw on domestic experience alone, on experiences in which only one set of coalitions needs to be considered. We must remember that collective behavior change in international organizations involves a dual set of coalitions—international bargaining blocs made up of coalitions of domestic groups. If true learning is rare domestically, we ought not to expect too much at the international level.
The case for the difficulty of learning is made starkly by John Steinbruner. He tells us, again, that true analytic decision making is rarely practiced, that the recurrence of misperceptions must be taken for granted. That leaves us with the choice patterns Steinbruner calls "cybernetic" and "cognitive."[17]
John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974). His unit of analysis is the bureaucratic unit in the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government. Although Steinbruner uses the categories found useful in the study of individual learning, he projects these to collective learning among potential domestic coalition members who will eventually have to face a foreign coalition. It is not always clear whether cognitive decision making is a variant of cybernetic choice or a separate type. For a clear demonstration that they ought to be considered separate types, with the cognitive type more likely to lead to learning than the cybernetic, see Robert Cutler, "The Cybernetic Theory Reconsidered," Michigan Journal of Political Science 1 (Fall 1981): 57-63. Expressed in terms of individual choice, analytic decision making features "theoretical thinkers," cognitive choice "uncommitted thinkers," and cybernetic choice "grooved thinking." Stein and Tanter put these categories to good use in their study of Israeli decision making during crisis, but they postulate that the three types are not mutually exclusive and that they can be combined to produce six different "paths to choice," thereby allowing gradations of changed behavior that contain elements of analytic thinking. See Janice G. Stein and Raymond Tanter, Rational Decision-Making (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), chap. 3. For a slightly different but congruent way of explaining decision making and error commitment, see James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "Organizational Learning and the Ambiguity of the Past," in Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1976), chap. 4.
In both choice patterns, decision makers are motivated by wishing to "survive," rather than to serve some overriding organizational mission. Routines through which choices are made seek to limit the complexity of the real world and to reduce uncertainty by imposing limits on incoming information and by seeking to segment the problem to be solved. Outcomes are not systematically assessed, and the choice of response is limited by these constraints. Both modes result in suboptimal outputs, though they generally suffice to assure the survival of the unit. Both decision-making modes are capable of not using new knowledge or of using it very selectively; neither is able to make full use of consensual knowledge.The chief lesson students of choice within institutions offer us is that we cannot predict events on the basis of a known distribution of preferences and capabilities among the actors. Something intervenes between these attributes and the outcomes of interest. Something goes on that constrains behavior so that neither the rationality of the market nor the power of pure analytic thought suffices to give us the explanations we seek. The routines and habits associated with the kinds of behaviors delineated by Steinbruner have independent effects. They lead to such oddities in organizational life as "garbage cans" and "martingale processes"—patterns that cannot be explained except in terms of institutionally mediated historical experiences and memories.[18]
This line of analysis is opened up in James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "The New Institutionalism," American Political Science Review 78 (September 1984): esp. 742-47. Independent institutional factors are explored in Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chaps. 7, 11. For an application of a similar logic to the analysis of innovations in economic life, see Paul A. David, "Clio and the economics of QWERTY," American Economic Review 75 (May 1985): 332-37.
An emphasis on independent institutional factors in no sense minimizes the continued importance of social-exchange theory in explaining how, given the constraints mentioned, actors nevertheless manage to make agreements that result in behavioral innovation. High among the insights of social-exchange theory is the norm of reciprocity. See Robert O. Keohane, "Reciprocity in International Relations," International Organization 40 (Winter 1986): 1-27.
What intervenes has a logic of its own, which, given the limits of bounded rationality from which all organizations suffer, is as rational as can be expected. Institutional constraints actually favor adaptive behavior most of the time, even though they do not make us learn by leaps and bounds to improve the outcomes produced.Different types of institutional constraints, however, may be able to predict something about the triumph of consensual knowledge. I offer the contrast between the American and European methods of making environmental regulations as an example. In general, the attempt to devise regulations to improve the quality of the environment is more controversial in the United States than it is in Western Europe. In the United States, expert witness is pitted against expert witness, study
against study, court decision against agency regulation. Each political interest seems able to create its own claim to knowledge and to make these claims penetrate the political process. Yet despite the palpable absence of consensual knowledge in the short run, these controversies often disappear eventually as better knowledge coalesces with dominant interests to produce comprehensive regulations that take into account economic consequences as well as immediate dangers to environmental quality.
In Western Europe, by contrast, the regulatory process tends to be much more sedate because the interested parties and their experts negotiate the regulations in relative privacy. The price of the European process—which superficially appears more consensual than its American counterpart—is a less sweeping set of regulations that is more respectful of the economic demands of the groups concerned—industry and labor. West European consumers suffer more than their American counterparts. In our terms, then, the learning—i.e., the recognition of a differently coupled system and the need to manage it—is more modest in Europe, though more peaceful. Pluralistic institutions predict a different course of learning than do neocorporatist ones. Both constrain learning while offering fora in which it can take place.[19]
For instances of a lack of consensual knowledge in regulatory politics, see Dorothy Nelkin, ed., Controversy (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979). The contrast between the European and the American pattern of regulation is explored in Ronald Brickman, Sheila Jasonoff, and Thomas Ilgen, Controlling Chemicals (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). The American pattern features autonomous experts who are partisans interested in long-range effects, willing to regulate intrusively, and eager to use risk-assessment techniques of analysis. The European experts tend to be committed to cost-benefit analysis, attached to interest groups and government, and preoccupied with the short run; they prefer less rather than more regulation.
I argue that institutions constrain and facilitate learning. But which predominates? In order to make a claim that international organizations need not confine themselves to adaptive behavior, I must also make a plausible argument that the cognitive-cybernetic version of constraint on innovation need not always prevail.[20]
Such alternatives also include learning patterns owing nothing to consensual knowledge. Examples are the tit-for-tat process demonstrated in Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and the GRIT process documented in Deborah Welch Larson, "Crisis Prevention and the Austrian State Treaty," International Organization 41 (Winter 1987): 27-60.
I admit that political actors do not automatically make use of knowledge, consensual or otherwise. I concede that the acceptance of novel cause-and-effect schemata derived from scientific knowledge is not common. I know that history has no purpose, that we are not programmed to progress, or to evolve, toward some future state of bliss based on the general recognition of new causal chains. Nevertheless, we also know that there is such a thing as the norm of reciprocity, that even antagonistic parties can bargain so as to make that norm a continuing reality. And we know of a sufficient number of bargains that resulted in both adaptive and learning behavior to be convinced that habitual and routinized institutional behavior is not the inevitable victor.How can we clarify this difficult relationship between the conservative and the innovative aspects of institutions? I shall argue, in the
remainder of this chapter, that the organizations of specialists we call epistemic communities are the most significant agents of institutional innovation. I shall also argue, however, that even epistemic communities are hemmed in by many constraints. It is a mistake, nevertheless, to think of the white knights of expertise as being arrayed against the forces of darkness, the bureaucrats and politicians committed to grooved and uncommitted thinking. I introduce the notion of habit-driven behavior to describe the continuum of institutional conduct that ranges from resistance to any innovation, to adaptation, and eventually to learning. Habit-dominated institutional behavior is usually adaptive; only habit-defying behavior, however, can be considered consistent with learning. To be able to learn means taking advantage of the most permissive, the sloppiest, side of habit. Finally, since learning clearly depends on our ability to share meanings across cultural and ideological chasms, I discuss the way in which transcultural communication must be envisaged.
Epistemic Communities as Enemies of Habit-Driven Institutions
All international organizations are staffed by professional civil servants who participate in the making of decisions and who implement most of the operational measures. International secretariats are made up of people who usually carry the professional qualifications relating to their organizations' tasks: law, agriculture, medicine, and the like. They are a conduit for introducing into public policy the knowledge produced by their disciplines. Moreover, these professionals often—always in the case of U.N. specialized agencies—act in concert with like-minded professionals not in the employ of the organizations, but linked to them through nongovernmental organizations having consultative status, or by way of service on advisory panels of experts. International organizations are exposed to knowledge through the medium of epistemic communities, defined by Holzner and Marx as "those knowledge-oriented work communities in which cultural standards and social arrangements interpenetrate around a primary commitment to epistemic criteria in knowledge production and application."[21]
The ideas contained in this section have been developed largely by Peter M. Haas; see his Saving the Mediterranean (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). The definition of "epistemic communities" is taken from Burkhart Holzner and John H. Marx, Knowledge Application (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1979), 108. Note that this definition differs sharply from Michel Foucault's, who apparently invented the term in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). I find Foucault's usage indistinguishable from what we might call "ideological communities."
In refining his notion of "paradigm" in the second edition of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), Thomas Kuhn also offers a specification of the "community," which is the unit of analysis of believers in a paradigm. His description on pp. 176-78 fits my notion. However, his specification of the content of these paradigms does not, because he seeks to make the content specific to the subject matter of the natural sciences (see pp. 181-87).
For Holzner and Marx most professional and disciplinary groups are also epistemic communities. Such groups profess standards of verification
and an attachment to rules of behavior that they consider sufficient to assure the truth of their findings. They are also subject to personal and social constraints derived from the institutional pressures on their careers, which may result in deviations from stipulated norms of behavior in the production of knowledge. Robert Merton's four imperatives and the limits on their being observed provide the norms and counternorms making up the cultural standards and social arrangements in point.[22]
The four Mertonian imperatives are universalism (the results of research are equally valid irrespective of particularistic biases in the minds of the researchers), communism (the findings are in principle available to everybody), disinterestedness (fraud and dishonesty are minimized through institutional safeguards), and organized skepticism (every finding is in principle subject to being corrected or subsumed by way of a later finding, arrived at in competition among researchers). See Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1957), 550-60.
The truth tests such groups apply to the work of their members are a function of the basic beliefs to which members subscribe. Not only molecular biologists and meteorologists but also psychoanalysts, astrologers, and sociologists may constitute epistemic communities (or they may not).I accept this definition as far as it goes. It must be augmented, however, to suit the specific circumstances of learning in international organizations constrained by institutional habit. For me, an epistemic community is composed of professionals (usually recruited from several disciplines) who share a commitment to a common causal model and a common set of political values. They are united by a belief in the truth of their model and by a commitment to translate this truth into public policy, in the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a result.
Epistemic communities profess belief in extracommunity reality tests. They are, in principle, open to the constant reexamination of prevailing beliefs about cause and effect, ends and means. They are ready to see more complex cause-effect chains, or to simplify these in line with new knowledge. Yet, being human, they also resist reality tests likely to disturb their claims to novelty and relevance; epistemic communities exhibit both the Mertonian norms of science and its counternorms. Rival epistemic groups thus exhibit the same behaviors as do rival schools of scientists. The ultimate test of truth is the collective decision by the users of knowledge as to which claim is more successful in solving a problem agreed by all as requiring solution. It is a common property of epistemic communities that they accept this judgment as legitimate.
I have put emphasis on the procedural aspects of epistemic behavior, on how the members of an epistemic community defend what they think is true. These aspects involve the procedures of science, scientific methodology, and the sociological canons for judging its generality.
The substantive aspect of belief requires even more emphasis. Members of an epistemic community profess belief not merely in scientific procedures of verification (belief that may be almost instinctive and may hardly require explicit articulation); they are primarily and overtly concerned with claims of substantive knowledge about whatever issue or problem attracts them to public organizations and political decision makers. Their knowledge about communicable diseases, deep-sea mineral deposits, nuclear fusion, or exchange rate stability gives them their claim to be heard.
How are epistemic communities organized, and how do they fit into international organizations? Sometimes they take the form of "invisible colleges," networks of the like-minded not employed in the same university, laboratory, or think tank. Sometimes they also create organizations of their own, such as the Club of Rome, various organizations of economists, of environmentalists, and of public health specialists.[23]
These and additional examples of epistemic communities can be found in William M. Evan, ed., Knowledge and Power in a Global Society (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981); and Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). It bears emphasizing that not every nongovernmental organization (NGO) is also an epistemic community. An NGO merits the label only if its members subscribe to the reality- and truth-testing procedures mentioned. A commitment to a belief in a common cause-effect model, the consistent advocacy of the belief in conjunction with shared political values, and success in forging alliances with political coalitions are not enough. Thus, groups of lawyers advocating stronger international human rights policies usually do not qualify as epistemic communities. Nor do any number of other NGOs active in international organizations. For a discussion of NGOs that may or may not meet our criteria, see Peter Willets, ed., Pressure Groups in the Global Arena (London: Frances Pinter, 1982).
Such groups can influence international organizations if their members come to dominate standing expert advisory bodies or consistently serve as executors of programmatic decisions (as in economic development and public health projects). They may also penetrate organizations by acquiring a monopoly on staffing secretariat positions in their issue area. Thus, the development economists, political scientists, and engineers originally organized by Raul Prebisch in the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America were an epistemic community that eventually managed to take over the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) secretariat. This can occur only when the epistemic community manages to forge an alliance with the dominant political coalition in an organization. It is equally possible, however, in the absence of such a successful coalition, that a given organizational unit is staffed by members of several rival epistemic communities. The success of an epistemic community thus depends on two features: (1) the claim to truth being advanced must be more persuasive to the dominant political decision makers than some other claim, and (2) a successful alliance must be made with the dominant political coalition.[24]The success of epistemic communities tends to be much more spectacular in the natural than in the social sciences. This is equally true at the national level. The hiatus is explained by some as due to the preference for uncertainty on the part of administrators, because by claiming uncertain knowledge they are able to escape the need to change programs and to side-step blame for failure. Moreover, epistemic communities advocating change on the basis of social science research tend to lack "brokers" who can consistently inform the political consumers of knowledge of relevant findings. In the absence of respected brokers, the policymaker tends to prefer the layperson's "social knowledge" to whatever arcana are advocated by social scientists. See Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., ed., Knowledge and Policy: The Uncertain Connection (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978).
We can say that epistemic communities seek to monopolize access to strategic decision-making positions, though few of them succeed in holding such a position for a long period.I seem to present epistemic communities as protean creatures able to make organizations and their members learn in the face of the most appalling obstacles to even boundedly rational choice. True, I make no assumption about history having a purpose; but my paean to epistemic communities comes close to suggesting that history moves from a condition in which embedded social relations constrain rational choice to a period in which rational choice vanquishes social embeddedness, from nonmarket traditional society to market-dominated modernism.
Even though it seems undeniable to me that the sway of boundedly rational market forces is more general today than in earlier centuries, it is equally undeniable that the impact of epistemic communities is sharply limited by habitual social practices, by routines of collective behavior that have acquired the legitimacy of long usage. The commonly held stock of everyday intersocial skills available to ordinary people in building their social relationships and their ties to organizations is far more powerful than the specialized knowledge of experts. Political actors are prone to adhere to the institutional forces that predispose choice toward the familiar rather than to take their chances with innovations urged upon them by experts who draw on their specialized skills.
James Rosenau labels this syndrome the "habit-driven actor approach." He describes such actors and their doings further:
They are both officials and citizens who strive for goals and respond to challenges in habitual ways. What they have in common is habit-driven behavior. All the habits that drive their behavior are viewed as a composite—a habit pool, as it were, that is fed and sustained by the diverse wellsprings of human experience. That is, be they Americans, Russians, or anyone else, their actions are posited as stemming from a combination of past experiences, cultural norms, memories, beliefs, personality, role expectations, and cognitive styles to which they have long been accustomed, by which they manage to maintain continuity in their affairs, and through which they are linked into the macro systems relevant to their lives. Depending on how these bases of behavior combine to make each act like the previous one in the same context, the habit-driven actor can be flexible or rigid, open or closed to learning, power-oriented or self-sacrificing, calculating or impulsive, complex or simple—but whatever the quality and direction of her [sic ] behavior, it springs from a readiness to respond to situations in a characteristic and repetitive fashion.[25]
James N. Rosenau, "Before Cooperation: Hegemons, Regimes, and Habit-Driven Actors in World Politics," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986): 861; emphasis in original.
These are rational actors in the same sense as are organizations subject to the failings of motivated errors. Technically rational behavior can also be habit driven. Different habits will give rise to different behavior patterns, but all patterns are explicable on grounds of rational choice, albeit suboptimally rational. Actors can be collectivities as well as individuals. Their doings are always embedded in a larger social context that antedates the action; that social context tends to be maintained ("reproduced," in the language of some sociologists) by virtue of the actions.[26]
In the sociology of Anthony Giddens, "praxis" plays a role somewhat similar to habit, though by virtue of being embodied in "structuration" determines continuity and stability in society more than adaptation. Giddens explains the occurrence of change (by means other than revolution) by insisting that communication among actors of unequal power takes place through the medium of elite manipulation of the symbols and codes of discourse (which amounts to Gramscian hegemony). What appears on the surface as social harmony and peaceful change mediated by expert knowledge is in reality the result of deliberate manipulation of the powerless by the powerful, in conformity with the formula "signification = domination = legitimation" (General Problems in Social Theory [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979]). Praxis dominates over truly free and informed choice.
Lindblom and Cohen also have high respect for the blocking power of praxis. They consider it most unlikely that social scientific knowledge can pre-empt ordinary social knowledge, and hence the role of epistemic communities of social scientists is likely to be very modest, though experts from the natural sciences may do better. See Charles L. Lindblom and David K. Cohen, Usable Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); see also Charles L. Lindblom, "The Sociology of Planning," in Economic Planning East and West, ed. Morris Bornstein (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1975), 23-67.
In fact, the notion of "scripts" represents an effort by students of cognitive processes and of artificial intelligence to capture habit-driven reproductive processes as if they were social structures. Schank and Abelson say that scripts area structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. A script is made up of slots and requirements about what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. Scripts handle stylized everyday situations. They are not subject to much change, nor do they provide the apparatus for handling totally novel situations. Thus, a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation.[27]
Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977), 41.
I argue that epistemic communities have a role to play even though the hand of habit is heavy. In the current practices of economic and social planning in almost all countries, massive convergence in theory is evident across cultural lines as planning agencies increasingly display similar ways of reasoning. Although systems of signification and domination surely differ from country to country, we nevertheless see more and more conceptually innovative international campaigns. As new strata and groups in hitherto inert populations are mobilized into new ways of living and adopt new ideas, we also find an increasing readiness to question established patterns and to consider new ones. Commonly experienced problems seem to invite the comparison of new solutions. My argument does not require that all habits be abandoned and homogeneous new patterns be adopted. It is perfectly possible that the old habits continue for certain purposes while new patterns emerge for others. Culture is rarely the holistic, seamless web that some claim it to be.
All institutional actors are habit driven, but not to the same degree and not at a constant rate through time. To be able to learn demands
that the bonds of habit be light. Adaptation, by contrast, is quite possible in all but the most taboo-ridden organizations. Few modern public organizations are so encrusted with habit and routine as to be unable to shift to more efficacious means or to add new purposes to old ones, though neither the new nor the old need be attained with speed and efficiency. Most habit-driven organizations can adapt, but only a few seem to be able to learn.
How rapidly and how readily organizations are willing to reexamine and revaluate themselves is a wholly empirical question. No formalized script can capture the process. As I argued above, we can claim only that epistemic communities, as triggers for learning, are likely to be heeded when political decision makers find it congruent with their career interests to do so; and this is more likely to happen during a crisis, when knowledge promises better solutions to old problems. Rosenau makes the same point, though he does not qualify it sufficiently to limit it to learning, as opposed to any change in organizational behavior:
In short, be they individuals or collectivities, officials or citizens, educated or illiterate, Western or Eastern, actors are conceived as learners and not as constants on the world scene. And as learning entities, they can never succeed in cutting off all feedback that runs counter to their orientations. Thus being open to learning, they are capable of changing. This can occur in one or both of two ways: (a) when the external stimuli are so persistently and startlingly different as to jolt habitual modes and foster new patterns more appropriate to the evolving circumstances; or (b) when new skills, capabilities, and/or responsibilities develop within the actor, forcing the old, habitual ways to yield to new ones. Externally induced habit change is exemplified by the political adjustments that follow the waging and termination of an international war or the socioeconomic adjustments that accompany, say, a fundamentalist revolution or a sharp and enduring shift in the cost of energy. Internally induced habit change is illustrated by the consequences of the microelectronic revolution for people's analytic capabilities. When basic change does occur, of course, its external and internal stimuli are interactive and reinforcing. Together they eventually produce new characteristic modes of coping with change, which, through time, evolve as new habit functions.[28]
Rosenau, "Before Cooperation," 864-65; emphasis in original.
For these reasons, then, the game should not be seen as heroic epistemic communities facing off against silent, undifferentiated, but malign, habit. Rather, we should see the game as a slow historical movement
in which some epistemic communities successfully shake up some aspects of habitual behavior. Organizations, because they adapt and sometimes even learn, permit change to occur even if they do not actively favor it. Habit is neither totally banished nor impervious to new ways.[29]
Learning, in the sense of overcoming habitual behavior, implies that actors will avoid self-destructive behavior. Overcoming habit-sanctioned conduct means perceiving ineffective conduct and doing something deliberate to improve one's chances of doing well. If the avoidance of self-destructive behavior runs up against "real" limits on choice (such as physical limits or obstacles associated with a lack of resources) then we must change our earlier assertion about the social construction of reality. As long as a habit that is breached violates no principle of physics, genetics, or economics, the original as well as the new formulation to the problem remain socially constructed. But when consensual knowledge rests on "hard science," the reality in question is more fundamental and the lesson learned is no longer socially constructed. The lesson can be denied only at the cost of great suffering or even of self-destruction.
It may be, though I am not sure, that the concept of structuration captures—at a higher level of abstraction—what I am saying about habit-driven behavior. Since innovation and noninnovation, habit and change, are not juxtaposable opposites, but mutually entwined tendencies (the metaphor of strands of DNA comes to mind), the "production and reproduction of society = accomplishment of interaction under bounded conditions of the rationalization of action" (Anthony Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory [New York: Basic Books, 1977], 122). If structuration is the "generation of systems of interaction through 'duality of structure,'" then the interplay of adaptation and learning modes seems consistent with the view Giddens advocates. Also see Rosenau, "Before Cooperation," 866-67, for a similar argument. In any event, the suggestion of the compatibility of structuration theory with my discussion of organizational change depends on the theorist's willingness to resolve the agent-structure problem in favor of the agent. Giddens, as do I, loads the dice in favor of the strand of action that represents voluntarism and choice, rather than the "generative" quality of underlying social structure stressed, for instance, in Alexander E. Wendt's outstanding article, "The Agent-Structure Problem," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 355-65.
But, given the culturally heterogeneous world in which we live, how can we expect meanings and symbols to be shared sufficiently widely among nations so as to allow learning based on consensual knowledge to occur?Learning and Transideological Communication
History has no purpose, but actors do. The process of revaluation is less a direct expression of actors' determination to improve performance than an unintended consequence of their poor foresight. But since actors are capable of reflecting on their poor performance and therefore on alternative models and theories that will avoid it, even purposeless history allows us to postulate that shared meanings might arise among clashing and squabbling actors. The emergence of shared meanings constitutes learning. How it may occur remains to be discussed.
I argue that transideological communication is possible, that shared meanings among politically and culturally diverse actors do emerge often enough to allow organizational learning. My argument, however, faces a major semantic hurdle.
Undeniably, there are in political life important terms and concepts that are and remain "essentially contested."[30]
The term "essentially contested" and its implications for political discourse, social science, and analytic philosophy are analyzed in William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). Connolly shows that because of the properties of essentially contested concepts, agreement on the notion of "democracy" can never be reached even among citizens of the same democratic polity.
They are embedded in systems of signification specific to discrete groups of actors, even within the same state or culture. They result in unique meanings that have far-reaching consequences for political discourse and may prevent the evolution of any consensus. "Every act of communication to or between human beings … presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition."[31]Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 9. He specifies further:
The criss-cross play of circumstances and abductive presuppositions, along with the interplay of various codes and subcodes, makes the message (or the text) appear as an empty form to which can be attributed various possible senses.... The multiplicity of codes, contexts, and circumstances shows us that the same message can be decoded from different points of view by reference to diverse systems of conventions. The basic denotation of a sign-vehicle can be understood just as the sender intended it to be, but different connotations can be attributed to it simply because the addressee follows another path on the compositional tree to which the sender referred. (Ibid., 139; emphasis in original)
Eco maintains that this is true even if sender and audience are part of the same culture. How much more telling is the point when they are not!
I now suggest that the language of modern science is creating a transideological and transcultural signification system.I suspect that the language of science is becoming a world view that penetrates politics everywhere. Perhaps the diffusion of science ought to be seen as a semiotic decoding exercise. In the West, which was first
impressed by scientific thinking, the corpus of scientific thought was seen as a superior way of seeing and acting, a straightforward way of thinking rather than a code. But potential consumers steeped in non-Western modes of thought have the burden of interpreting the apparently desirable signs and symbols in terms that are intelligible to themselves. Since, signs make sense only in the presence of linguistic convention, the actual truth value of the message is irrelevant since it is bound to be interpreted differently from what might have been intended. If that is so, we need not worry about whether the non-Western audience exposed to the scientific way of thinking is buying a falsehood in decoding the West's message. What matters is that they do decode it and make use of it. If a nineteenth-century Indian student, impressed with the implications of British economic thought for the mitigation of the caste system, comes to the conclusion that John Stuart Mill's arguments connote "progress" even though Mill may not have extended his thought in quite this way, then the Indian's decoding effort conforms to semiotic argumentation even though the Indian may be wrong about the extension.
Nevertheless, a partially shared meaning still emerges. Even though the decoding involves the mixing and questioning of the cultural messages, something innovatively transcultural develops. Our Indian may accept Mill in his own way and still share some of Mill's ideas, with possibly enormous consequences for later Indian behavior. The growth of shared meanings need not imply the complete demise of items in the original culture. It is conceivable that the core values of the non-Western cultures retain strength, even if they do not remain fully intact—although only aspects of the new message seep in, with the original core still serving as a filter. To the extent that the new message begins to alter the conventions of thinking "at the edges" of the culture, however, a definite change takes place. Meanings are shared to the extent that the edges get wider and overlap many cultures. For long periods, then, it is possible to have a gradually encroaching shared set of meanings for certain political purposes (such as the improvement of public health or the creation of a larger communications infrastructure) while leaving cultural core values unchanged. Individuals and groups may be the hosts of new and old ideas; they may act out the scientific mode in some of their pursuits while continuing to believe
in nonscientific ones for other activities. Alternatively, India may become cognitively confused as a country: some segments of the population may share the Western world view in its entirety while other segments remain steeped in the traditional culture.
Sharing meanings is an issue-specific process. Shared meanings do not resemble codes, which arise only when there is a dominant, single way of interpreting life and its messages. If the entire world shared the Enlightenment's view of knowledge, action, and progress, we could speak of the victory of a secular-materialistic code because that ideology would become the cultural matrix that informs all messages. Shared meanings are more modest constructs. They make no such sweeping assumptions even if they do rely on what semiotics calls "decoding."[32]
The same conclusion can be reached without making a semiotic argument. Ian I. Mitroff and R. O. Mason, in Creating a Dialectical Social Science (Rotterdam: Reidel, 1981), demonstrate the workings of different styles of "knowing," among which the scientific method is only one. Yet they also argue that these different styles can and do interact to produce consensual knowledge by means of lengthy confrontations within realms defined by a particular social purpose calling for public policy.
Contrast, also, the arguments offered by Adda Bozeman and Ronald Dore on this issue in The Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 387-423. Bozeman makes the case that cultural spaces tend to be self-contained and largely impervious to the sharing of meanings. Dore, in contrast, shows that cultural distances are shrinking and that cultural spaces are less and less self-contained because their inhabitants display more "fellow feeling" in terms of their manner of defining and solving problems. But Dore also notes the exceptions to this tendency. Hayward R. Alker, Jr., has often made the case that Western realist scholarship in international politics obscures the convergences in thought that make possible such "fellow feeling"; see "The Presumption of Anarchy in World Politics," in Anarchy, Power, and Community: Understanding International Collaboration, ed. H. R. Alker and R. Ashley (forthcoming).
Even partially shared meanings emerge in a roundabout way. They depend not only on the confrontation of diverse ways of knowing and imperfect decoding but also on specific stimuli and on particular groups of specialists. Shared meanings do not and cannot sidestep the interests and values of political actors. Yet these values change in response to influences imposed by one culture on another, as through colonialism. They change because increased trade and communication open peoples' eyes to possibilities previously undreamt. Yet it remains true, given the drag of institutions, that these influences will shape knowledge only to the extent that they do not contradict the social knowledge about cause and effect that lay politicians carry in their heads.
But that social knowledge can be pushed in the direction of value convergences. If diverse cultures and nations experience problems that are seen as broadly similar—disease, poverty, pollution, the exhaustion of natural resources—and for which convincing transcultural explanations are being offered, then the scene is set for the sharing of meanings specific to the problem at hand.
Convergences do not happen by themselves. They require a group of people able to offer apparently superior explanations of the problem that occupies actors. That role is played by groups of experts bound together by a claim to a particular body of knowledge and the commitment to make politicians listen to them. They are crucial agents in forcing the reexamination of ends and programs that had long gone
unchallenged. Without such reexamination, there can be no trans-ideological sharing of meanings.
There certainly are cognitive-cybernetic limits on learning. I hold out a possibility that these limits are not as confining as has been suggested. I suggest that the assimilation of scientific into social knowledge occurs in a transcultural manner. I propose that this assimilation can be seen as a way to sidestep the difficult process of changing organizational routines, a way of weakening the prevalence of motivated error in decision making. That is why it makes sense to look at international organizations as fora for sharing meanings and engendering learning.
3
Characteristics Shared by All International Organizations
Our next task is to describe, in principle, how the sharing of meanings can be accomplished in international organizations. My argument to this point suggests that organizations adapt and learn, but that learning is distinguished from adaptation whenever actors include consensual knowledge in working out new solutions to unsolved problems. I have argued that when we seek to explain the preferences of political actors, there is no need to consider consensual knowledge as opposed to political interest; on the contrary, I suggest that interest cannot be understood unless we know something about the cause-effect schemes in the minds of actors. What I have yet to show is how interest informed by consensual knowledge and mediated through international organizations can become public policy. For this, we must have a more searching discussion of decision making as bargaining.
We need a conceptual bridge that leads us from stating these general propositions to being able to observe how—and whether—change occurs in and through international organizations. This chapter
and the one that follows are to provide such a bridge. The terminus of the journey is the specification of three models of organizational change—the tasks of chapters 5 through 7. Before arriving there, we need to introduce the dimensions shared by all models and organizations. Then we require a set of key indicators, a code, for observing events in organizations. The code records how behaviors differ from organization to organization.
Since this and the following chapter are mostly methodological and conceptual, the reader may well be tempted to skip them and to proceed to the empirical chapters. I advise against such a step. The empirical material is ordered along the lines of the codes I introduce here. Patience will eventually pay off.
Some general empirical features apply to all international organizations and therefore shape the contours of all three models. We now establish the core principles of organization theory that describe all public organizations and offer a typology of decisions made under constraint that hobble all international agencies.
Models, Organizational Units, and Learning
If I employ the term model for the constructs that follow, I am following custom rather than adhering to rules of verbal accuracy. These constructs are not models that permit prediction. Knowing the state variables of the system under study, I do not claim that I can then predict the future value of those variables after specifying particular changes in organizational design. The state variables are not known, at least not in a quantitative way. Even if I could predict the organizational output on the basis of design changes, I still could not predict how the output would be transformed into outcomes. The sequence can be handled only in terms of "if … then …"; the range of outcomes is probably specifiable, and therefore the range of actor responses is too.
Incremental growth and turbulent nongrowth are models of typical experiences—typical enough to encourage me to consider them as recurring patterns of institutional behavior that compress many historical episodes. I speculate on the persistence and mutability of the patterns. The speculation is the foundation for possible future changes in
design if we assume that actors are unwilling to be eternally disappointed and are receptive to taking their chances with new knowledge claims in order to better themselves.
Incremental growth and turbulent nongrowth are "real," whereas managed interdependence is more akin to a Weberian ideal type. Although several organizations have behaved in accordance with the managed-interdependence model for short periods, only the World Bank has consistently behaved in accordance with its rules (and even that judgment is disputed by some observers). Managed interdependence, then, refers to something that has not happened very often, if ever; it represents a possible situation, logically consistent with our reasoning and with limited real experience.
We are concerned with organizations, not with regimes or large-scale systems of interaction. International organizations respond to such larger forces and may help to change them as well if they serve as fora for innovation. Our inquiry concerns how representatives of states and NGOs adapt or learn in organizations; such abstracted representations of multilateral state behavior as "regime" and "system" are not appropriate here. Sometimes the unit of analysis is a major component of an organization rather than the entire entity. It makes little sense, for example, to study the United Nations as a whole since we know that certain of its subunits, though legally a part of the United Nations, have independent programs and personnel practices. This is true of the regional commissions and of UNCTAD, U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), and most of the other agencies and programs that rely only marginally on the central budget and are only minimally subject to direction from the U.N. General Assembly because they have their own legislative organs. Nor do the numerous activities housed in the United Nation's own departments easily lend themselves to single generalizations and summaries. It is more instructive to deal with entities active in conflict management, economic development, human rights, and global commons as separate units of analysis.
Organizations are usually a component of regimes. As in the study of regimes, any judgment of change or evolution must consider the vexing issue of when the clock starts. This is particularly important when we wish to distinguish between patterns of change that feature
learning and patterns characterized by adaptation. Theories about regimes have run into trouble when the same theory was used to explain the origin as well as the maintenance or demise of a regime.[1]
This difficulty in regime theory is explored in Roger K. Smith, "Explaining the Non-Proliferation Regime," International Organization 41 (Spring 1987): 253-82. For additional discussion, on which Smith comments, see Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
If we wish to avoid this difficulty, a clarification is necessary before we proceed.A theory about change in organizational behavior must take as its units of analysis events some time after the creation of the organization. Adaptation and learning refer to events after the organization has been exposed to the winds of change. But cannot the very founding of an organization already represent actor learning as contrasted with experiences and events before the act of creation? Usually it does. Knowledge of the past, dissatisfaction with earlier ways of realizing interests and values, does inform the origins of multilateral institutions. The knowledge inspiring the founders is consensual for them. If that were not so, they would not join the organization. Even if the later life of the organization showed no evidence of learning at all, the chances are that learning was present—as compared with the knowledge that prevailed earlier—when the organization came into existence.
Almost all entities in the U.N. family, and almost every major regional organization, owe their birth to a creative act of fundamentally reconsidering earlier patterns of international relations and of revaluing earlier policies.[2]
The creative thrust and learning associated with the founding of the post-World War II international organizations are inextricably linked to the analysis that went on during the war, which sought to account for the rise of fascism and the breakdown of the League of Nations' collective security system. The origin of the Bretton Woods system was closely tied to the effort to understand the causes of the Great Depression. Similar traumatic experiences underlie the decisions to launch regional integration movements, each tied to a novel analysis of the causes of poverty, underdevelopment, or political enmity. In short, the historical setting, the traumatic events of the modern world, and the desire of governments to avoid the worst and hope for the best implied by these experiences account for the burst of creativity.
Many, but not all, acts of creation also involved a serious effort to nest problems and solutions in a more complex fashion than had been attempted by earlier generations of politicians. The founders of the United Nations set out to build a system of collective security better than that of the League of Nations. The builders of the Bretton Woods institutions wanted to link domestic growth and prosperity to expanding world trade and investment, hoping thereby to avoid depressions and to assure full employment. Although the founders of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), UNESCO, and WHO all saw the need for a major break with past ways of dealing with industrialization, educational deficiencies, and epidemics, their way of nesting their new visions in a larger view of economic welfare and conflict management among states did not remain consensual for long. The founders of the European Community (EC), in contrast, wanted to assure prosperity, avoid the recurrence of European wars, and create a European political identity—an ambitiousnest. The founders of common markets in Africa and Latin America had similar plans. Learning, then, is usually explicit in the origins of an international organization. Because subsequent events often contradict the original insights, many people speak of the "decay" of multilateralism.
Behavioral Constants of All Public Organizations
We are dealing with public organizations, a species dominated by political groups that act in accordance with bounded rationality. Competition among such units selects out nobody; survival depends on pleasing one's clients, not on efficient production. Dependence on historical paths of development as a force that limits innovative choices probably counts for less in public organizations than in private ones; the masters and clients of a public development are free to depart from the path whenever they choose. Since neither historical paths nor environments select for success, there must be other constraints and other determinants that limit freedom of choice. We now list those that are common to all public organizations and cover all our models.
International organizations should not be discussed as if they were rational models; I consider them "open systems, hence indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but at the same time as subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing determinateness and certainty."[3]
James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 10. The discussion that follows is entirely adapted from Thompson's seminal work. Terms given in quotation marks are technical expressions taken from this study.
Because the states that are the masters and clients of international organizations are a heterogeneous lot, they present a similarly heterogeneous "task environment" for organizational action. The "task" they jointly wish on the organization represents the sum of the possibly very different tasks each government faces at home. Therefore, organizations must seek to reduce the complexity of the task environment by creating homogeneous segments within it and to create units that cater to these segments .
International organizations suffer from volatile "domain consensus." Their assigned mission and task is almost never simple and straightforward. Member states, subject to the same uncertainties as the organization, disagree on the proper task and also change their minds about what ought to be accomplished. Therefore, international organizations tend to be forced to ration their services . All organizations depend on
their environments and therefore, in order to guard their autonomy, seek to master their environments by "buffering," "leveling," and (occasionally) "forecasting" the need for their services and the nature of their clients. Failure to do any of these things well compels the organization to curtail its services or to offer less than its clients demand. This is quintessentially the lot of international organizations.
Conflict within and among coalitions is endemic . If each coalition confined its interest to a discrete part of the organization's program, conflict would not matter much. The more interdependent the parts of the program, and therefore the subunits of the organization that run them, the less possible it will be to keep the interests of specific coalitions in distinct compartments. Interdependence among program items therefore increases the potential for intraorganizational conflict. Although conflict calls for continuous compromising within and among coalitions, the terms of each compromise are likely to be unsatisfactory and to perpetuate conflict.
The social "technology" of international organizations is "intensive." All organizations favor a particular way of arranging and routinizing their most important activities, thus linking the parts into which the whole organization is divided. "Long-linked" technologies are typical of manufacturing operations, and "mediating" technologies are characteristic of service activities. International organizations use neither. A large number of diverse techniques is needed to achieve organizational objectives; because feedback from the objects to be changed is a crucial component of action, such "intensive" technologies are far more difficult to organize for smooth functioning than the other varieties because they "talk back" to their designers.
The program of international organizations cannot be assessed and evaluated by master and clients in a technically rational manner . All criteria of assessment are of the "satisficing" type. Alleged improvements in performance can be demonstrated only with reference to an earlier performance in the unit's history. Since across-the-board improvement can rarely be shown, the leaders will seek to satisfy those forces in the task environment whose continued support matters the most. When neither clients nor masters nor the staff can agree on knowledge that ought to justify action and promise success, the evaluation will take a symbolic form that eschews any immediately relevant criteria of success,
although it will allow the hope for doing better in the future. The measure of success is the subjective confidence expressed by whatever coordinating or supervisory units exist.
These tendencies place strong limits on the discretionary power of executive heads . Unless they are recognized as possessing knowledge superior to that accepted by forces in the task environment, executive heads will be tempted to avoid exercising discretionary power. They will call attention to their successes and avoid systematic investigations of their records while explaining away their failures. The volatility of task domains and the heterogeneity of the task environment combined give the executive head the incentive to seek support from multiple and changing coalitions of states. This tendency will result in the creation of a large number of "political" positions on the staff and thereby further reduce the executive heads' discretionary authority.
Situational Constants of All International Organizations
The Unequal Distribution of Power
All international organizations have a heterogeneous membership. Their members differ in size, military power, population, resource endowment, and degree of industrialization. The members also differ greatly from one another in the extent to which they are permeable—that is, subject to being "penetrated" economically, culturally, and politically by their stronger neighbors.
Most organizations have their own "superpower" capable of playing a hegemonic role if it chose to do so. All organizations (except those of Eastern and Western Europe) count democratic, totalitarian, and authoritarian governments among their members. Even organizations that consist almost entirely of economically less developed countries display significant differences in the degree of development among their members. All universal organizations include members with capitalist, socialist, and mixed economies.
All organizations are characterized by major inequalities in power, however defined, among their members. Consequently, they are subject to rule by hegemonic states or hegemonic coalitions of states. The
hegemony need not be expressed in the direct imposition of the preferences of the stronger on the weaker. It usually takes the form of higher financial contributions and disproportionate roles for the nationals of the stronger members in organizational secretariats. At the extreme, this kind of hegemony is illustrated by the role of the United States in U.N. agencies. On the one hand, a decision to reduce American financial contributions from 25 percent of the budget to 20 percent threatened to ruin organizational programs. On the other hand, the United States had been signally unsuccessful in translating its superpower status into consistent influence over the content of programs, having lost many programmatic battles for almost two decades except in organizations in which greater power is recognized in the form of weighted voting.
In addition to disproportionate influence due to financial prowess or voting privilege, the principle of sovereign equality is also contradicted in practice by the tendency of the more powerful states to constitute themselves into an inner elite that is consulted far more consistently by the formal heads of secretariats, commissions, and councils than are representatives of less important states. Membership in this elite differs with topic and issue. It almost always includes the delegates of the superpowers and of Japan, Britain, France, West Germany, India, and, increasingly, Brazil in organizations to which these states belong. But it may also include the delegates of smaller states if the country in question happens to be salient to the issue at stake. Sweden, Singapore, and Tanzania have played inner-elite roles on some occasions in the United Nations.
It must also be acknowledged that Western beliefs about procedure—budgetary, administrative, parliamentary—hold a privileged position in international organizations. This hegemony of Western modes of problem solving results not only from the founding role Western governments played in designing most international organizations but also from the tendency of non-Western delegates, experts, and civil servants to be educated in Western ways and sympathetic, in principle, to Western modes of defining policy issues. Western notions of technical rationality tend to predominate.
International organizations share a certain marginality with respect
to the core activities in international politics. Few foreign policy initiatives depend on international organizations for their success. States risk little by investing symbolically in the programs of such organizations; the core of one's foreign policy remains intact even if little concrete help is provided by the organizations. In most instances, any result from a symbolic investment in organizational action will not be experienced until much later. Foreign policy relies on nonorganizational means to a far greater extent than on institutionalized multilateral efforts. There are, of course, exceptions for large and small states. Immediate benefits can accrue from a successful peacekeeping operation for the losing side in a war; ambitious economic development and technical assistance projects are sources of prestige and employment for one's nationals; a country beset with refugees benefits immediately from multilateral aid; even the superpowers may benefit from a successful mediation to prevent crisis escalation. The great lines of foreign policy, however, are only marginally and gradually influenced by what goes on in international organizations.
Types of Decisions
We know that power is not homogeneously distributed in international organizations. But how is that power mobilized? I now offer a taxonomy of decisions typically made by all international organizations.[4]
I am following the typology developed in Robert W. Cox and Harold K. Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), chap. 1.
The most fundamental decisions refer to representation . Who is entitled to be a member, who can be elected to committees, and how shall the member's vote be counted? Not even the most straightforward description of the rights to membership escapes controversy. The fact that the charters of most U.N. specialized agencies guarantee membership rights to all members of the United Nations has not prevented the de facto exclusion of South Africa from some; nor has the stipulation that members must be sovereign states prevented the presence of the Ukraine as a full-fledged member of the United Nations, or that of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a quasi member.Many decisions are symbolic . They "are tests of how opinions are aligned; no practical consequences in the form of actions flow directly from these decisions. The intention … is to test the acceptability of
goals or ideologies intensely espoused by one group of actors or the legitimacy of long-accepted norms of dominant elites."[5]
Ibid., 9.
When the hiatus between a symbolic decision and its degree of implementation is too great, the scene is set for the kind of questioning that may trigger adaptation or learning. Or it may signal the onset of organizational decay.Boundary decisions seek to fix the jurisdictional limits of one organization vis-à-vis other organizations also active in the issue areas of concern. They are especially significant in deliberations over the implementation of programs that call for participation of more than a single organization, as in the field of economic development. When the nesting of the problem set in question in too complex to be met by the resources of the organization that seized the issue, the relaxation of boundaries may be an important learning strategy.
Programmatic decisions refer to choices within the organization whether to retain program activity at a given level, retrench, or expand. Any rearrangement of programmatic activity implies that some subunit gains or loses. It also means that the patrons of that subunit are satisfied or rebuffed. Programmatic decisions are the core of the activities that must be judged in order to sketch the developmental pattern of concern to the observer. Programmatic decisions are executed in the form of operational decisions. Programs are expressed in budgets and personnel plans. Operations involve the commitment of parts of the budget and personnel to a specific project in a particular place. Together they constitute the methods through which outputs are produced and specific outcomes targeted.
A final set of decisions refers to the procedures through which activity is evaluated and institutionalized into permanent routines. Rule-creating decisions articulate new basic principles that ought to inspire the programs of the organizations. They may take the form of treaties, formal declarations (which are not binding on the member states, whereas ratified treaties are), or solemn admonitions by the executive head when endorsed by the organization's elite. The attempt to create new rules is an expression of the desire of a coalition to institutionalize a new world-order ideology or to reaffirm an old one, as exemplified prominently by the declaration of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974. Rule-supervisory decisions seek to follow up
on such new principles by creating appropriate internal procedures for monitoring member states and secretariats with respect to their adherence to the new rules. They are essential if the organization's leaders are to form an impression of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with output and outcomes. They are the decisions the observer must follow in order to discover whether adaptation is being attempted.
4
Characteristics that Differentiate International Organizations
Identifying the Differences: A Descriptive Code
Three main dimensions will be used for comparing international organizations: the setting in which they operate, the power of which they dispose, and the main forms of behavior through which the power can be exercised (Table 1). Each dimension contains as many descriptive variables as seem necessary to do justice to the efforts states put into international organization, whether or not these variables turn out to be important in establishing systematic variation among models of adaptation and learning. The list of variables and the coding of variations within each variable are intended to be exhaustive of what any observer and any participant would agree is relevant to the study of multilateral cooperation.
Setting
Four major questions require specification: (1) Is there an ideological consensus among the member states? (2) Are member states represented on a basis of state equality? (3) How autonomous of the
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
member states is the secretariat? And (4) to what extent does the organization rely on information provided by independent experts?
Five world-order ideologies have competed for predominance in global international organizations since 1945.[1]
One might suppose that the sharing would be simpler in regional organizations composed of states with minimal cultural differences because better communication develops rapidly in a setting in which common cultural assumptions prevailed before the organizations were founded. Although the experience of Western Europe lends support to this suspicion, the lack of rapid organizational progress in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Arab world, and even in Eastern Europe should dampen the expectation that cultural closeness favors the sharing of political meanings. I shall not make the assumption that regionalism facilitates the sharing of meanings as compared with globalism.
In general, regional organizations did not quarrel over world-order ideologies. Instead, a single ideology tended to inform each organization. That ideology was usually the expression of the shared interests that led the members to create the organization. If it later ceased to serve that role, the organization usually disappeared or was seriously weakened. Some examples illustrate the pattern:
|
World-order ideologies summarize the expectations about international collaboration in the minds of national policymakers and their delegates in international organizations. They may also characterize the thinking of epistemic communities and nongovernmental organizations. The content of each ideology is what makes a given international organization legitimate (or illegitimate) in the eyes of policymakers, advocates, and administrators. The very beliefs that make UNCTAD valuable to a developing country also turned that same institution into a target of opprobrium for the United States under the Reagan administration.
The content of a world-order ideology is a projection of a policymaker's implicit or explicit theory about the world. Why choose such subjective images as descriptors of the setting rather than a typology of forms of government (democracy, authoritarianism) or of economic institutions (capitalism, socialism)? The setting in which international organizations operate could certainly be described in these latter terms. However, I chose the ideologies because of the need to specify the task domain and the task environment of our organizations, not the kaleidoscope of beliefs and institutions that characterizes the member states. Our ideologies abstract the core items from what member states want and expect from international organizations, irrespective of their momentary domestic form of government and economic institutions. Ideologies therefore provide a more economical code than one that seeks to abstract expectations and demands from forms of governance.[2]
It could also be said that there is no close covariation between forms of government and demands made of international organizations. Some democracies rely on collective security and human rights mechanisms, others disdain them. Some socialist countries want nothing to do with the IMF and the World Bank, while others seek full participation. But it is also true that if a very specific task domain is being studied to the exclusion of others (e.g., the International Labor Organization's [ILO's] protection of workers' right to organize and to bargain collectively, or the World Intellectual Property Organization's [WIPO's] ability to obtain agreements to a particular form of patent protection), then an alternative form of specifying the task environment is certainly called for.
Representation of member states may be determined on the basis of one state, one vote, irrespective of the power of the state. It may also be representation qualified by some special attribute of the state considered essential for the proper implementation of the organization's
| |||||||||||||||||||||
task, such as military, financial, or industrial power; qualified representation is expressed in the form of permanent membership in the organization's key decision-making bodies. Finally, state control can be weakened in that one or more nongovernmental groups may represent the state, either formally (as in the International Labor Organization [ILO]) or informally (as on some organs of the International Telecommunication Union [ITU]).
The autonomy of the secretariat is equally variable. In principle, the entire secretariat could be recruited on strict civil service criteria and be as neutral vis-à-vis member-state interests as directed by the official oath of international civil servants. In practice, entire organizations may be staffed by officials beholden to one coalition of members or another. More commonly, certain subunits of organizations are penetrated and controlled by specific coalitions of states or nongovernmental groups. The extent of such penetration, when evaluated together with the predominant world-order ideology, can predict the range of organizational output.
Almost all international organizations can employ consultants and advisers. The variation of concern to us involves the degree of independence such experts enjoy. We must distinguish among uninstructed experts acting only in their personal capacity, experts who belong to an epistemic community but who are formally uninstructed, and experts appointed by member governments and therefore subject to instructions.
Power
The core questions about the power of international organizations are these: Is the organization able to administer its program directly through its own budget, personnel, and right of access to memberstate territory, or is the administration of programs dependent on indirect means? Is the organization able to monitor its substantive and programmatic decisions and to deal with noncompliance by states? Is the organization financially independent of member governments?
The continuum of possibilities is large. We begin with revenue raising. The United Nations is entirely dependent on annually assessed
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
contributions of its members and on changeable voluntary contributions for selected programs above the assessments. Revenue is dependent exclusively on the volition of the contributors. The European Community relies on assessments and on a share of the uniform value-added tax levied by the member governments; in addition, it is entitled to a fixed percentage of the revenue raised by member states from the common external tariff. Most of the specialized agencies depend on assessments and contributions received on a program-by-program basis from the UNDP, which in turn relies on voluntary contributions from member governments. In contrast, international development banks are financed by fixed-capital contributions determined by members' ability to pay, by bond issues, and by interest earned from their loans. The International Seabed Authority, if it comes into existence, will be able to finance itself from taxes and royalties charged on the mining of seabed nodules. Financial power varies from total dependence on the member states to an independent ability to tax them and their citizens.
Administrative power is almost entirely indirect, but the range is potentially wider. At one extreme is the possibility of direct international administration, using international personnel not requiring permission to operate on the soil of a member state. At the other is the total delegation of the power to implement programs to the personnel of the member states. The latter is the predominant pattern, but the former has occurred, as in the U.N. peacekeeping operation in the Congo (1960–1964). An intermediate form consists of the administration of international programs essentially by the personnel of the international organization after the local government has agreed to the scope and terms of the operation. Actual implementation is done by local personnel supervised by the organization's personnel, as in most development and humanitarian-relief projects. This form of administration, of course, is subject to unilateral termination by either party.
The power both to monitor and to assure compliance can take the form of graduated steps that constitute a scale of organizational intrusiveness (Table 3). Organizations differ, as do specific programs within organizations, as to whether their armory includes all or only a few of the possible steps.
Behavior
Variables that describe the power of an organization give us the range of independent action open to its leaders; variables that describe the setting illuminate the context in which power can be exercised. Behavior is the pattern of action allowed by the limits set by context and power. Behavior comprises the voting practices used to make decisions, personnel recruitment practices, budgeting, the various roles that nongovernmental groups can play in these activities, and the leadership style the executive head can employ when she or he seeks to use discretionary power.
Voting may follow the constitutional rule, using simple or qualified majorities or requiring unanimity; or it may follow the "consensus" rule, under which voting is avoided until a compromise acceptable to all is negotiated. The trend is toward consensus in all but the most contentious encounters.
Budgeting may be done according to the practice of "disjointed incrementalism," whereby existing programs are continued on an ad hoc basis without formal examination of their success. Alternatively, budgeting may be purely a function of logrolling: programs are approved on the basis of ad hoc coalitions in which each item is the victim or the beneficiary of separate agreements among the members. To those increasingly dissatisfied with both methods, program budgeting and planning-forecasting have appeared as more desirable practices. The United Nations, although in principle committed to program budgeting, has so far failed to practice it consistently because the administrative agencies are unwilling to engage in searching evaluations of past programs.
Recruitment of personnel departs widely from the principle of hiring the most meritorious (as determined by competitive examination) and the most loyal. We have to know to what extent recruiting on the basis of nationality quotas determines personnel policy. In addition, we must bear in mind the practice of using the U.N. system as an honorable way to temporarily exile inconvenient politicians; it tends to accelerate personnel turnover and to put in doubt the exclusive loyalty of international civil servants to their organization.
Nongovernmental organizations, whether as epistemic communities
or not, are able to play very different kinds of roles. They may simply be lobbyists, as in the U.N. Economic and Social Council. But they may also be executors of programmatic decisions, as in many relief programs and some technical assistance projects. NG0s furnish the essential expert advice and services in such programs as the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), in the area of telecommunications, and in the uses of outer space. Finally, they appear as the advisers to complainants in human rights activities and sometimes as the personnel who animate investigatory commissions. The range between lobbyist and judge is wide.
This brings us to leadership by the executive head. A modest and self-effacing style of leadership is the predominant pattern. It is determined by the dominant coalitions of states. Variations are possible, however. On the one hand, if the organization is ruled by a single hegemonic state, then the executive head is merely the agent of that state, thus making independent leadership impossible. Discretionary power, on the other hand, can accrue in a severe crisis.
Leadership by profiting from crisis is an art mastered by few. The crisis in question must escape the management skills of the dominant coalition. Its members must be so concerned that they are willing to delegate considerable power to an executive head who advances a proposal that the coalition cannot better. Alternatively, when no stable dominant coalition exists, the executive head can use a crisis to obtain the power he or she seeks by organizing a slightly different coalition for each issue. That leadership style is risky. It may not pay off. Only rarely do the discretionary powers so gathered translate into a permanent growth of mandate.[3]
The examples of successful leadership-through-crisis are few, but they include Dag Hammarskjöld, Robert S. McNamara, and Jacques de Larosière. It may be that leadership can also be maximized if the executive head can persuade his masters that he is in command of a privileged body of knowledge that his organization can bring to bear on whatever problem preoccupies them. McNamara again may be an example of this style, as are Maurice Strong and Mustafa Tolba; nonetheless, the list of executive heads who failed to make such a claim persuasive is much longer. The following works contain descriptive material illustrating the variables here introduced: Douglas Williams, The Specialized Agencies and the United Nations: The System in Crisis (New York: St. Martin's, 1987); Pei-Heng Chiang, Nongovernmental Organizations at theUnited Nations (New York: Praeger, 1981); Norman Graham and Robert Jordan, The International Civil Service (New York: Pergamon, for UNITAR, 1980); Johan Kaufman, United Nations Decision Making (Rockville, Md.: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1980).
Adaptation and Learning: An Analytic Code
The variables we have discussed are descriptive and may be recognized by the actors themselves; they might even be of use to students not concerned with adaptation and learning. Since my concern is the discovery of patterns of events in the experiences of international organizations—patterns that enable us to make judgments regarding the forms of adaptation and learning that occur—I must furnish some criteria for making these judgments. How, in short, can we identify an
adaptive or a learning pattern when we see one? The discussion of such evaluative variables is the next task.
I begin by restating the sequence of steps involved in changing one's policy that I assume as the most common in international politics. When facing disappointment with the outcomes of earlier actions, actors rarely question the theory of causation that led them to the initial choices. They start by questioning the adequacy of the policies—of the means—chosen. If no better outcomes are attained after a different set of means is selected, they begin to question the reasonableness of the ends they pursue. And only when the choice of different ends still results in unsatisfactory outcomes do they question the theories about the problem that needs to be solved.
The criteria we need hinge on how we, as observers, judge the encounters among the clashing coalitions in organizations. They hinge on the concepts we contrive to judge the decisions and bargains made by the actors. I remind the reader that the purpose of the exercise is the elaboration of a code for observing how international organizations adapt and learn; but I also offer the reminder that learning occurs as a result of negotiation and of encounters in which the parties seek to solve common problems so as to advance their individual interests at the same time. Learning is not sudden enlightenment or even incremental insight. It is the establishment of shared meanings among parties that may be active antagonists but that find themselves condemned by their interdependence to negotiate better solutions than they had created in earlier attempts. In my approach, adaptation as well as learning are completely associated with bargaining.
A discussion of bargaining is therefore necessary. We also need to study the acts antecedent to bargaining and the consequences and qualities of the bargains in relation to the organizations in which the bargaining occurs (Figure 2). We begin with a discussion of the types of knowledge available and the varieties of political objectives in play. Those clarified, we can then proceed to an analysis of decision-making styles, issues, and issue linkage. The character of the actual bargains sums up key combinations of decision-making styles and modes of issue linkage. Certain of these combinations favor learning; others favor adaptation; some favor neither. Whether bargains are based on "similar" or "dissimilar" linkages is the crucial judgment that can help
Figure 2. Organizational adaptation and learning
in identifying learning. The quality of the bargain is captured by the "nested problem sets" the bargainers manage to define; these are judged according to how easily causal interconnections are composed. or decomposed. We then come back to the results of such bargains for international organizations by taking up the matter of institutionalization, authority, and legitimacy.
Knowledge
All decisions in organizations use information in the effort to reduce uncertainty, despite all our caveats about unmotivated and motivated error. What matters for our purposes is whether this information
is "raw" or structured, generally agreed to be true and reliable, or subject to controversy. We are most concerned with the kind of structured information that is offered by epistemic communities as a guide for action. The term knowledge is more appropriate than information because it implies the structuring of information about whatever topic engages the organization in conformity with some theoretical principle.
Consensual knowledge, we now know, is the sum both of technical information and of theories about it that command sufficient agreement among interested actors at a given time to serve as a guide to public policy. If the epistemic community involved in the decision encounters no opposition, its knowledge is in effect consensual for all. In the absence of consensuality, the decision will be characterized by conflict among rival claimants to knowledge. Decisions, in short, have to be studied with regard to the knowledge brought to bear. That knowledge is either consensual or it is not.
The lack of consensual knowledge does not mean that no knowledge is involved in the decision or that no issue linkage occurs. A decision about environmental protection may be informed by the separate bodies of information of toxicologists, meteorologists, soil chemists, and agricultural economists, even if these professionals cannot yet agree on an integrated, consensual, view of how their separate disciplinary lores might cohere. Issue linkage, if it occurs, will still be based on knowledge. Hence, more accurately, a decision is based on knowledge that is or is not becoming more consensual.
Political Goals
Political goals are determined by the ideologies to which decision makers subscribe. Ideologies vary considerably in their determinateness. In the life of contemporary international organizations, the applicable ideologies are one of the five notions about a desirable world order we discussed above. Each suggests the concrete interests a politician chooses to advocate and defend.
Goals can be either "specific" or "interconnected," "static" or "expanding." A specific goal seeks the attainment of a single outcome—a higher per capita income, or cleaner air, or cheaper fuel prices. An interconnected
goal envisages causal connections among these separate desired outcomes. Actors who espouse such goals define the superordinate problem to be solved in a more complex way than actors who remain committed to the attainment of specific goals. Static goals remain constant over long periods of time. Expanding goals refer to situations in which politicians feel compelled to enlarge their targets to include new goals in order to be able to satisfy the demands associated with the original goals. Interconnected and expanding goals tend to go together because they are justified by the same cause-effect chain. A commitment to them creates a dependence on producers of transdisciplinary knowledge, whose advice becomes a crucial input. No such commitment is evident among decision makers, who tend to entertain static and specific goals because the fragmented knowledge proffered them by separate professional and disciplinary groups (not organized as epistemic communities) is deemed adequate by the decision makers.
There is of course a logical possibility governing decision making that differs from the four we envisage here. Interests need not be informed by knowledge (as here defined) at all. Ideology may be the source of interest, unaided by any notion of technical information—structured or unstructured, consensual or disputed. In such a situation a politician's sense of interest retains its immunity from the truth tests to which epistemic communities are subject. These possibilities do not concern us here. I am elaborating a notion of organizational decision making in which knowledge, consensual or not, deflects raw interest. I am not here interested in goals based on interests uninformed by knowledge.
I feel justified in taking this position because it is hard to imagine any political issue in modern international relations that is not informed to some extent by experts' claims that command some respect, mixed with a fair amount of ridicule and even contempt. The point is that even though the knowledge claimed by experts may be partisan, it still enters the decision-making process (this is the situation covered by cell A in Figure 3).
When we combine the codings for the kind of knowledge involved in decision making with the types of goals politicians are able to entertain, we obtain the four situations described in Figure 3. Each cell
Figure 3. Decision-making styles used by international organizations:
how knowledge interacts with interest
represents a decision-making style that might be associated, empirically, with a subunit within a public organization that teams experts with politicians.
Issue Linkage
I refer to an "issue" as a single goal that has found its way onto a decision-making agenda, such as the cessation of nuclear testing or the establishment of a maximum sustainable yield for catching salmon in international waters. Agreement, or lack thereof, in the ensuing bargaining process will dispose of the single issue. "Issue linkage" refers to bargaining that involves more than one issue. Issue linkage is being attempted if the nuclear test ban is discussed in conjunction with limits on strategic weapons, or if the salmon catch is being negotiated in connection with the nutritional needs of the consumers. The attainment of interconnected and expanding goals is almost always accompanied by the attempt to link issues in negotiations.
We are attempting to understand how issues are linked in multilateral negotiations in international organizations, a bargaining process dominated by politicians who are aided by technical experts in national and international bureaucracies and urged on by other
experts associated with NGOs. In short, we must understand a bargaining process in which all styles of decision making operate. This requires a closer look at how experts persuade each other, how politicians bargain, and how experts interact with politicians.
There are three ways of persuasion. First, one can link issues by introducing into the agenda items that are not substantively or inherently connected. We call this "tactical linkage." The objective is simply to extract a concession not obtainable if the discussion remains confined to a single issue. For instance, deep-sea mining can be regulated without also worrying about the right of passage through straits. Yet in the UNCLOS III (Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea) these issues were in fact linked by the Group of 77 because the weaker countries had no other way to force the stronger ones to internationalize deep-sea mining. Tactical linkages are commonly used by the weaker parties in bargaining. Since the issues linked are not considered inherently connected, the sacrifice of a secondary demand poses no problem as long as what is really wanted is accomplished. Tactical linkage describes the conduct of most international negotiations when politicians are left to themselves to bargain, when no effort is made to inform the negotiations with a changing consensus on causes and effects, or when experts make no attempt to transcend their separate professional perspectives.
Second, issue linkage may also proceed on the basis of causal understandings, or consensual knowledge applied to an agreed overarching social goal. This "substantive linkage" is of greatest concern to our efforts to understand collaboration. An item from the NIEO debate illustrates the pattern. Experts in the developing countries have come to regard technology transfer as an overarching concept instead of worrying separately about such matters as foreign capital inflows, obtaining patents for specific products, finding markets for their products, or building a certain type of factory. These things remain the issues, staying in people's minds even when they are combined and abstracted into a more comprehensive pattern. But instead of being ends in themselves, they become means toward a more complicated end—the achievement of technological self-reliance. Instead of being effects, they are reconceived as causes leading to more basic effects such as wealth, prestige, status, and autonomy. Substantive linkage is typical of
decision making not only by experts committed to consensual knowledge but also by politicians who profess interconnected-expanding goals informed by consensual knowledge.
Third and finally, issue linkage may also be attempted in situations where most of the political aspirations are issue specific, but where strong strands of causal understandings among issues also exist. Moreover, the bargaining situation demands that the negotiators maintain cohesive coalitions in the face of this mismatch between knowledge and interest. We call this "fragmented issue linkage." Each coalition is held together by a commitment to some overriding social goal, even though the politicians disagree with respect to the knowledge necessary to attain it, while the experts see eye to eye. Politicians may also disagree on the extent to which the issues in the package have interdependent anticipated effects. Uncertainty about outcomes is the glue that holds the coalitions together. Even though the linkers are uncertain about the joint gains promised by the issue package, it is safer to link because only by doing so can big concessions be obtained from the industrial countries. Moreover, because the relationship between relatively specific-static goals and increasingly consensual knowledge is by its very nature volatile, we can expect changing calculations of joint gains within and among coalitions. This changeability suggests the possibility of occasional elaborate agreements covering a variety of issues, but not a pattern of such agreements.
Even though bargaining that features tactical linkages does not depend on knowledge, whereas negotiations that conform to the fragmented linkage pattern do, both modes depend on the size of the "win-set." Win-sets, however, are irrelevant to bargaining in the substantive-linkage mode because the persuasiveness and acceptance of the consensual knowledge alone predict agreement.[4]
I have taken the idea of win-sets in two-tiered negotiations and the argument about the importance of large win-sets from Robert D. Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-level Games," International Organization 47 (Summer 1988): 427-60.
The notion of win-sets is intrinsic to international bargaining because international organizations are coalitions of coalitions. The negotiators in the organizations are tied to coalitions by virtue of their membership in blocs of states; they also have to "sell" any agreement to a domestic constituency made up of bureaucratic entities as well as of varying combinations of voluntary groups and political parties. The wise negotiator does not seek to reach agreement on the international level until he or she has some idea of the size of the domestic win-set required to assure acceptance of the international bargain.
Figure 4. A typology of decision-making styles and issue linkage
in international organizations: how knowledge interacts with interest
In general, the larger the win-set the more likely that an acceptable international agreement will be concluded. Having a large win-set implies the inclusion of many groups of constituents into the bargaining process, which in turn implies a large number of interests to be represented and satisfied. A large basket of interests implies a large number of issues that call for linkage in order to become acceptable, at least for tactical linkage. The larger the issue packages, the greater the chance that the various proposals for an agreement offered by the international coalitions will overlap sufficiently to produce a general agreement. Conversely, small win-sets at home imply more restricted issue packages on a narrow range of issues, thus increasing the chances that the competing international formulas will not overlap.
We are now in a position to combine the typology of decision-making styles with our typology of issue linkage (Figure 4). We are still positing an organizational subunit as the decision-making entity, not an international bargaining session (even though our discussion of linkage was illustrated with episodes that occurred in international organizations).
Let us examine what each cell in this figure suggests. In cell A, neither
experts nor politicians are motivated by a growing body of consensual knowledge. Neither thinks of the conceptual unification of separate goals nor uses analytic techniques for conceptual integration. If this situation prevails in an organization, the linkage pattern among issues will remain purely tactical. Agreements persist only as long as the initial interests of the participants remain intact.
In cell B, the experts and politicians are committed to some new and ambitious goals that call for new causal theories. Yet they have no consensual knowledge to help them (though some experts and some politicians undoubtedly propound concepts that have not yet become consensual). Issue linkage is based on political demands alone. The situation is that of fragmented linkage. Agreements can be made, but they are subject to rapid obsolescence if new consensual knowledge develops.
In cell C, the analytic mode of decision making is supreme. All participants accept the expanding knowledge base and employ it in designing their ambitious social objectives. It is the perfect case of substantive issue linkage. The founders of UNEP had something like this in mind, as did the epistemic community and its political allies that dominate UNCTAD.
In cell D, finally, a more complicated situation prevails. The expert knowledge for more ambitious problem solving exists and is available to politicians, some of whom may even be persuaded by its relevance. Yet the definition of social objectives remains fragmented, though some politicians probably would wish to move in the direction of more conceptual complexity. Bargaining under such conditions will also show the fragmented-linkage pattern, with more pressures toward substantive linkage than in cell B. Agreements are subjected to the pressure to adapt in line with knowledge. But the unstable consensus on goals is likely to make the adaptations short-lived.
Bargaining
My argument was based on the assumption that all participants in decision making are located in a single cell and the negotiation in question can be described in terms of the characteristics of a single cell. This assumption is unrealistic. It is truer to life to imagine a bargaining situation in which the participants are located in different
cells. Analysis would then have to focus on a bargaining situation between say, a set of negotiators characterized by an eclectic style and tactical linkages and another made up of skeptics committed to the fragmented linkage of issues.
Let us use the NIEO negotiations in UNCTAD as an illustration. In 1975 the situation would have looked as follows. The governments of the Group of 77 were skeptics; they entertained interconnected and expanding goals but were not united by any commitment to consensual knowledge about how the NIEO package of issues would make them wealthy and strong. The experts advising these governments tended to be of an analytic frame of mind since they did claim such a body of knowledge for themselves, i.e., the structural antidependency position. The UNCTAD staff agreed with them. Group of 77 governments were tied together on the basis of fragmented issue linkage, while UNCTAD staff and the experts advising the Group of 77 governments packaged things on the basis of substantive linkages. In contrast, the B-group governments were divided by a lack of consensual knowledge and united by a commitment to static and specific goals; they were eclectics. Their experts (and the staff of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]) were agreed that NIEO, as based on structural antidependency arguments, was nonsense, whereas good theory favoring economic development was available in the form of the basic-human-needs approach (a variant of managed liberalism). B-group governments embraced tactical linkages, if they were committed to any form of linkage, whereas their experts were willing to engage in fragmented issue linkage with the opposing coalition. We all know the result: years of bargaining produced no agreement because the win-set was at no time large enough to result in any appreciable overlap between the two coalitions. Put differently, decision styles and types of issue linkage were too diverse to allow the kind of formulas that might have yielded large enough win-sets.
Things were different ten years later, but they still did not permit agreement on the NIEO. Owing to many events since 1975 and many new arguments advanced in the meantime, the differences between the two camps were reduced, though not eliminated. Group of 77 governments are less sure of their skeptical style and of their commitment to fragmented issue linkage; they have moved toward the position
of eclectic-tactical linkage as recession, debt, and dependence on foreign funds forced a disaggregation of the old issue package. Their experts lost the earlier commitment to substantive linkage as the doctrines of classical liberalism and pragmatic antidependency reemerged as legitimate. B-group governments, in contrast, became sufficiently concerned with the financial viability of Third World countries to link the issues of debt, debt relief, and world trade in a more substantive manner than was done in 1975, although they did so without professing a greater degree of agreement on the economic theories underlying the linkage. In short, they edged toward skeptic-style fragmented linkage. Although the NIEO did not come into being, shared adversity brought about more intercoalitional agreement than existed ten years earlier. Both coalitions now straddle cells A and B.
How then shall we code the bargaining styles that pit differently minded coalitions against each other in single negotiating encounters? The first point to be noted is that decisions can be based either on "similar" decision-making styles and modes of linkage or on "dissimilar" ones. The decade of NIEO negotiations made the encounter between the two coalitions more "similar" than it had been in 1975, when the coding would have been "dissimilar." I predict that negotiations in which the bargaining coalitions "live in the same cell"—when they profess "similar" modes of linking issues and of merging knowledge with political goals—are more likely to produce lasting collaborative agreements than when "dissimilar" modes occur.
A little later I shall introduce evidence of a number of bargaining encounters that resulted in the evolution of agreements based on "similar" decision-making styles and modes of issue linkage after having first suffered through encounters that were "dissimilar." The sequence of these encounters illustrates the important differences between the pragmatic-fragmented mode and the analytic-substantive ones. Pragmatists, unlike analytic thinkers, experiment with combining two or three issues. Once convinced that the combination is conceptually faulty or politically unacceptable, they are willing to decompose the issue package. Pragmatists prefer to link issues substantively at all times. But they will accept tactical linkages when they must. Moreover, they will bargain with opponents who are not willing to make substantive linkages, thus permitting the fragmented pattern to
operate. Therefore, this mode permits tentative movement toward the growth of consensual concepts. To the extent that these take root, certainty about how to proceed also develops. For the pragmatist, however, nothing is ever final and complete. The social and economic goals to which politicians subscribe may not be expanding as the expert wishes. Therefore, the varying concepts that permit the nesting of goals and policies continue to coexist and to compete. Improved knowledge cannot be used to order goals in any final way. As single goals change and coalitions among bargainers shift, so does the order of priorities acceptable to the pragmatist. Improved knowledge may help in the ordering. But since such knowledge too is rarely final and complete, pragmatists must work on the border of relative and temporary "certainty," of social goals that are only occasionally ordered consensually. Hence they are willing to settle for stop-and-go tactics and for attempts to construct more encompassing concepts, followed by periods of retrenchment and disaggregation.
These conclusions, however, require a more refined typology of bargaining situations than has been offered so far. Since international organizations are coalitions of coalitions, such a typology must contain these three possibilities: (1) intragovernmental negotiations before a national position is developed; (2) intracoalitional negotiations to harmonize the positions of members of single blocs; and (3) intercoalitional bargaining to arrive at an agreement for the entire membership.
Intracoalitional bargaining is likely to be easier than bargaining with one's antagonists.[5]
Negotiations among the bureaucratic units of a government can be expected to display the array of cognitive styles described by Steinbruner. Some of the participants will be theoretical thinkers, while others will display grooved or uncommitted thinking. The theoretical thinkers approximate our analytic ones, and the, uncommitted thinkers resemble the pragmatists, while the eclectics show some similarity to the grooved type. Normally, because in principle national decision makers are subject to hierarchical direction from ministers and heads of government, disagreements among the negotiators can be resolved on the basis of any of these styles; prediction of which one dominates is not possible. Conversely, if no central direction is provided and if no clear agreement is reached (which has been known to happen), the scene is set for the phenomenon of transgovernmental bargaining. Units within the national government approach their opposite numbers in other governments in order to work out a common stance, which may contradict the stance taken by the negotiator's fellow nationals. The national unit with the most complete access to the international bargaining process, then, is in a position to force its fellow decision makers into an agreement they had initially opposed.
Also, the styles involved will probably be similar, or at least not drastically different. The knowledge that the coalition will eventually have to face an opposing coalition is a powerful incentive to hold the members together. Intercoalitional bargaining is very likely to pit the competing styles against one another, with the patterns described above expected to characterize the encounters.Problem Definition
Assume now that the bargaining has resulted in an agreement that will take the form of a new program of action. Such a decision seeks to define a commonly experienced problem that is to be solved by collaboration. Assume also that this decision is just the latest effort to
tackle the problem. Each new effort produces slightly different definitions of the problem. Each time the components of the problem are "nested" more (or less) complexly than before. A "nested problem set" contains a theory about what causes the dissatisfaction that constitutes the problem; how various institutions, processes, and physical parameters are thought to bring about the unhappiness; and what can be done about it. Differently arranged nests correspond to different sets of Chinese boxes (or Russian dolls), each governed by the shape of its largest unit. Successive conceptualizations (nests) will contain elements of the various world-order ideologies. The extent to which the set straddles and combines elements in these ideologies in arriving at its particular manner of nesting shows the extent to which meanings are actually being shared.
I illustrate alternative ways of nesting concepts with a summary discussion of four major U.N. conferences that sought to define key economic questions.[6]
See Ernst B. Haas, "What Is Progress in the Study of International Organization?" Kokusai Seiji 76 (May 1984): 11-46. The four conferences illustrate (1) the failure to arrive at any nesting of concepts (U.N. Conference on Science and Technology for Development [UNCSTD], 1979); (2) nesting patterns that at first approximate the analytic style—substantive linkage mode and then degenerate (U.N. Environment Program Conference, 1972 and 1982); and (3) nesting patterns that conform to the pragmatic style—fragmented linkage mode (the deep-sea-mining aspects of the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea III and the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, 1979). I gratefully acknowledge the work of Susan Sell, Wayne Sandholtz, Jacki Reich, Stephen Sloan, and Mark Trexler as extremely helpful in the analysis of these conferences.
Each conference attempted to construct new nested problem sets about the same issues. In each case, the effort to link issues was more complex than the earlier iteration because states questioned the consensus that had inspired almost all pre-1970 international collaboration on economic welfare.The earlier consensus accepted the desirability of a complex international division of labor and the dominance of free trade and free investment abroad. It envisaged that human welfare would improve as a result of these practices, that economic benefits would trickle down to the mass of the urban and rural populations. Scientific and technological knowledge was crucial in this process. It was expected to be diffused automatically and would therefore require no special intervention by states and international organizations. Efficiency was the organizing concept uniting the processes considered relevant to development. The economic experience of the Western countries inspired it.
Efficiency was challenged in each of the conferences, and other modes of nesting were discussed. Equality—national and international—was the most important rival to efficiency, as represented by the ideology of dependency reduction and the NIEO program. Other rivals included various efforts to organize international collaboration under the concept of improving the global quality of life. They relied
heavily on substituting labor-intensive indigenous technology for imported Western modes of production and on meeting the basic human needs of the poorest in the poor countries, such as food, medical care, shelter, and education. At a minimum, the conferences showed the move away from the efficiency criterion as the dominant concept and toward a different understanding of human and national welfare. At a maximum, they sought a new way to nest the problem of poverty in a matrix of complicated causes that were no longer "decomposable."
How then shall we code problem definition? The dominance of the analytic-substantive mode results in the elaboration of a "nondecomposable" set of tightly interrelated issues and concerns.[7]
The source of the typology is, of course, Herbert A. Simon's work. For a recent discussion of these distinctions see Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983). The normative and perhaps evolutionary significance of the typology is discussed further in chapter 9.
To the extent that the set is derived from a single overarching principle or norm—such as the predominance of a higher quality of life or improved international equity—the set is hierarchically arranged. The prevalence of the pragmatic-fragmented style tends to yield a "nearly nondecomposable" nested set. Less hierarchy is evident in the nesting because the bargainers have to do some compromising among the basic principles in assembling the set. Not all parts of the set are equally tightly and permanently linked to the other parts, so that some decomposition is always possible. A "fully decomposable" set is the result of bargaining in the eclectic-tactical style. Whatever arrangement is reached remains subject to relatively easy dismemberment as bits and pieces of the problem can be tackled. Bargaining that features the skeptic-fragmented style is more difficult to code and classify. It depends on the style of the opposing coalitions. If they are eclectically minded, the result will also be a fully decomposable set. But if they are analytically or pragmatically minded, then the outcome is likely to be a nearly nondecomposable set.Institutionalization
We now need some evaluative variables for assessing the impact of various kinds of issue linkage, bargaining, and problem definition on a specific organization. I shall use the notions of institutionalization and organizational legitimacy and authority for that purpose. The coding in each case is a simple bivariate one: the features to be elaborated either do or do not develop. I define institutionalization as the development
of new organs, subunits, and administrative practices that are designed to improve the performance of the organization in the wake of some major disappointment with earlier outputs.
So defined, institutionalization assumes that learning involves decision-making routines that actively search for consensual knowledge and make serious efforts to use it. Evidence that such a trend is under way would include any and all of the following: the organization may establish a think tank to work up consensual knowledge; it may decide to use modeling techniques useful in other decision-making contexts in order to reduce uncertainty; program budgeting may be adopted in order to monitor performance more systematically and to gain insight about failures; recruitment practices may be changed to reflect the need for personnel adept in these activities and skills; rules of deliberation may be changed so as to encourage serious nonconfrontational discussion instead of posturing and voting. Adaptation, as opposed to learning, may feature attempts to use one or two of these innovations in an ad hoc manner. It must be stressed that the episodic use of these innovations—all of which have occurred—does not amount to successful institutionalization; coding cannot be done by merely noting the effort to introduce innovations. Successful institutionalization takes place only when they are consistently used and fully integrated into the regular decision-making process.
Crisis management can be used as a short-hand indicator for successful institutionalization. A crisis is a sudden concatenation of circumstances that threatens the major values of most of the membership—a major war, a famine, a global depression. A crisis presents the membership with an unfamiliar set of problems in the sense that the causes of the disturbance are seen as complex and not amenable to one-shot solutions. It is not that the membership never before experienced war, famine, or depression. A crisis consists not in the recurrence of these events, but in the membership's recognition that the recurrence is brought on by the insufficiency of institutional routines to avert it. Hammarskjöld's invention of peacekeeping forces constitutes successful crisis management in this sense, as does the work of the 1974 World Food Conference. Successful crisis management incorporates in a single institutional response the qualities and routines described above.
Legitimacy and Authority
Successful institutionalization, or crisis management, can be appreciated or neglected by the membership. A one-time jump in institutionalization is far from guaranteeing its continuation. It also does not imply that everybody applauds the innovation. Peacekeeping remains controversial despite its thirty-year history. The reforms suggested by the World Food Conference did little to prevent the recurrence of famine in Africa. Modeling and program budgeting are talked about but not integrated into U.N. decision making.
Organizational legitimacy exists when the membership values the organization and generally implements collective decisions because they are seen to serve the members' values. Organizational legitimacy increases when, and only when, the innovative institutional practices are accepted and appreciated as desirable for meeting the values of the member states. The legitimacy of U.N. peacekeeping practices has not uniformly increased, though on balance more members value than denigrate them. The legitimacy of technical assistance for economic development has certainly increased, but not uniformly so for all donors. The overall legitimacy of the United Nations has probably decreased as far as the industrialized member states are concerned; but the same is not true with respect to the IMF and the World Bank. Judgments about increases in legitimacy must be finely tuned.
Authority is different from legitimacy. States may grudgingly meet the organization's expectations without at the same time appreciating or valuing them. The targets of peacekeeping operations defer to the United Nation's authority without granting it legitimacy. So do the victims of the International Monetary Fund's conditionality requirements and the small artisans and farmers who pay the European Community's value-added tax. Organizational authority consists of the ability of the organization to have its decisions implemented irrespective of the goodwill of the members concerned. Organizational authority, like legitimacy, either increases or fails to do so. Of course, it can decline, too.
Finally, the development of an international organization can be judged as to whether legitimacy and authority, taken together , decline, increase, or stay the same. I commend an exercise that would trace
the changes in the legitimate authority enjoyed by all public international organizations. I suspect that only the Universal Postal Union (UPU) would show a consistent upward trend shared by most of the membership.[8]
Legitimacy and authority can be measured quantitatively when the rule-supervisory decisions of the organization call for regular reporting on implementation and/or when a complaint procedure exists. For a method of measurement in the case of human rights programs see Ernst B. Haas, Human Rights and International Action (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1970), 47-49.
"Predicting" Changed Behavior?
The enterprise on which we are engaged is disciplined speculation: we want to think systematically about the possible future of international organizations as a medium of interstate cooperation that can lead to the sharing of meanings. Our enterprise does not offer a theory to be tested against other theories. Such a step would be premature.
The speculative purpose of the approach explains the exhaustive character of the two codes we offer. The variables in the descriptive code cover almost every aspect of the work of international organizations, whether relevant to the study of adaptation and learning or not. The code was designed to provide a vocabulary for describing every feature that might possibly turn out to be important for the development of a theory, leaving for later testing and study the additional question about whether the variables are each equally necessary for explaining or hazarding predictions.
The analytic code also hedges against an uncertain epistemological future. The mode of reasoning, of understanding decision making, or of evaluating the meaning of decisions presented in Figure 2 is also intended to be exhaustive rather than parsimonious. The arrangement of variables does not "predict" any more than do the variables of the descriptive code. It is intended to encompass all the judgments observers ought to be able to make, or be interested in making, without now worrying about whether each step is strictly speaking necessary for understanding how adaptation and learning occur. I now offer several sets of logically plausible associations among the descriptive and analytic variables that ought to "go with" adaptation as opposed to learning. In the absence of a real theory, I do not feel entitled to consider these logical associations as the equivalent of hypotheses.
Adaptation and learning, though they are the behaviors I want to explore, are not the only possible fates for international organizations. Additional behavioral patterns we ought to consider are the continuation
of the status quo and decline. Organizations whose work and program do not engender disappointment and therefore do not trigger demands for a different program can continue to follow the happy path on which their founders set them. They have no need to adapt or to learn. They were fortunate in being designed from the first to cope adequately with a task that also does not change much over time. I find it impossible to list specific forms of beliefs, representation, administration, voting, budgeting, and leadership (to name a few of the descriptive variables at random) that ought to be logically associated with the continuation of the status quo. It seems to me that any form the variables might take could, in principle, find favor in the eyes of the membership.
The same cannot be said of decline. Decline is the label we give to an organization's trajectory when neither adaptation nor learning takes place but when there is evidence of massive dissatisfaction on the part of the membership. Under these circumstances we ought to expect the demise of the organization. A systematic list of how each variable is logically to be related to decline, adaptation, and learning follows.
Ideology . Five major ideologies have contended for the souls of contemporary organizations. When the members seem unable to resolve sharp conflict among any or all of them, thus preventing the definition of any program, decline is likely to follow. The hegemony of one ideology, constantly under challenge from one or more rivals, is associated with adaptation. Learning is consistent with the victory of any two ideologies that manage to work out a compromise.
Representation . The main issue is whether representation should follow the principle of state equality or yield to qualification by special state attribute. Another issue is whether nongovernmental organizations ought to be able to be represented or whether that right depends on statehood. When no formula finds acceptance, decline is nigh. Adaptation goes with equality (in principle), though some qualified state representation and selective participation by NGOs are tolerated. Learning is associated with qualified state representation and participation by nongovernmental groups friendly to the dominant states.
Secretariat Autonomy . The total penetration of the secretariat by the dominant members is to be expected under conditions of both decline
and adaptation. Partial penetration is to be expected even in the learning mode, though it is subordinate to secretariat autonomy.
Status of Outside Experts . Should experts be free agents or agents of governments? Inability to arrive at any agreement about this is the hallmark of decline. Under adaptation, we can expect toleration for any formula; no single one seems to be uniquely associable with adaptation. Learning requires the predominance of epistemic communities acting as the most relevant experts.
Source of Revenue . All types of revenue are consistent with adaptation, though all are unstable and unreliable. Decline is likely to occur if an institution relies exclusively on assessed contributions. Learning relies on capital subscriptions and voluntary contributions.
Administration . None of our patterns can be uniquely associated with direct, indirect, or shared administration. Under learning, we would expect shared administration to increase. An organization in decline is likely to be characterized by sharp disputes over the preferred mode of administration.
Monitoring Compliance . All types of monitoring techniques available to international organizations are consistent with adaptation, but none is used consistently and thoroughly. An organization in decline will not attempt any systematic monitoring. irrespective of its legal mandate. An organization undergoing learning will stress consultations, regular reporting, and the selective use of sanctions.
Voting . An organization suffering decline is likely to be torn apart by controversy over the voting formula to be preferred. Organizations undergoing adaptation may prefer voting by simple or qualified majorities. Learning to live with controversy and to transcend it via compromise, however, tend to coincide with the avoidance of voting altogether and the practice, instead, of "consensus."
Budgeting . Adaptation is associated with disjointed incrementalism and logrolling as the main methods of creating budgets. Organizations in decline work on the basis of logrolling almost exclusively. Learning is to be associated with program budgeting.
Personnel Recruitment . Although learning is associated with recruitment practices that stress merit and skills, adaptation tends to go with
deference to nationality quotas, though the two principles (merit and nationality quotas) are contradictory only at the margin. An organization in decline will dispense with merit as a criterion of employment and rely exclusively on political favoritism.
The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations . Adaptation tolerates all conceivable roles NGOs can play, ranging from expert consultant to monitor to lobbyist. An organization in decline is likely to tolerate NGOs in major administrative roles and will even delegate power to such groups, even though they are anathema to some members.
Leadership . The executive head of an organization in decline will not assert himself; his position is purely reactive to whatever dominant pressure from the outside is brought to bear. Adaptation will be associated with an executive head's deference to whatever dominant coalition prevails. In an organization that learns, however, the executive head will succeed in building and manipulating a dominant coalition by practicing crisis management.
Knowledge . Knowedge is not consensual and is not becoming more consensual in organizations undergoing decline or adaptation. It is becoming more consensual in organizations that learn.
Political Goals . An organization in decline is unable to decide whether its political goal structure ought to remain specific and static in the face of pressure to move toward interconnected and expanding goals. An organization undergoing adaptation also has difficulty deciding that question, but finds ways of resolving it by using less-than-coherent techniques (these techniques will be examined in the next chapters). Learning, by definition, implies the reasoned ability to justify expanding and interconnected goals, or to articulate static and specific ones.
Decision-making Style . Organizations in decline cannot do better than make decisions eclectically, while organizations undergoing adaptation seek to work out compromises among skeptic, pragmatic, and eclectic styles. Learning is exclusively associated with pragmatic or analytic decision making.
Issue Linkage . Organizations in decline cannot link issues except tactically, while adapting organizations attempt fragmented issue linkage
while primarily depending on tactical linking. Organizations undergoing learning link issues in a fragmented manner, simultaneously reaching toward substantive linkage.
Bargaining . Adapting and declining organizations both tend to be subjected to situations in which all bargaining, among all possible groups of opponents, pits different ways of linking issues and different decision-making styles against one another; dissimilarity prevails across the board. This is not the case under learning. Intragovernmental encounters feature dissimilarity, intracoalitional negotiations are similar, and intercoalitional bargaining is based on almost similar modes and principles.
Problem Definition . An organization that learns will tend to define the problem set that characterizes its task as being made up of nondecomposable or nearly nondecomposable elements. An adapting organization tends to go for a problem set that is made up of fully decomposable elements, whereas a declining organization is characterized by an inability of the membership to arrive at any clear problem set.
Institutionalization . An organization undergoing decline is incapable of institutionalization. It is difficult to arrive at fully coherent and consistent institutionalization in an adapting organization. Only the learning mode is associated with successful and coherent institutionalization.
Authority and Legitimacy . Again, it is true by definition that decline must be associated with diminishing authority and legitimacy. Adaptation, however, is quite consistent with an increase on both dimensions, or with unchanging degrees of either authority or legitimacy, or of both. Learning is certainly associated with increased authority, though not necessarily with a concomitant improvement of legitimacy.
Three Models of Organizational Change
The four chapters that follow are devoted to the detailed discussion of two models of adaptation (incremental growth and turbulent non-growth) and one model of learning (managed interdependence). I conclude this chapter with a summary of how the descriptive and analytical variables combine to result in each of these three models. (see Tables 4 and 5).
In the incremental-growth model, the knowledge available to policymakers does not become more consensual, though it may be growing in scope, and no single epistemic community dominates the flow of knowledge. Politicians in the dominant coalition entertain static and narrowly focused goals; politicians associated with member states outside the dominant coalition, however, are advancing dynamic and expanding goals. Prevalent decision-making styles pit eclectics and/or skeptics against each other. They will link issues tactically for the most part, though some pressure for engaging in fragmented linkages will be in evidence. The modesty of the goals and the relative irrelevance of novel bodies of knowledge result in bargains that are "similar" at the intragovernmental and intracoalitional levels, and only "slightly dissimilar" at the level of intercoalitional encounters. The resulting problem definition is most likely to be a fully decomposable set; we have no reason to expect much intellectual coherence among the constituents of the organization's program, as each item can flourish or founder on its merits without being aided or hindered by other items.
Things work quite differently in the turbulent nongrowth model. Knowledge among coalitions is not becoming more consensual; however, within some coalitions knowledge applicable to the organization's mandate does command more and more agreement. Some politicians defend static and specific objectives while others advocate dynamic and interconnected ones; the two sets of politicians (and their associated experts) confront each other for control of the dominant coalition. The decision-making style pits skeptics and/or pragmatists against each other. They are able to link issues only in tactical terms, resulting in a bargaining pattern dominated by "dissimilar" styles at all levels. This of course results in a program that is so decomposable as not to merit the label "set" at all. While under conditions of incremental growth, the decomposable program items lack coherence without interfering with each other, under conditions of turbulent nongrowth, the lack of coherence may actually hinder the successful implementation of program items.
Both models of organizational adaptation, then, operate in such a fashion as to give us fully decomposable problem sets, looser and more fragmented than the actors' conceptualization that preceded the change we code. We cannot tell whether the new and more disaggregated set will lead to member-state dissatisfaction: demands for
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
still another reconceptualization of problem sets would depend on whether satisfaction of the members, or its lack, takes the form of an ideologically unified critique.
The managed-interdependence model is the only one capable of inspiring a redefinition of the organization's mandate, giving us nondecomposable, or nearly nondecomposable, sets; but a fully decomposable set may also be produced if the learning pattern suggests this solution as superior to its alternatives. Consensual knowledge, depending on its substantive content, could in principle lead to any of these outcomes.
Our cases of learning to manage interdependence, however, fail to confirm this variety of theoretical possibilities. Mainly, they show that reconceptualization leads to the articulation of nearly nondecomposable sets. The typical sequence of events is as follows. The knowledge being purveyed by experts as relevant to improved organizational performance is becoming more consensual; the objectives of politicians are at the same time expanding and are seen as more tightly interconnected as well. The decision-making style of policymakers will be pragmatic and/or analytic; issue linkage is fragmented, shading into substantive connections among items. Bargaining among members of the same government is likely to become "dissimilar," while intracoalitional negotiations are showing "similar" issue-linkage patterns. Intercoalitional negotiations are becoming "almost similar." This combination of features must result in a problem set that is nested so as to make the disaggregation of the constituent parts very difficult, if not impossible.
True, the increasingly consensual knowledge could also suggest the wisdom of disaggregating issues; the fact that the objectives of politicians are expanding in scope need not imply a tight interconnection among objectives. Decision making would then be consistently pragmatic, and issue linkage would remain fragmented without accretions of substantive linkage. Intercoalitional bargaining would be "dissimilar," or, if "similar" in the sense that only the fragmented style prevails, the substantive differences in positions that the negotiators profess would still militate in favor of decomposability among problems. Why this pattern does not prevail is the theme of chapter 9.
5
Adaptation Through Incremental Growth
The Incremental-Growth Model
Incremental growth in response to dissatisfaction in the task environment involves adaptation, not learning; it has been practiced with great success by many organizations. Seen from the vantage point of those who run international organizations, steady, untraumatic growth in task, program, and budget are highly desirable. From the perspective of the founding states, growth may be acceptable, even if not intended. Designers usually hope their handiwork will produce the expected outputs with a minimal need for investing additional resources.
The organization is created by states who decide that their separate interests cannot be adequately met without some mechanism for collaborative, programmed, or joint action. The initial task of the organization is the elaboration of a program and a set of rules of conduct to bring about such joint action. Invariably, because the founding states are not equals in terms of issue-relevant power, the organization will be ruled by a dominant coalition of like-minded states; in exceptional
cases it will be ruled by a single hegemonic state. The dominant coalition will select the executive head.
In order to carry out its tasks, the organization must interact with other organizations that constitute its environment. These include governments as well as other international organizations. Depending on the task, they may also include multinational firms and nongovernmental groups.
States in the dominant coalition will seek to place people considered able and willing to carry out the preferred program in the administrative subunits of the organization. States not included in the dominant coalition will also seek to place "their" people in such entities, but with less success. It is realistic to visualize the result as a coalition between international civil servants and their advisers and consultants, organized in specific subunits, and the dominant coalition of member states. Together they will fashion the organization's program of action.
Change in the program occurs in response to evidence of member-state dissatisfaction, which can be visualized as a "threat" to the autonomy of the subunits concerned. Unless they meet the threat, they may lose funds, personnel, prestige, and even their existence. The most salient threats come from subunits in rival organizations and from the core units within member-state governments. Faced with a threat from within the dominant coalition of states, the organization must either seek support from a different coalition or yield by changing the program. If the dominant coalition itself is threatened by other states challenging its position, the dominant coalition usually seeks to respond by enlarging its membership in an effort to co-opt some of the complainants. This tactic can succeed only if the program is adjusted to suit the interests of the states admitted to the dominant coalition. Adaptation takes the form of enlarging the program to suit the newcomers without relinquishing the programmatic elements favored by the original dominant coalition.
Organizational theory and the logic of games tell us that the greater the variety of threats, the larger the new dominant coalition will be. It is doubtful that this rule holds in our model. The size of the coalition is not the result only of mechanical bargaining and compromising on the program. Some attention must be given to the internal coherence
of the program, to its fit with prevailing beliefs about cause and effect, ends and means. Compromise cannot exceed the bounds of knowledge accepted within the dominant coalition unless a new, and more consensual, knowledge based is discovered at the same time.
At any rate, it can be taken for granted as the newcomers are given some degree of satisfaction that the program will change, though not necessarily expand. In the case of contraction, some subunits in the administrative apparatus will disappear. If the program expands, new subunits will emerge, beholden to new patrons in the enlarged dominant coalition. Consequently, the distribution of internal power among units will alter, as it did within the dominant coalition. Gradually, this will result in changing the goal structure of the entire organization. The organization will have survived by simply enlarging or contracting its task, not by having given that task greater coherence or a new legitimacy in terms of the knowledge that inspired action.
Adaptation by increments is usually informal; constitutions are not at first formally changed. Only later are formal rules and procedures brought in conformity with the actual changes. Constitutional amendments are usually enacted in international organizations only after the practices have already been adjusted to the pressures we summarized. Before the informal changes come about, the subunits most threatened will usually "scan" their environment in order to devise an appropriate response. There are very few units in international organizations that possess a power base that is sufficiently autonomous from the dominant coalition of states to be able to ride out threats without scanning and bending with the winds of new demands.[1]
In preparing this summary statement, I relied heavily on Donald Chisholm, Organizational Adaptation to Environmental Change, Studies in Public Organization, Working Paper 86-1 (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California), 24-26, 31-32. Chisholm uses the notion of dominant coalitions to describe clusters of power within administrative agencies, rather than describing the groupings among member states. His units of analysis are groups of civil servants; mine are clusters of governments.
How to Identify the Incremental-Growth Model
Setting
The incremental model cannot operate unless the ideological conflict among member states is completely contained (see Table 1). The model flourishes when any one of the five world-order ideologies is disproportionately represented among the members. It can also operate when the members are divided between classical and managed liberals,
or between the two varieties of antidependency thinking. When any other set of ideologies is in contest, the model's limits have been reached.
Representation must reflect the principle of state power qualified by whatever issue-relevant attribute makes one state more crucial than others; an oligarchy of the most "relevant" rules. NGO representation is possible only if the groups in question share in the dominant ideological consensus. The secretariat is formally autonomous and is treated as if it were a civil service, but it is partially penetrated by the dominant coalition of states, which dictates the terms of employment and the key roles. Expert consultants and advisers are formally or informally instructed by governments. Participation by truly independent experts, or representatives of epistemic communities not linked to governments, is not consistent with rule by a cohesive dominant coalition of states.
Power
All of the descriptive possibilities captured by the variables of revenue, administration, and monitoring of compliance are compatible with the incremental-growth model (see Table 1). Organizations that have grown incrementally have used all four methods of raising revenue, though annual assessments and voluntary contributions have certainly been the most common ones. Similarly, organizations of this type have made use of direct, shared, and indirect administration. Monitoring of compliance, perhaps, relies more on consultation, reporting, and the examination of reports than on the investigation of complaints and the mounting of sanctions. Nevertheless, even intrusive measures for enforcing compliance have occasionally been used by incrementally growing organizations. It is certainly true, however, that if organizations are induced to use these measures frequently (given the constraints on autonomy shared by all international organizations), the limits of incremental change will soon be reached.
A special opportunity for adaptive behavior arises when administrative tasks are being shared with other international organizations and national governments. The opportunity involves the pooling of
resources among organizations and the regularization of implementation by relying on firm rules. Interagency cooperation on economic development programs is a case in point. Sometimes no single unit is equipped to carry out a multisectoral project. Hence the cooperative work of several agencies takes the form of a "pooled" social technology regarding the deployment of information and personnel. The coordination brought about by this pooling can be routinized only through new institutions and through rules governing decisions on recruitment, monitoring, and finance. Such rules confirm and perpetuate the adaptation to the new kind of task.[2]
For fuller discussion of the role of rules see James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 70-72. For an elaborate discussion of rules as a management strategy in international resource conflicts, see Peter E. Cowhey, The Problems of Plenty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), chap. 2.
Behavior
What voting formula is likely to prevail (see Table 1)? On matters of fundamental importance to the dominant coalition—matters that were a key to the kinds of tasks the organization was designed to implement—unanimity among the oligarchs must prevail. This is shown most clearly in the voting rules of the U.N. Security Council. But the same rule holds informally in other organizations dominated by major powers. The dominant coalition cannot hope to have its way unless voting in general assemblies and general conferences is based on a qualified-majority principle. Strict majoritarianism is inconsistent with rule by oligarchy.
Budgeting reflects the practice of disjointed incrementalism, with occasional use of logrolling to assure the necessary qualified majority. Amounts that are budgeted change marginally from year to year in line with the efforts of the nondominant to have their demands met or in response to slight shifts in interest of the dominant. If the dominant coalition that founded and continues to rule the organization is a group of Western countries, the members of that coalition will impose the merit principle as the sole criterion for recruiting staff. Reliance on the merit principle enables this dominant coalition to equip itself with a staff socialized to employ Western problem-solving techniques.
No particular pattern characterizes the role of nongovernmental groups. All are consistent with the incremental-change model, provided only that the values and interests of the NGOs concerned do not
clash with those of the dominant coalition. The executive head, finally, serves as the agent of the dominant coalition. He can be neither self-effacing nor independent, but he can increase his legitimacy by pointing to the efficiency with which he carries out the organization's task. Given a relatively stable task environment and a slowly changing task domain, the executive head is safe in justifying his efficiency with criteria of technical rationality.
Knowledge and Political Goals
The mere fact that a task is being defined presumes that some knowledge about it exists and is being applied (see Figure 3). The real question concerning us is whether, and to what extent, knowledge is becoming more consensual among the actors. The designers of the conflict-management task of the United Nations drew on their understanding of the causes of World War II as their knowledge base; so did the founding fathers of the European Community. The designers of the Bretton Woods institutions relied on their common understanding of the Great Depression. Much of the early activity on human rights derived its notions of cause and effect from knowledge about totalitarianism. In each instance the knowledge in question was shared among members of the dominant coalition, but it was not necessarily accepted by outsiders.
Acts of adaptation that occur later on in the work of the organizations undoubtedly make use of bits of additional knowledge. For example, the advent of the U.S.-Soviet conflict resulted in changed ways of conflict management in the United Nations without, however, substituting a new theory of conflict for the previous one. The collapse of Bretton Woods involved a challenge to Keynesian economics, but it did not give rise to a new generally accepted macroeconomic theory of international relations. Nevertheless, the organizations concerned adapted their programs to the decline in consensus. Adaptation occurs regularly on the basis of slightly altered knowledge that is not necessarily consensual. The incremental-growth model can operate on the basis of knowledge that is not becoming significantly more consensual, but it cannot survive an unbounded deterioration in knowledge.
The dominant coalition makes no effort to merge hitherto separate political goals into overarching clusters. There is no reason, however, to suppose that members of the excluded group of states feel equally satisfied with the perceptual status quo. Not being part of the oligarchy, such states may be entertaining dynamic goals that present a challenge to the inner elite because the outsiders are likely to include demands that are incompatible with the goals of the dominant coalition.
In such situations organizations make decisions beset with uncertainty and disagreement about preference orderings. When this uncertainty occurs while the actors also accept a single theory of causation, they are led to a compromise in which the goals professed are somehow combined, such as by splitting the difference or finding a formula for dividing the expected benefits in variously differentiated ways instead of using a single calculus for identifying benefits. There may be another commonly encountered decisional conundrum: the situation in which there is no agreement on causation, but certainty about the goals. Here the decision must be made by weighing the available knowledge and debating its merits and shortcomings; eventually one's best guess determines the information one needs to use in order to attain the stipulated goals. The techniques advocated by some for overcoming motivated misperceptions come into play here.[3]
For suggestions on how to cope with motivated misperceptions, see Alexander L. George, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980).
Decision-making Style, Issue Linkage, and Bargaining
The possibilities for decision making are confined to action in the eclectic or the skeptical mode (see Figure 4). If all participants share specific-static goals and rely on existing bits of knowledge, the encounter must be eclectic. But if some of the participants entertain more expanding-dynamic goals, action can move into the skeptic cell. Issue linkage will be tactical where electicism prevails, but fragmented linkages become possible with movement toward skepticism.
Bargaining in the incremental-growth model is not likely to be overly complicated. Intragovernmentally and within the international coalitions it is to be expected that eclectics would face other eclectics, and skeptics other skeptics: bargaining styles would be similar. In intercoalitional encounters it is possible that eclectics would have to face
skeptics. If so, and if the members of the dominant coalition tend to be eclectic and to link issues tactically, the outcome will favor the eclectic-tactical style once more.
Problem Definition and Institutionalization
Given our observations about issue linkage and bargaining, the problem-to-be-solved will most likely be fully decomposable. Compromise, judgment, and eclectic matching of knowledge with static goals are incapable of providing a holistic picture of the problem. They cannot give rise to an organizational task that approaches the complexity of a large problem set with many branches. Adaptation consists of adding new tasks incrementally, not of justifying the new task in terms of a reconsidered mission rooted in a new theory.
Can such incremental but incoherent growth result in institutionalization? Yes indeed. Each instance of adaptation in U.N. conflict management was accompanied by the creation of new organs and routines. It is also true, of course, that some of these withered on the vine after a few years of use. One could even argue that adaptation consists of discarding an institutional innovation once the task environment changes once more. Better crisis management is possible within the confines of this model, though we cannot claim that the improvement is likely to be permanent.
Therefore, both legitimacy and authority can increase, separately and together. If the global conditions or the regional dynamics under which this model operates do not change rapidly and dramatically, incremental growth can result in more legitimate and authoritative international organizations. But we must spell out these global conditions and regional dynamics before we can determine the frequency with which this occurs.
Conditions and Limitations of the Incremental-Growth Model
Incremental growth can continue only as long as nothing disturbs the leisurely pace at which new client demands are introduced. Once a great many new demands engulf the organization—especially when
these demands emanate from competing ideologies and claims to knowledge—the limits of the model have been reached. This will happen even sooner if the diverse new demands are issued all at once. What, then, accounts for the helter-skelter flood of new demands? Demands that upset adaptation through incremental growth are associated with unstable task environments, unstable task domains, and longer shadows of the future.
Incremental growth flourishes as long as no new member states are admitted to the organization. It can also go on if the membership, which remains constant, experiences the need for new policies in such a fashion that all the member states make the same kinds of new demands. If they all want more (or less) peacekeeping at the same time, incremental adaptation is not threatened. Incremental growth can also continue if new members are admitted provided they do not differ systematically from the original ones. If all the new members are democracies with industrial-mixed economics, no threat to incremental adaptation is posed; if most of them are poor agricultural countries with authoritarian political institutions, a severe problem emerges. In the first case, the original ideological consensus is likely to remain intact, though the dominant coalition may have to be expanded; in the second case, a challenger ideology may be admitted along with the new entrants.
What matters, then, for a stable task environment is not an unchanging set of demands and expectations. What matters is that the type of demand remain stable. Expressing dissatisfaction over insufficient monetary liquidity or inaccurate reporting of epidemics does not introduce a new type of demand. Assuring liquidity for the poor with automatic grants, and monitoring epidemics with WHO personnel does, because the derogations of sovereignty implied by these demands project a qualitative change over accepted institutional practices.
A stable task domain is likely to exist when the conditions for a stable task environment prevail. There are other considerations, however, that make for a stable task domain. Incremental adaptation cannot survive disastrous program failures. A famine relief program that fails to feed people, a disease eradication campaign that results in increased fatalities, or a peacekeeping episode that exacerbates conflict are all examples of such catastrophes. In other words, as long as the
available knowledge suffices to avert totally unacceptable outcomes, incremental adaptation is safe.
One major challenge to such safety, however, is the volatility of technology and science. Rapid technological change triggers new demands that wish to make use of (or to restrict) the implications of the technology for human welfare. Rapid scientific change spawns new claims to more interconnected pieces of knowledge and therefore challenges prevailing definitions of problems. The combination of the two gave us the "ecoholistic" world-order ideology. A task domain cannot be expected to remain stable unless the pace of scientific and technological change is modest. Rapid change implies accelerated instability in the task environment.
Incremental adaptation is favored by a conception of time in which problems are defined by intragenerational concerns with immediate consequences. A war threatens people now living in the zone of hostilities, not their children and grandchildren; its consequences are felt every time a shell explodes. The same is true of a famine, an epidemic, and even a major economic development program. In these cases, potential beneficiaries of international action are living in the present; they are being protected against evils experienced every day.
But what about the disposal of toxic wastes, the exhaustion of natural resources, genetic engineering of grains, runaway population growth, economic investments not likely to bear fruit for a generation, or costly war-fighting systems that may never be used? These are examples of intergenerational time, of temporally very remote consequences flowing from action or inaction. Thinking about causal chains of this type takes us beyond easily calculable chronological time; here, we are dealing with a more abstract "social time."[4]
See John Gerard Ruggie, "Social Time and International Policy," in Persistent Patterns and Emergent Structures in a Waning Century, ed. Margaret Karns (New York: Praeger, 1986). Marvin S. Soroos, "Ecology and the Time Dimensions in Human Relationships," in The Global Predicament, ed. David W. Orr and Marvin S. Soroos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).
In a different perspective, it is not accurate to claim that incremental growth and the solution to intergenerational problems are incompatible. On the one hand, my claim is true in the sense that decision making under conditions of disagreement on causation is hard to reconcile with the kind of analysis and foresight that is ideally required by thinking in terms of intergenerational time. On the other hand, for instance, it is also true that decisions about genetic engineering by those who develop and commercialize the technology, as well as by authorities called upon to license the technology, may well be made incrementally because there may be no institutions capable of thinking in terms of social time. In short, the prevalence of incremental techniques in situations in which they should be avoided is due to the absence of appropriately designed institutions.
Problems characterized by social-time considerations cannot be solved by incremental modes of intervention. Organizations geared to incremental adaptation be sidestepped when social time is perceived by the actors as the imperative for action.Almost all contemporary international organizations originated because their founders had learned some important lessons from their unsatisfactory experiences with multilateralism. Many of the founding fathers thus sought to place the problem to be solved by the new organization in a more complex nest of causation than the one allowed by
the insights of their predecessors. Yet most of these organizations eventually settled into a routine of incremental adaptation to ongoing challenges. Later still, many entitles failed to stay within the limits of continuing incremental adaptation. Either they fell into the pattern to be explored next, adaptation via turbulent nongrowth, or they learned to manage increasing interdependence.
Despite the pervasiveness of politics in the life of these organizations, institutionalization does occur. Routines do dominate decision making and the implementation of programs. Jeffrey Pfeffer accounts for stability within such organizations, despite their political nature, by reminding us that routines are themselves a form of decisional commitment; decisions made today inevitably condition future actions even if controversy and disagreement ensue in the meantime. Organizations develop their own internal culture, a special body of beliefs is accepted by most of the staff, and they standardize and routinize expectations. And, of course, particularly successful subunits and individuals acquire a relatively safe power base and consequently retain access to resources with which to reward their supporters and punish their enemies.[5]
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power in Organizations (Marshfield, Mass.: Pitman, 1981). My treatment ignores one possibility explored by students of voluntary organizations in the United States—i.e., a takeover by the organization's professional staff in the face of lack of consensus on the part of the dominant external coalition that is titularly in charge of the organization. No international staff, no matter how professional, possesses the power resources for a takeover, even though the motivation for doing so may well exist. See J. Craig Jenkins, "Radical Transformation of Organizational Goals," Administrative Science Quarterly 22 (December 1977): 568-86. Jenkins studied the National Council of Churches.
Taken together, these otherwise adaptive features can have the effect of overadaptation. Units in the secretariat may become so cozily safe (because they are well protected by past commitments, by organizational culture, and by resources assured by friendly forces in the task environment) that they see no need to adapt in the face of new challenges. They will then stubbornly defend their established mission and question the legitimacy of new and different demands. If this behavior occurs frequently in an organization, the end of incremental adaptation is near.
Another telltale sign is the problem of scale. Adaptation will become unmanageable if the multiplicity and complexity of the tasks facing the organization grow too great. Unless further adaptation takes the form of deliberate internal disaggregation or of the shedding of new responsibilities, problems of scale may endanger the organization's continuing ability to adapt incrementally and may lead to turbulent nongrowth. This is one of the institutional disasters that struck the United Nations in the 1960s, and many claim the same fate befell the European Community.
The transition to turbulent nongrowth may also be implied by personnel turnover. Acting in the incremental mode, a set of administrators may initiate or intensify a program that may prove to be disappointing to the presumed beneficiaries. But by the time the program fails, the initiating administrators may have left and will therefore escape blame. Not expecting to remain in the secretariat for a long time, they are willing to take the risk of failure and to experiment with programmatic innovations.
Although short tenure is expected among high appointed officials in the United States, this is not normally the case in international organizations. Hence when new demands are made by new clients, the administrators are often leery of acting because they fear failure and do not wish to be blamed for it. When that becomes evident to the claimants for new programs, they will seek to sidestep the old administrators and to create new subunits staffed by "their" people. The new staff then acts as risk takers and innovators, expecting to be protected from failure by their patrons. But their programs may fail too. Being protected, they cannot be removed. Yet they can no longer do what they were hired to accomplish. Failure is not enough to inspire a reformation of the organization. The scene is set for turbulent nongrowth.
6
Adaptation Through Turbulent Nongrowth
"Nongrowth" overstates the pattern we are about to explore. Literally defined, nongrowth is characterized by stable or shrinking budgets, the failure to acquire new tasks, low morale, and failure to recruit needed personnel. Although this has been the lot of some international organizations, it is not our real concern. Nongrowth may also prevail even though budgets keep growing, personnel expand, tasks are added, new organs are created and additional agreements concluded. I label such developments nongrowth when they occur in settings of "turbulence."[1]
The term and concept were first used in E. F. Emery and E. L. Trist, "The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments," Human Relations 18 (1965): 21-32. The concept was formalized by J. L. Metcalfe, "Systems Models, Economic Models and the Causal Texture of Organisational Environments," Human Relations 27 (1974): 639-63.
Turbulence and Turbulent Fields
Turbulence characterizes an organization that finds itself in a setting of enormous social complexity. There are many actors professing many clashing interests; they have different perceptions as to why they find themselves in difficulties; and they cannot agree on who or what placed them in the condition. Each actor pursues many objectives simultaneously
but is unsure of the trade-offs among them. Each actor is tied into a network of interdependencies with other actors who are as confused as the first. Yet each knows that some of the objectives sought by each cannot be obtained without cooperation from the other. A "turbulent field," then, is a "policy space" in which this type of confusion dominates discussion and negotiation.
In such a policy space it is very difficult for organizational actors to develop stable expectations of mutual behavior and performance. If one is not sure of one's own goals, it becomes very hard to adjust one's behavior to the goals of negotiating partners who are no more certain of their own. The questioning of norms and values accelerates, and problem-solving machinery that had been accepted earlier falls into disuse. Many new organizations are devised in the attempt to cope, but they change form and purpose almost as quickly as they are created. Old rules fall into disrepute and the new ones lack legitimacy and efficacy and are soon discarded. Everything is "up for grabs."
Complexity should not be equated with absence of knowledge. One of the characteristics of turbulent fields is the existence of very large bodies of knowledge that exacerbate the turbulence because they provide certainty for parts of the field while further confusing an understanding of the whole . For example, the rapid development and diffusion of new technologies suggest the possibility that control mechanisms can be placed over certain social and economic processes while they simultaneously create new problems because the unwanted side-effects of the same technologies also have to be controlled. Scientific research tends to create new certainties regarding natural resources, public health, pollution control, and perhaps even the guidance of economic growth, but these "certainties" are fragmentary: they do not command a consensus among organizational actors in the aggregate. Each actor seeks to use particular certainties to achieve a given objective without being able to relate this objective to others it may wish to attain. The trouble is that there are too many of these particular certainties. The growth in knowledge and the multiplication of incompatible actor objectives combine to worsen the turbulence.
Turbulence is the result of the interaction of three types of events: (1) a more complex task environment created by the multiplication of relevant actors; (2) a more confused task domain caused by the unordered
preferences of the actors informed, frightened, and tempted by rapid changes in scientific and technological knowledge; and (3) the appreciation of the significance of social time. In some ways turbulent fields arise because previous patterns of adaptive, incremental behavior were so successful. The economic policies associated with the post-1945 Keynesian consensus triggered a general prosperity never before experienced; the groups and countries that lagged behind clamored for the same prosperity. The success scored by the United Nations in ending colonialism by the early 1960s resulted in more dissatisfied member states in the 1970s. The rapid acceleration of technological innovation spurred by the flourishing of U.N.-promoted world trade entailed later worries about the globe's carrying capacity. The turbulence that overtook many international organizations is the result of these trends, favored and promoted by those who made up the earlier dominant coalition.
The picture should not be overdrawn. Turbulence may characterize some, but not all, organizational programs. It may swamp one organization, while leaving another unscathed. Turbulence need not engulf all modes of collective endeavor. It should not be equated with civil war, massive alienation, or rejection of routinized choice. Many countries that show signs of internal turbulence nevertheless manage to practice politics without succumbing to such extremes. Turbulence provides a description of why choices today are more difficult than fifty years ago, not a prediction of irremediable chaos. Therefore, incremental growth, turbulent nongrowth, and managed interdependence can easily coexist.
Turbulence and International Organizations
Despite increases in task, staff, and budget, then, these conditions add up to a number of impacts on international organizations that deserve the label "nongrowth." The dominant coalition responsible for creating the organization loses control. Its efforts to adapt by co-opting new entrants either fail or result in an enormous diffusion of the original consensus, confusing the task domain. Alternatively, the old coalition is completely displaced by contenders warring to become the next rulers, with no one group gaining a clear victory. There is no
single dominant coalition; every major issue is resolved through the workings of a different one; governance depends on shifting coalitions.
Under these circumstances, the organization's ability to monitor performance declines because the membership lacks criteria with which to assess compliance and achievement of aims. Coherence among programs suffers, as nobody is clearly in control. Although attempts at institutionalization will multiply, one cannot expect them to be successful or permanent. Neither legitimacy nor authority can flourish under these conditions. Yet the organization, paradoxically, will probably survive.
Since more interests and demands now clamor for a hearing, the number of experts involved will also increase. Instead of providing consensual advice, however, they will mirror the clashing claims. This is likely to increase the discord among member states. Yet when, despite these conditions, there is a general sentiment that an agreement must be reached, an ad hoc inner circle of mediating states is likely to emerge to guide the bargaining. But the circle will be made up of different members depending on the occasion and the issue. Moreover, decisions made on this basis are far more difficult to translate into operational programs. Implementation becomes spotty because the absence of a stable dominant coalition prevents reliable monitoring. As certain tasks atrophy and it gets more difficult to find new tasks, the organization is likely to compensate by attempting to strengthen its control over tasks not affected by these trends.
This may give so-called martingale processes an opportunity to swamp the task domain. Policy martingales are processes of change in which outcomes depend heavily on previous chance events, establishing a pattern of expectations and calculations among the actors. This pattern prevents the actors from accepting later events as relevant. Once the actors are able to explain to themselves why the initial chain of random events resulted in the growth of the relevant set of institutions used for making policy, they will pay little attention to subsequent events that impinge on those institutions.
A martingale process is subject to chance variation, but the variations accumulate…. The expected value of the process at one time is equal to the realization of the process at the preceding time…. In effect, the chance fluctuations of history change the baselines of the next step of
the historical process…. Policies, once adopted, are embedded into institutions. They are associated with rules, expectations, and commitments. By affecting attention and aspirations, they affect the future search behavior of political participants.[2]
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life," American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 745. For institutional accounts of events in the U.N. system illustrating some of these pathologies see Martin Hill, The United Nations System: Coordinating Its Economic and Social Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Richard Hoggatt, An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO From Within (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978). For a no-holds-barred account of institutional and behavioral pathologies at the United Nations see Thomas M. Franck, Nation Against Nation: What Happened to the U.N. Dream and What the U.S. Can Do About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Take the issue of apartheid in the United Nations. It has been on the agenda, in one form or another, since the late 1940s. For many decades it coexisted with a large number of other issues without dominating the agenda. In the 1970s, however, it acquired a prominence quite out of proportion to its relevance to the maintenance of global peace, security, and the improvement of economic life. Sentiment, activity, time for debate, resolutions, and even budgetary commitments snowballed around the issue. Something similar occurred with respect to Israeli-Arab relations after 1967. Trends of this type have the effect of focusing organizational attention on issues not readily amenable to multilateral action for all the reasons mentioned above. They distort the energies of the organization by featuring symbolic outputs that fail to product the desired outcome. Institutional rigidity results; it biases the organization against becoming a forum for innovations—unless eventual member dissatisfaction with this state of affairs puts an end to it.
The time perspective adopted by an observer clearly makes some difference in whether we code a sequence as illustrating incremental growth or turbulent nongrowth. Take the United Nations' work on human rights as an example. A student of long-range trends and of administrative pathologies would code it as turbulent nongrowth, while the committed advocate of more immediate and centralized human rights activity could rightfully claim it as a case of incremental growth. The U.N. record is clearly influenced by the expansion of the membership since 1960 and the prior success of decolonization; it is also characterized by the addition of value commitments to human rights to other prior commitments without resulting in systematic trade-offs. Values expand in scope without being integrated. This much is consistent with incremental growth. Yet if the failure to integrate new values with old ones serves only to increase each actor's confusion because preferences remain unordered, and if this state of affairs coincides with a general appreciation of social rather than intragenerational time (as is increasingly the case), then the picture resembles turbulent
nongrowth. I shall make each case to show that neither is so convincing as to preclude the other.
Incremental growth prevailed at the United Nations before 1970, after which learning set in. How can we conclude this? Until the covenants on civil/political and economic/cultural/social rights and the convention outlawing racial discrimination took effect, things proceeded slowly and sedately. Although not a binding commitment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted unanimously, to be followed by the negotiation of some less important conventions. No impressive monitoring powers were available, as the U.N. Commission on Human Rights proved unwilling to investigate complaints or to issue reports pillorying violators. Things improved after the three major conventions were concluded (after almost twenty years of negotiation). The commission began to hold public hearings on especially egregious violations; it heard nongovernmental advocates of victims, attempted some investigations, and issued annual blacklists of serious violators. This much is consistent with incremental growth. After the conventions entered into force, standing organs were created to receive regular reports and to hear complaints of violations. They have not yet been used extensively, so we cannot claim that the experts who serve on these panels have been able to infuse the machinery with a sweeping problem redefinition of the significance of human rights, which would be consistent with learning. But the possibility exists.[3]
Material illustrating my treatment is contained in Jack Donnelly, "International Human Rights," International Organization 39 (Summer 1986): 599-642. See also Ernst B. Haas, Global Evangelism Rides Again (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978). The intensification of the sanctions campaign against South Africa is also consistent with learning.
This picture, while accurate as far as it goes, is also incomplete. Once it is fleshed out, the pattern seems more like turbulent nongrowth. Why? Developments consistent with the incremental-growth model would have had to feature a stable coalition of states willing and able to supervise the monitoring machinery. There was in fact no such coalition. Different types of rights and varying emphases of how seriously to take them commanded different majorities. There never was a general consensus, nor is there one now, about the relationship of human rights to other tasks, such as maintaining peace, promoting economic development, safeguarding the commons, or bringing about disarmament. The developed democratic countries favored civil and political rights associated with democracy; the developed socialist states preferred economic and social rights for collectivities rather
than individuals. The developing countries were divided. They agreed only on the condemnation of racism and colonialism and favored collective over individual rights. Very few of them were enthusiastic about a standing U.N. machinery for extracting reports and hearing complaints. There was a general apprehension that too many civil and political rights would interfere with the state's ability to mobilize resources for economic development and self-defense. Members also expressed apprehension that violations of human rights in civil wars might trigger intervention and international war, thus contradicting the security tasks of the United Nations.
U.N. practice corroborates these fears: there has been a distinct tendency in the monitoring bodies to ignore violations of human rights in developing countries and to concentrate criticism instead on Israel, South Africa, and an occasional Western country.[4]
This conclusion does not apply to the human rights machinery of the Organization of American States, which since 1960 has demonstrated a true incremental growth pattern devoid of double-standard distortions. The very successes and smooth functioning of the European Convention on Human Rights machinery, in contrast, illustrates the "no need to grow at all" pattern.
A double standard favoring a Third World interpretation of the issue has prevailed, somewhat counteracted by strong threats from some Western countries to boycott the machinery unless the double standard is abandoned. As long as the task and the institutions expanded so as to leave U.N. authority and legitimacy in doubt because no viable majority supports them, and as long as this occurs in the absence of a nested problem set, turbulent nongrowth prevails too.How to Identify the Turbulent Nongrowth Model
Setting
All five world-order ideologies now represented in the member states' demands, and even the formulation of some not yet on the scene, ought to be anticipated under conditions of turbulent nongrowth (see Table 1). Turbulent fields spawn efforts to conceptualize the dilemmas facing decision makers, and such efforts are likely to produce novel ideologies. New members stress the equality of all states, irrespective of differences in major attributes, while members of the displaced dominant coalition continue the fight for qualified representation. NGOs of all stripes and beliefs, whether approved by the governments or not, are now permitted to enter the fray. The autonomy
of international secretariats disappears. Civil service rules of conduct are widely disregarded. Most subunits are totally penetrated by one coalition or another. As for the status of expert consultants and advisers, all types are now likely to be found, not just the expert instructed by his government.
Power
The revenue base of the organization erodes (see Table 1). Members of the old dominant coalition become uneasy about paying their assessed dues and may even unilaterally reduce them, though this is technically against the rules. They also become skittish about paying capital subscriptions. Contributions to voluntary funds become unreliable, oscillating widely from year to year and from program to program. In the face of the erosion, newly dominant coalitions will seek to introduce taxation as a means of raising revenue, though with little chance of prevailing. Administration of all types is featured. There may well be an increase in direct administration in emergencies such as famines, though this will be regarded as temporary. Indirect administration will also increase as new programs are launched and will shrink as the programs are abandoned. The monitoring of compliance will decline in coherence and consistency. Rules previously developed and accepted (about reporting, hearing complaints, reminding states of their obligations) become shaky as the task environment becomes more heterogeneous and the task domain less predictable. This is not to say that the various steps available for monitoring will fall into disuse. The point is that there will no longer be regular rules determining which step ought to be taken when, whether all violations of obligations ought to be exposed or only some of them.
Behavior
The drive for equal representation has as its counterpart the insistence that decisions ought to be made by simple majorities (see Table 1). Such a voting formula enhances the negotiating power of even the smallest state. Decisions by simple majority, which may well mean the
majority of the small and poor, are bitterly resented by the former dominant coalition. In the U.N. system all developed countries, socialist and capitalist, have opposed this trend. They have often indicated that they will not comply with, or implement, decisions made on this basis. Therefore, the voting trend under conditions of turbulence is toward consensus: no decision is made until exhaustive negotiations have taken place, resulting in the expression of all major viewpoints in the decision. That done, a vote is not taken and the decision is considered to have been adopted by consensus. In UNCTAD, for example, the use of consensus has enraged the coalition seeking to dominate that organization and has resulted in demands for a return to majority voting.
Whenever a coalition comes close to dominating the organization and wishes to commit the entire membership to its own program, it advocates the adoption of a budget based on a firm plan of action. If full control is not achieved, however, budgets continue to be written through a mixture of disjointed incrementalism and logrolling. Because these practices have the effect of increasing budgets and because the complexity of the task domain makes it impossible to judge the success of the programs funded, the richer member states rebel against these practices and demand the introduction of program budgeting. If these demands are not met, disjointed incrementalism continues to prevail.
Personnel recruitment now follows the principle of rigid nationality quotas mixed with the practice of using international civil service positions as places of temporary exile for politicians out of favor at home. These practices, of course, tend to deprive the organization of skills that may not be distributed proportionately among all nations. Under conditions of turbulence, NGOs are used more intensively than under conditions of incremental adaptation. All roles played and playable by NGOs benefit from turbulence. As for the executive head, he has little opportunity to act as a dynamic leader. There no longer being a single dominant coalition to be placated, the prudent head who treasures his job will be self-effacing and react to crises rather than anticipate them. He has to be very careful to offend none of the competing coalitions and can take no risks with innovation. Since he
cannot do everything well and since the task domain is unstable in any case, the wise head will concentrate on a few things he thinks he can do well, exaggerating his successes and soft-pedaling his failures.
Knowledge and Political Goals
Turbulence, as we saw, does not imply the diminution of knowledge relevant to political choice; it implies its sharp increase without concomitant agreement on how that knowledge reduces uncertainty about outcomes (see Figure 3). Therefore, overall consensual knowledge does not increase, but fragmentary consensus does. Within the various coalitions knowledge is likely to jell into consensual analyses and proposals, but these are not shared among the coalitions. That is, the various experts active in each issue area are likely to agree more with each other, provided they belong to the same epistemic community, but a similar consensus across epistemic communities is by no means sure to follow. The influence of experts within coalitions is likely to rise without bringing the competing coalitions any closer to agreement.[5]
See Harold L. Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1967), for theoretical arguments and material substantiating this tendency, especially chap. 2.
Politicians will also be divided. One or more groups will espouse static and specific goals, as before. But another will opt for expanding and interconnected goals, as sharply illustrated in the NIEO debate of the 1970s. And each will be reinforced by its set of experts. The very clash in perspectives contributes to the syndrome of conditions we call "turbulence."
Decision-making Styles, Issue Linkage, and Bargaining
The mixture of political goals that prevails clearly places the membership in a situation where preferences regarding possible outcomes are uncertain and unrankable. Beliefs about cause and effect are more difficult to code. Within each coalition there is more agreement about causation, but across coalitions there is not. Therefore, issues cannot be linked by using the judgmental formulas available in the case of incremental change.
The situation looks just as confused if we interpret it using my matrix
of decision-making styles (see Figure 4). To help keep matters clear, imagine as our setting the world of international bargaining over the New International Economic Order in the 1970s. Within the Group of 77 we would have found mainly skeptics and a few pragmatic politicians; on the whole the politicians representing the developing countries were espousing very dynamic and heavily interconnected goals, supported in many cases by analytically minded experts. Negotiations within the Group of 77 were characterized by fragmented issue linkage par excellence. Within the B group eclectic politicians tended to face pragmatic ones; sometimes one and sometimes the other prevailed in the attempt to fashion a unified bargaining position, advised as they were by pragmatic experts and staff. On some issues, such as the common fund for commodities and the deep-sea-mining regime, no agreement within the Western coalition could be had at all. Intracoalitional bargaining dynamics therefore oscillated between tactical and fragmented linkage.[6]
For data permitting these codings, see Robert L. Rothstein, Global Bargaining (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); "Consensual Knowledge and International Collaboration," International Organization 38 (Autumn 1984): 733-62; "Regime-Creation by a Coalition of the Weak," International Studies Quarterly 28 (1984): 306-28. The following works criticize the institutional arrangements that led to the pattern discussed above: Douglas Bandow, Unquestioned Allegiance (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1986); Miriam Camps and Catherine Gwin, Collective Management: Reform of Global Economic Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); Christopher P. Brown, The Political and Social Economy of Commodity Control (New York: Praeger, 1980). For a systematic study showing how learning occurred within but not between negotiating blocs in UNCTAD, see Susan K. Sell, "The International Politics of Technology Transfer" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1989).
What happened when the fragmented-tactically linked issues of the West encountered the fragmented issue linkage of the developing countries in intercoalitional negotiations? It is wrong to predict agreement on the basis of what looks like "similar" bargaining styles because the content of the bargains previously made within each group were completely different and incommensurable. Similar styles that contain different substantive solutions to problems must warn us not to code the bargaining as "similar." Encounters between truly like-minded officials, under conditions of turbulence, are most unlikely to be the norm.
The prevalence of, in effect, dissimilar bargaining styles has severe consequences both for bargaining tactics and for the bargains likely to be achieved.[7]
Material in this paragraph on bargaining is an adaptation of the hypotheses developed for describing "political" organizations by Samuel B. Bacharach and Edward J. Lawler, Power and Politics in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980).
Communication and understanding among the warring coalitions will be strained. Each will be tempted to use bluff and deception in the use of information that enters the negotiations. On the one hand, in intercoalitional bargaining each side is willing to sacrifice the integrity of the organization as a whole to the satisfaction of its particular demands. On the other hand, bargaining within coalitions is likely to show the opposite trend: because the objective is to exact concessions from the opposing coalition, each coalition is under severe pressure to sacrifice the interests of its subgroups to the overallintegrity of the coalition. The integrity of the organization as a whole might be saved if lines of communication were always open among the main contenders, but this condition is not normally to be expected. Intransigence about demands is typical, softened only by the recognition that the encounter takes place within strong constraints that will not yield to tough bargaining. Improvement in communication in intercoalitional encounters can also have the effect of softening a group's stance. Such softening, however, is most unlikely to develop if the delegates who do the negotiating lack autonomy from their home governments. The active participation of constituents "back home" is a distinct hindrance to the achievement of an internationally viable bargain. In short, bargaining under conditions of turbulence is unlikely to result in a consensual definition of the overarching problem and will prevent the elaboration of a set of well-nested solutions—unless the condition of turbulence itself is seen as the problem to be solved.
Problem Definition, Institutionalization, and Legitimacy and Authority
Yet international organizations do attempt to act even under conditions of turbulence. They mount programs, appropriate funds, and pass resolutions enjoining one type of behavior and denouncing others. Organizational life in a turbulent setting is far from coming to a whimpering end. Problem definition differs in this setting from the pattern we associate with incremental growth because no agreed over-all theory informs the choices made. Under incrementalism it is possible to use the original consensual problem set and to add to it piecemeal. Because the accretions are not very coherent, it is then also possible to decompose the set without doing enormous damage to the program. The program is decomposable. Under conditions of turbulence there is no consensus on a problem set. Each coalition has its own theory of cause and effect, ends and means. This makes the program decomposable with a vengeance. Under incrementalism a core of agreement subsists and provides some guidance as to how decomposition can occur. Not so under conditions of turbulence. The pattern of decomposition lacks any coherence. There are no agreed rules of thumb for channeling the process.
Yet, at the risk of boring the reader, I must point out again that this condition need not condemn the organization to complete irrelevance. Certain developments in international law occur in turbulent organizational contexts; they make a slight contribution to institutionalization. "Soft" international law covers rules that are obeyed even though they are part of unratified treaties, as well as rules that evolve from encounters between states and private corporations—on the border between public and private law. On occasions, municipal law functions much like public international law because the rules are implemented by foreign sovereigns who are not obligated to do so. In other words, a turbulent world finds ways of doing its business despite the rigidity of the sovereignty principle and the incoherence of organizations created in conformity with it.
Meaningful institutionalization is impossible under these conditions, even though new committees commissions, centers, and working parties tend to proliferate. The new organs reflect the lack of coherent problem definition; they do not overcome it. Crisis management suffers because the main parties cannot agree on why there is a crisis, what causes the crisis, and what can be done to overcome it. Neither authority nor legitimacy can be expected to increase under turbulence.
Conditions and Limitations of the Turbulent Nongrowth Model
At this point it is important to stress that our notions about organizational change contain no suggestion of cycles, spirals, or any other kind of regular progression. Not all organizations begin life in the incremental mode and then degenerate into turbulence. Nor is it clear that, once in a turbulent condition, the organization must remain there, revert to incrementalism, or change into the managed-interdependence type. All these possibilities exist. No outcome is programmed. The variety of actual experiences is illustrated in a highly simplified way in chapter 8 (see Table 6). Detailed organizational histories written with this scheme in mind may suggest inaccuracies and the need for more nuance. Nevertheless, the lack of regular progression is clear.
Not all U.N. agencies began in the incremental mode and then fell
into turbulence, though many did. Many were overtaken by crises they could not manage, but not all. In the 1930s the ILO adapted incrementally to the Great Depression and the advent of fascism and even attempted to upgrade itself into a depression-management mode. ITU adapted incrementally to the advent of Third World demands. The U.N. human rights program was beset by turbulence from the beginning, as was UNESCO's entire program. The attempt to limit armaments, as expressed in the relevant U.N. Charter provisions, fell victim to turbulence as soon as the cold war became a reality. The IMF, finding itself in a condition of turbulence in the late 1970s, discovered a new task in managing the debt crisis. Beginning in about 1970, the World Bank underwent many important learning experiences that pushed it considerably beyond adaptation. In short, being in a condition of turbulence does not necessarily condemn the organization to remaining there. Yet, undeniably, most do.
International organizations do not create the turbulence; they mirror it. When the world is made up of states whose governments find themselves in a web of interdependencies that they do not like but cannot change without paying unacceptable opportunity costs—and yet cannot agree on a theory explaining their dilemma—they will use international organizations to act out their frustrations . Resorting to a different pattern of organizational behavior presumes that the glimmerings of a theory of action, which nests problems differently, must be acceptable to some viable coalition of member states. These glimmerings can originate in epistemic communities or in a particularly persuasive or powerful set of states or a combination of the two. This is what happened at the IMF as the major industrial countries began to fear the uncertainties of rising debt, uncoordinated macroeconomic policies, and shrinking world trade. Transcending turbulence requires a crisis, a shared definition of its causes, and organizational leadership willing and able to profit from the combination.
Living with turbulence triggers attempts to adapt. Since most organizations survive and continue to provide services to their members, no matter how incoherent these may be in terms of a nested set of problems, they have in fact adapted. Still, the incoherence may have very serious consequences. WHO succeeds in reducing the infant mortality rate and thereby contributes to world population growth. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) does not manage to
increase the rate of agricultural production to keep pace with population, and the successes of the other U.N. programs for population control show uneven results. UNDP, UNIDO, and the World Bank do well in stimulating industrial development, but UNEP does less well in pointing out the deleterious environmental consequences of such development. Success in the short run creates serious problems in social time. Put differently, successful organizational adaptation under conditions of turbulence, while real enough, may well be the enemy of humankind's future welfare. Must we conclude that the turbulent nongrowth model is really pathological?
In many respects international organizations functioning in a turbulent setting are reminiscent of the "garbage can" model of administrative behavior.[8]
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, eds., Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976). My summary relies entirely on chap. 2, by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, entitled "People, Problems, Solutions and the Ambiguity of Relevance." The authors intend the garbage-can model as a critique of both analytic-rational and political-bargaining models of organizations, arguing that most public organizations are neither rational nor bargaining types. I disagree and suggest that garbage cans are consistent with political-bargaining models under certain conditions, i.e., turbulence. The authors argue that the garbage-can model applies when there are no criteria of relevance. In the turbulent nongrowth model there are such criteria, but they are not consensual among the actors. Still, the fit is pretty close.
The term sounds derogatory. That should not distress us if we recall that adaptation is not normally associated with perfect analytical rationality. Before we turn away from the image in disgust and put our faith in a renewal of the classic Weberian model, we ought to pursue the analogy further.A "garbage can" is a setting in which organizational choices have to be made when issues are not clearly understood and when some participants offer solutions that do not correspond to clearly recognized problems or issues. Garbage cans are choice opportunities when "organized anarchy" prevails, when goals are either unclear or unstable, when the information supposed to elucidate the connection between ends and means is disputed or lacking, and when participation by decision makers is highly fluid. Under these conditions choices are made, but they will not necessarily solve problems. There are few rules as to who should decide what. Each choice opportunity is uniquely context dependent. So far the shoe fits very well.
What behavior patterns should we associate with this setting? March and Olsen note that agenda items tend to be dropped without being addressed. Time pressure tends to determine which issues receive attention irrespective of their importance. The higher the load of the demands and the issues they generate, the less likely it is that solutions will be found. The same problems and the same decision makers chase each other without ever fully meeting. New problems are created by the very attempt to solve them. Idiosyncratic and random factors of availability of information can influence output.[9]
The authors also offer a number of propositions that deal with the "importance" of issues, arguing that the most and the least important do tend to get solved, while those in the intermediate range suffer from neglect. Since their argument offers no criteria for defining importance, I made no use of it.
Something that accurately describes many organizations that perform
desired services—local, national, and international—can hardly be totally bad. Garbage can-type behavior still gives some satisfaction to people, even though it is certainly not efficient. The mismatch between problem and solution, administrative behavior and output, need not be catastrophic. If the results of the pattern are essentially neutral with respect to eventual outcomes, if the situation to be improved is not actually made worse, then the model is far from pathological. It enables an organization that is sorely beset with woes not of its own making to survive its time of troubles. But, if the mismatch is so serious as to result in the kinds of incoherence in outcomes discussed above, the organization's efforts to adapt is not likely to improve the lot of humankind.
Therefore, those who see virtue in organizational and administrative "redundancy" go too far in praising organizational anarchy. Redundancy refers to one aspect of the garbage can model, the situation in which many agencies are duplicating each other's work. Advocates of redundancy sing the praises of duplication. They say it is like safety engineering, like the equipotentiality of neural networks to take over from each other. Such features limit error, while centralized specialization magnifies it. Overlap among agencies is like pluralistic politics in the United States. The mistakes of one group and one branch of government can always be corrected by another.[10]
The classic argument for redundancy is Martin Landau, "Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap," Public Administration Review 29 (July-August 1969): 346-58. Landau is unclear on whether the quality of redundancy must be deliberately designed into political institutions or whether it is a systemic-evolutionary property that manifests itself even without foresight.
Redundancy in international organizations is never deliberately designed. It develops from the workings of the political forces we have associated with the defeat of a dominant coalition and the failure of a successor to emerge. I doubt that it is an adaptive development. It manages to save specific organizations from premature death, although it does so at the cost of producing undesirable outcomes from the point of view of most actors in the international system. When the temporary adaptation of one organization is achieved at the cost of programs that duplicate and overlap in such a fashion as to undo another's work, nothing is achieved. It may be tolerable and even good from the viewpoint of most actors that the United Nations and WHO follow quite different—and competing—population control programs as long as there is no consensus on which program is the better. It is quite another thing to tolerate economic development programs with quite different objectives, each housed in its own organizational
niche, when we have good reason to suspect that some of them will not make people better off.
How then can organizations and their members transcend the limits of incremental and turbulent adaptation? Can we ever expect them to do better than these common patterns suggest? Is the solution to the so-called crisis of multilateralism to be found in the third pattern, managed interdependence?
7
Learning to Manage Interdependence
Learning should be seen as the actors' way of saying that life under conditions of turbulent nongrowth is not satisfactory, that something ought to be done to overcome turbulence. Learning could also represent a decision that incremental growth is simply not good enough because it is too slow and results in problem definitions that are excessively decomposable. In either event, my argument that institutions can be arenas for innovation in addition to being constraints on change clearly depends on the presumed capability of actors to use institutions to cope with problems never before experienced—coming to grips with something unprecedented instead of being mere instruments for the performance of routines.
This chapter ought to be read in the spirit of visualizing the way in which a bureaucratic entity seeks to cope with the unprecedented. The previous chapters offered essentially a stylized historical account. The characteristics we associated with the two models of adaptation correspond to what actually happened, to what was truly experienced. The
interpretation was mine, but not the events on which it is based. This chapter cannot make the same claim. The model of learning now to be specified "hasn't really happened" in the lives of many international organizations, though events like the ones to be discussed did occur in a few instances, and unsuccessful attempts to learn were made in a few others. These will be described more fully here. Learning will be specified partly on the basis of these experiences and partly be deduced logically from the attributes discussed in chapter 2.
Managed Interdependence: General Characteristics
Learning, as a form of bureaucratic behavior in and by international organizations, really means attempting to "manage interdependence." The behavior implies "management" because those who lead the organization switch from a passive to an active stance. They want to take hold of a problem decisively. "Interdependence" is involved because the decision involves a cognitively more ambitious attempt at defining, and therefore nesting, the problem than had been attempted earlier. More (or less) complex nesting of presumed causal chains and remedial measures implies a greater awareness of greater (or lesser) interdependence among the trends, events, and consequences associated with the problem than had been imagined in an earlier iteration. I stress that managed interdependence may be concerned with a few of the organization's programs and operations, not its entire array of activities.
Learning cannot occur unless the dominant coalition changes. In the transition from incremental adaptation to managed interdependence, certain key members of the old dominant coalition must be seriously dissatisfied and must take the initiative in persuading and cajoling their fellows. At the extreme, though no actual case comes to mind, a hegemonic state can coerce and bribe its allies into taking the major steps implied. More commonly, when the transition to managed interdependence occurs in response to dissatisfaction with turbulent nongrowth, a new dominant coalition is formed. It is made up of states that are most concerned with the shortcomings of turbulent adaptation. The new coalition must include states whose issue-relevant capabilities are most crucial in solving the problems that confront the membership. The new dominant coalition is therefore made up of
ideological antagonists, of the chief countries that had faced each other as opponents during the earlier phase. Those who had been the most prominent defenders of rival solutions now turn themselves into an inner circle of reformers committed to a new approach.
This does not mean that the earlier coalitions disappear. The inner circle of reformers continues to belong to the antagonistic coalitions. They still have to keep their followers in line, and, in doing so, they remain accountable to them and must satisfy some of their demands. Nevertheless, these leaders are now no longer merely mouthpieces for their groups. They are also mediators. On the one hand they represent their groups, but on the other they are now allied with the leaders of the opposing coalitions in the search for a viable new problem definition.
This means that there may be several inner circles, depending on the issue. Instead of large, stable coalitions (such as the three negotiating groups in UNCTAD and UNIDO), there will be variable coalitions that are issue dependent. Managing interdependence implies the disaggregation of the huge and intractable packages of controversy that beset organizations dominated by permanent large coalitions. But enough member states must come to recognize that very intractability before they will be ready to disaggregate, diffuse the coalitions, and begin to negotiate seriously with the erstwhile enemy.
Once these things happen, of course, the mutual exclusivity of antagonistic world-order ideologies mellows a bit. States not permanently tied to the same large coalition on all issues will begin to sort their policy demands into separate packages. Not every package will neatly correspond to the tenets of the ideologies. Disaggregation of issues must originate in the home governments of the countries that will become part of the inner circles. The phenomenon of transgovernmentalism reasserts itself. Individual ministries, or units within ministries, formulate new problem sets, and they will seek allies not only in the corresponding units of the international organizations but also with their opposite numbers in the ministries of the countries they wish to secure as allies. The mellowing of world-order ideologies is brought about through such transgovernmental processes. As new international alliances form, the cohesiveness of national governments may well decline.
In this situation epistemic communities come into their own. They
are likely to furnish the studies and analyses that will lead to a different nesting of problems. Their efforts to sort out the features that result in turbulence, their attempts to bring new research to bear on how problems should be redefined, are going to be utilized by policymakers unwilling to continue along adaptive lines. If one or another epistemic community captures the high ground of a persuasive analysis, it will be introducing consensual knowledge into the bargaining. Transgovernmental processes will then spread the word. While ecological and resource-management issues provide the most telling examples of this process, something like them may also be visible in macro-economic coordination among the industrialized democracies and even in the arms control negotiations of the late 1980s.
The growing importance of consensual knowledge by no means renders bargaining obsolete. Because it is more centralized, bargaining among coalitions will differ from the patterns we have already encountered. Instead of featuring huge encounters between large aggregates of states—as in the General Assembly of the United Nations or the general conferences of the specialized agencies—issue disaggregation will result in a diffusion of ideas such that several previously disaggregated problems will now be taken up simultaneously in different fora by different clusters of negotiators. One issue will attract the attention of one set of states, another issue quite a different one. Variable coalitions, bridged by variable inner circles, will bargain in different organizations. The negotiators will still make package deals and offer side payments to reluctant followers and allies. Tactical linkages will not disappear. But overall, the infusion of consensual knowledge ought to result in more substantive linkages taking place in more fora.
Still, we know that no body of knowledge is ever final and complete. Hence even bargains characterized by substantive linkages are subject to obsolescence. The more rapidly the knowledge base changes, the quicker the bargains grow obsolete. Learning to manage interdependence also implies the incessant reexamination of older bargains. It would therefore be a mistake to associate the learning model with a permanent harmony of interests and quiet instrumental problem solving. Controversy is bound to remain lively. But it can also be expected that the controversy will not overtake every issue on the organization's agenda. Pools of relative harmony within a broader turbulent sea ought also to be envisaged.
Managing interdependence implies continuing uncertainty and ambiguity. Problems will continually be taken apart, examined from a variety of perspectives, and recombined with new solutions the actors learn from epistemic communities, only to be taken apart once again at a later point when new information or a new theory gains acceptance. What appears nondecomposable at one point may well come to be seen as nearly nondecomposable later, or even as fully decomposable, only to be reconceptualized as nearly nondecomposable at a later point. Learning means that nothing remains cognitively fixed.
Managed interdependence makes great demands of administrators. They have to take a major hand in the decomposing and recomposing of problem sets. As James D. Thompson put it,
The basic function of administration appears to be co-alignment, not merely of people (in coalitions) but of institutionalized action—of technology and task environment into a viable domain, and of organizational design and structure appropriate to it. Administration, when it works well, keeps the organization at the nexus of the several necessary streams of action. Paradoxically, the administrative process must reduce uncertainty but at the same time search for flexibility.[1]
James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 157-58.
Administrators must search out the task environment for opportunities to recompose problems. They must actively scan for new opportunities and techniques. They must be willing to abandon older routines. When they succeed in nesting problems more complexly, they can hope to manage the new set only if they also find the "strategic variables" there that permit decomposition after recomposition without losing the coherence of the set.
The coalignment of which Thompson spoke, in the case of international organizations, implies vastly improved coordination among the linked activities of several organizations. The prevalence of reciprocal interdependencies among them and their member-state clients calls for administrative skills and visions not easily found. The strategic variables that allow the right mixture of connectivity and separateness are unlikely to be located within the resources and the task domain of a single organization. The problems of industrial and agricultural development as constrained by trade and debt are obvious examples. No single organization is able to deal with the set. The strategic variables have not yet been discovered, at least not many of them. Learning to manage interdependence is not easy.
How to Identify the Managed-Interdependence Model
Setting
Our five ideologies of world order are still in evidence, but the inner circles of leading states no longer make them the lodestars of their demands (see Table 2). Debate and bargaining are dominated by only two opposing ideologies, an attenuated liberalism facing a chastened antidependency sentiment, or either facing ecoholism, or either facing each other after having accepted some of the ecoholistic values. If not the end of all ideology, managed interdependence implies the end of uncompromising ideologies.
Representation has moved back to an emphasis on state attributes especially relevant to the issue involved. The leading states of the coalitions must also be the most prominent or most important ones with respect to the problem to be solved. When we deal with debt, for instance, the major debtors and creditors must be represented. When trade imbalance is at issue, the major trade-deficit countries as well as the surplus nations must be in the inner circle. When shipping rules are at issue, the cast must include Panama and Liberia along with the major shipping nations. Representational roles may be delegated to nongovernmental organizations, but they support the core positions of the states in the new dominant coalition. Dissenters would spoil the game.
The autonomy of the secretariat will mirror this situation. Administrative positions will be partially penetrated by the new dominant coalition. Civil service rules will be more highly respected than under conditions of turbulent nongrowth, though the legal ideal will hardly be approximated. Among the experts who will penetrate the secretariats will be those epistemic communities whose views have found special favor in the new dominant coalition. The same epistemic communities will also be prominent in the home governments.
Power
By no means all possible sources of revenue will be stable and reliable even under managed interdependence (see Table 4). On the
whole, we expect that states will be quite selective about which portions of the organizational tasks they choose to finance. They cannot be expected to endorse all activities with fervor and simply decide to pay rising assessed contributions with gladness in their hearts. We can suppose, however, that voluntary contributions and capital subscriptions will increase for those portions of the program that are singled out in a more elaborate problem set.
Managed interdependence is unlikely to favor one form of administration to the exclusion of the others. Since the upgraded program items are likely to involve more monitored activities of all kinds on the soil of member states, it may be expected that shared, rather than direct or indirect, administration will occur more frequently. Suppose there is a strong commitment to a more integrated effort to stave off famines in semiarid and arid countries. Some of the relief effort will be handled through indirect administration since the client states' personnel do the main work. But the technical assistance and financial contribution to improve irrigation, agricultural, and antidesertification measures will be shared in the sense that the local personnel will be closely instructed and supervised by international staff. Or take the case of administering the conditionality clauses in debt relief agreements. The actual policies dictated by the IMF and the World Bank will be administered by national personnel; but they will be supervised by, and must report to, organizational staff implanted in the national ministries. In addition, sharing may well take the form of the international organization's insistence that national personnel especially attuned to World Bank or IMF policy be charged with enforcing the conditions.
Interorganizational coordination is now imperative. In order to minimize the considerable costs in time and energy taken by coordination, the steps to be taken by each participating organization must be carefully planned in order to assure that everything necessary is achieved in the right order. Each participating unit—irrigation specialists, soil and erosion experts, and agronomists in the case of our Sahelian antidesertification campaign—can do its job only if and when the other units have done theirs. The professional units must support each other in the right order if the problem as a whole is to be tackled. Coordination must be arranged at the actual site of work as
well as at the supporting headquarters. Yet the coordination must not be carried too far. Each unit must be able to function autonomously too. If everything depends on a single authority and a single source of supply, the system is too tightly coupled and therefore more easily disrupted.[2]
Thompson puts the matter more formally: "Organizations seek to place reciprocally interdependent positions tangent to one another, in a common group which is (a) local and (b) conditionally autonomous." Also, "when reciprocal interdependence cannot be confined to intragroup activities, organizations subject to rationality norms seek to link the groups involved into a second-order group, as localized and conditionally autonomous as possible" (ibid., 57-59).
Effective coordination means finding the right mixture of centralized planning and less-centralized implementation. Completely decentralized implementation violates the canons of managed interdependence, though it is consistent with our two models of adaptive administration.Activities likely to be favored under managed interdependence all require more monitoring than under the other two models. Our illustration of the enforcement of conditional loans makes this clear, as does the example of Sahelian famine relief and drought prevention. The monitoring takes the form of more intensive consultations and more detailed reporting. It does not involve the intensified use of any existing complaint machinery. In extreme cases of noncompliance, sanctions (confined to the withdrawal of financial support) will be imposed.
Behavior
Given the nature of intercoalitional bargaining under managed interdependence, it is extremely unlikely that major decisions will be made by voting (see Table 1). Decision making by consensus is to be expected, with each major member of the coalition having the power to veto proposals. Budgeting, logically speaking, should contain a planning component since we assume the countries of the inner circles will want to get the most for their money. Program budgeting for specific tasks, at least, should be practiced if overall planning proves impossible. Since a great deal is now expected as far as organizational performance is concerned, personnel recruitment is likely to revert to the merit principle, though some nationality quotas will undoubtedly remain. Nongovernmental groups will be used extensively to plan steps and to analyze a new definition of problems to be solved. But because the epistemic communities likely to be prominent in these roles will be made up of several kinds of professionals, it is also likely that the greater resort to nongovernmental experts for planning and
analysis will engender more interprofessional conflict than would be true in our models of adaptation.
Much more will be expected of the executive head, who is now expected to be a crisis manager. He will actively participate in talks among the inner-circle states in efforts to mediate and bring about agreements that reflect both compromise and judgment. He will have the key role in arranging interorganizational coordination and in obtaining revenue. It is his job to pull together the units and pieces of organizations with dispersed powers and tasks. The leader has three jobs: he must help define the problem to be solved, he must mediate in negotiations to get the inner-circle states to agree to his definition, and he must arrange the necessary coordination to achieve implementation.
Knowledge and Political Goals
None of this can happen unless the relevant knowledge becomes more consensual than was previously the case (see Figure 3). Unless new consensual knowledge is available, the main actors have no intelligent way to improve on previous performance, no guide for dealing with their dissatisfaction. Moreover, if turbulence is seen as the source of dissatisfaction, and one of the causes of turbulence is a fragmented understanding of the problem, previously held political goals must now be changing. Actors can no longer perceive them as static and specific because those qualities are now known to have contributed to the turbulence. Political goals are now expanding and are seen as increasingly interconnected.
Decision Making, Issue Linkage, and Bargaining
Argument based only on logical projection predicts that analytic decision making alone is consistent with what has been said (see Figure 4). To claim this is to overstate the clarity and force of the consensual knowledge likely to be available. It is also to overestimate the determination of politicians to hold onto their goals. Each member of the inner circle is still accountable to a number of other states. The coalitions have multiplied, not disappeared. Hence, in order to hold one's coalition together and to compromise with the opposing coalitions,
it is impossible to rely on analytic decision making to the exclusion of less formal ways of deciding. Pragmatism influenced by analytic notions will probably prevail. Hence the predominant mode of issue linkage will be fragmented, although some admixture of substantive linkage will also be allowed.
If all bargainers are either analytically or pragmatically minded, the bargaining styles will be similar and life will be easy. This is unlikely to be the case very often. It is more reasonable to suppose that pragmatists will face analytic thinkers. In that situation the bargaining styles are dissimilar, but not nearly as much as in the turbulent nongrowth model. Perhaps we should call them "almost similar." Certainly it is to be expected that it becomes easier to reach agreements that recognize a complex problem set and appropriate solutions than was true in the other models.
Is the bargaining style "almost similar" in all situations? The discussion above applies to intercoalitional bargaining. In intracoalitional encounters, the style is likely to be "similar." But inside governments the style may actually grow "dissimilar." If serious differences over the definition of major problems develop within national governments, and if these differences are internationalized through the formation of transgovernmental alliances, then international encounters are likely to be more important than inconclusive debate in the capital in producing eventual agreement on actions undertaken by international organizations. Paradoxically, then, bargaining styles may become more similar internationally as they grow less so at the national level.
Problem Definition
Problems will increasingly be defined as nearly nondecomposable sets. The inner circles, the leader committed to crisis management, and the epistemic communities that furnish the knowledge will at first attempt to isolate strategic variables, particularly important trends, that will enable them to place other problems (previously considered separate and autonomous) within a complex set or to remove items shown to be autonomous from the set. Examples of strategic variables are such things as economic aid based on the idea of basic human needs, environmentally sound rural development, food self-sufficiency. Each
of these is a core idea for an international operation—a programmatic focus. But each program, in turn, is constructed so as to include many subordinate activities, originating as independent programs and based on separate justifications; now, however, they are linked as a result of a comprehensive view of substantive and politicoeconomic interconnections. After the construction of such a set, the decomposition may recur. The set is then subdivided into separate activities, each with its own organizational home, though extensive coordination of activities is also required. Thus, it is expected that the failure of any single activity will not doom the entire set to misfortune.
Institutionalization
A nearly nondecomposable problem set requires different kinds of institutions than we have encountered in the other models. Institutions must be able to construct and then to decentralize a comprehensive approach. They must be able to "span boundaries" and to recognize boundaries as real. The articulation of more complex sets calls for think tanks and similar kinds of entities where experts can undertake the analyses and planning that the penetrated regular institutions of the organizations cannot perform. Sometimes such think tanks are set up within organizations. Some units are given the task of a "lookout institution" and are charged with scanning the entire array of relevant trends and with formulating warnings and proposals. More often, these tasks are performed by nongovernmental units under the control of epistemic communities but in close consultation with the organization's leaders.
During the implementation phase of the program, special skills of coordination are required. Segmentation of the units involved is needed. Specialization must be sacrificed. Redundancies must be introduced, provided only that the segmented but coordinated units do not operate so as to undo each other's work in the long term. Operating a nearly nondecomposable program involves great risks for the organization. Some of its units will be favored with special funds and powers; others will be neglected. Portions of the program that do not fit the focus will languish and their personnel will suffer low morale. By no means will all member states be happy with the new focus. Internal
conflict may actually be aggravated by these practices.[3]
Lest this argument be misunderstood, I wish to point out that the special mission given the United States National Security Council in the Iran-Contra episode is not a good example of what is being urged. Almost everything fits, except that no new consensual knowledge brokered by an epistemic community was in evidence. Problem definition in no sense showed awareness of a new and more complexly linked set with a longer time horizon.
Nevertheless, the model clearly implies an era of innovative institution building. If the outcomes of the program are generally satisfactory, it may be possible to dismantle the special-mission units and hand over the program to the normal routines. If, however, portions of the program are not successful, one must remember that it is the essence of institutionalization under these conditions to be experimental and subject to rapid revision.Authority and Legitimacy
Since innovative programs of this kind almost always carry with them additional resources desired by the member states, it is to be expected that the clients will accept the mandate and operations of the organization even if they do some grumbling. The experience of the World Bank and of the IMF would suggest as much. Authority is likely to increase. Whether that rise in authority will also be considered legitimate is another question. It depends on the outcome, which may not be known for years. Legitimacy is likely to increase if the outcomes are satisfactory, but to suffer if they disappoint. Hence we cannot conclude that authority and legitimacy will increase in tandem.
Successful Organizational Learning: Case Studies
Even though the learning model was derived in good measure from a logical projection of what learning ought to encompass, a number of experiences give empirical support to the case.
The World Health Organization
Until the early 1970s we should describe the experiences of WH0 as successful incremental growth. Leadership was in the hands of a coalition of Western governments, and the program was fashioned according to the professional consensus of the major Western medical groups, which staffed WHO's many advisory committees. WHO therefore stressed epidemiological intelligence and early-warning systems, the eradication of the most common communicable diseases, the
elimination of malaria, and the standardization of pharmacological practices. Medical training and hospital construction in developing countries was also emphasized through WHO participation in the U.N. Development Program. With the exception of unsuccessful efforts to mount a population control program, WHO prided itself on its "nonpolitical" approach, and it achieved major successes.
All of this changed in the early 1970s as the developing countries began to insist that the program was fashioned in the image of Western public health practices and did not address developmental needs adequately. New NGOs of Western provenance stressing social service principles rather than medical orthodoxy also entered the fray. The executive head and the secretariat responded to these pressures by working out a new program, more directly linked to rural development needs in the developing world and less informed by the practices of industrialized countries. The new definition of public health problems sought to nest health within a cluster of activities and aspirations relating to economic productivity and rural self-sufficiency: WHO adopted the principles of "primary health care" and "country health programming" as the operationalization of the nested problem set. In 1977 the World Health Assembly committed WHO to "the attainment by all citizens of the world by the year 2000 of a level of health that will permit them to lead a socially and economically productive life." In 1979 the assembly found that health is an "integral part of development." The emphasis shifted from the construction of Western-style medical facilities to primary health care centers, which owed something to the Chinese system of health delivery and to the critiques of high-technology medicine increasingly heard in the West. The program is charged with fostering decentralized institutions—multisectoral and multidisciplinary in form—permitting the active participation of patients, using appropriate technology, promoting self-reliance, and respecting, where suitable, non-Western medical traditions.
One major problem in interorganizational coordination is illustrated by the emphasis on primary health care centers. WHO's family planning program is nested within a more general multiprofessional approach, which offers birth control information as part of a package that includes prenatal care, nutrition, and maternal health principles, rather than treating the issue in terms of special crash programs built
around birth control technologies. This brought the new WHO program into conflict with the World Bank and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). The problem of coordination is crucial because the different ways of nesting the problem of population growth may also imply quite different outcomes if population growth continues to outstrip agricultural and industrial development.[4]
See Robert W. Cox and Harold K. Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), chap. 6. C. Pannenborg, A New International Health Order (Germantown, Md.: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1979); World Health Organization, The Work of WHO (Geneva: WHO, 1982); J. J. Finkle and B. B. Crane, "The World Health Organization and the Population Issue," Population and Development Review 2 (September-December 1976): 367-93; Kathryn Sikkink, "Codes of Conduct for Transnational Corporations: The Case of the WHO/UNICEF Code," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986): 815-40; and World Health Organization, Primary Health Care (Geneva: WHO, 1978).
It should be noted that WHO's new program emphasis does not involve the decay of all components of the earlier program. These continue to be followed. Nonetheless, the old coalition no longer dominates WHO because the main contributors have come to an agreement with the leaders of the developing countries. New epistemic communities have succeeded in gaining access to the decison-making machinery. The authority of WHO, already high before 1970, has increased further. Whether its legitimacy will also increase depends on the success of the new program, which the world will not be able to evaluate for some time.
The U.N. Environment Program
Environmental issues provide another instance of learning, though the experience is much shorter and the program may be degenerating into nongrowth. The story starts with the massive effort of an epistemic community of environmentalists working under the auspices of the International Council of Scientific Unions in the late 1960s. Their studies and analyses about the deterioration of the global biophysical environment spurred a flurry of environmental legislation in the industrialized countries and persuaded the Swedish government that the effort must be internationalized to be fully effective. The resulting U.N. Conference on the Human Environment (1972) pitted the Western governments, which wanted to create an international program to assure higher environmental standards, against governments from the larger developing countries (notably Brazil and India), which objected on the grounds that such standards would make industrialization more expensive for them. A compromise was reached by establishing the principle of "sustainable development," or environmentally sound economic development. Under this compromise, such matters as urban amenities in the Third World, desertification, soil
degradation, and unwise resource use in developing countries were declared to be major environmental matters in addition to the Western concerns with air and water purity.
The resulting international institution, UNEP, was to be a catalyst for promoting national and international policies consistent with this emphasis, rather than an operating agency. UNEP was headed by Maurice Strong, who had fashioned the environment-development compromise, and was soon penetrated by the epistemic communities that had raised the original hue and cry. UNEP's catalytic efforts resulted in the initiation of environmental programs in more than a hundred developing countries. It brought about the acceptance of environmental concerns as fully legitimate in nations where the issue had never before been raised. The program remained faithful to the original compromise as it invested heavily in measures to halt and reverse desertification, and to offer the kinds of environment-enhancing services most in demand in the Third World. In doing so, UNEP depoliticized the issue and made it more amenable to analytic solutions. As Lynton Caldwell notes: "Cumulating evidence from environmental science was demonstrating that not all Third World disasters could be laid at the door of the developed world…. UNEP has provided a forum acceptable to the Third World countries for examining their mutual problems free from suspicion of solutions imposed by the First World."[5]
Lynton Caldwell, International Environmental Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), 66-67. Also see Peter M. Haas, "Saving the Mediterranean," International Organization 43 (Summer 1989): 377-403; Robert Boardman, International Organization and the Conservation of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1981); Robert Repetto, ed., The Global Possible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). I am also greatly indebted to a paper by Kenneth Conca entitled "UNEP, the World Bank, and the Environment-Development Debate" (Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1988).
But things have not continued to run smoothly. Even though the crisis-leadership style adopted by Strong was continued by his successor, Mustafa Tolba, and even though the major developing countries have joined the consensus, environmental conditions continue to deteriorate. At the same time, the commitment of the industrialized countries to finance the programs declined on the global stage, even though in certain areas (such as the Mediterranean) they are willing to intensify antipollution practices. Although the learning model describes what happened between 1970 and 1982, it is not clear that the pattern continues. Some institutionalization has clearly taken place, but it may not be well enough anchored to go on. Nearly nondecomposable problem definition has taken hold; but will it continue to enjoy enough consensus to be carried forward? One major complaint has been that interorganizational coordination is insufficient. The U.N.
agencies charged with economic development tasks have been accused of not considering the environmental consequences of their investments and technical aid. The World Bank has admitted as much and has pledged to improve the coordination.
The World Bank
The first two decades in the evolution of the World Bank are best characterized as incremental growth until Robert S. McNamara took over as executive head in 1968. Since that time the changes in problem definition have been so extensive as to suggest learning, despite the fact that not all indicators fit.[6]
See Robert L. Ayres, Banking on the Poor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Valerie J. Assetto, The Soviet Bloc in the IMF and the IBRD (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988); Warren C. Baum and Stokes Tolbert, Investing in Development: Lessons of World Bank Experience (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1985); J. Winsome Leslie, The World Bank and Structural Transformation in Developing Countries: The Case of Zaire (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 1987); Stanley Please, The Hobbled Giant: Essays on the World Bank (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984); William Ascher, "New Development Approaches and the Adaptability of International Agencies," International Organization 37 (Summer 1983): 415-40; Lars Schoultz, "Politics, Economics, and U.S. Participation in Multilateral Development Banks," International Organization 36 (Summer 1982): 537-74; Douglas Rimmer, "Basic Needs and the Origins of the Development Ethos," Journal of the Developing Areas 16 (January 1981); Robert H. Girling, Multinational Institutions and the Third World (New York: Praeger, 1985); Jill Torrie, ed., Banking on Poverty (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1983); William Clark, "Robert McNamara at the World Bank," Foreign Affairs 59 (Fall 1981): 167-84; B. B. Crane and J. J. Finkle, "Organizational Impediments to Development Assistance," World Politics 33 (July 1981); Richard Feinberg et al., Between Two Worlds: The World Bank's Next Decade (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1986), published for the Overseas Development Council; Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Philippines (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Richard Feinberg, "The Changing Relationship Between the World Bank and the IMF," International Organization 42 (Summer 1988): 545-60; and Pat Aufderheide and Bruce Rich, "Environmental Reform and the Multilateral Banks," World Policy Journal 5 (Spring 1988): 301-22.
These changes took place in a setting unique for a global international organization: The Soviet Union and most of its allies had declined to join. The staff and president enjoy almost complete autonomy from member governments. Every president has been a respected American who has often prevailed over dissenting views in the U.S. government. Capital subscriptions and bond sales provide the sole financial support (plus interest earned on loans). The private sector and oil-rich developing countries have grown in importance as contributors; U.S. governmental support, while still the single largest, has proportionately declined over the years.A historical profile of the World Bank, expressed in terms of our indicators, is given in Figure 5. The substantive changes in problem definition are not evident there, however, and require spelling out. The bank began life with a commitment to the trickle-down theory of economic growth; investment was confined to specific infrastructural projects considered "bankable" and related almost exclusively to the stimulation of manufacturing industry. Transportation and energy-related projects were most prominent. Private enterprise was to be encouraged in the long run even though many of the loans went to state agencies. Ten years later it became apparent that many poor countries were unable to profit from this policy because they were unable to borrow on near-commercial terms and could not translate the gains from single projects into overall economic growth without more direct government intervention. The bank responded by altering its trickle-down doctrine. It created a soft-loan agency, the International Development Association (IDA), and encouraged economic planning
Figure 5. The learning model and the World Bank
as a necessary activity in developing countries by creating its own training facilities for officials from borrowing countries. When McNamara took over, the doctrine was changed once more in order to speed up development and to reach those strata of the population that were not benefiting from infrastructural lending. A new nested problem set took shape, labeled "redistribution with growth" and "meeting basic human needs." Lending was expanded to include agriculture, nutrition, land reform, family planning, housing, and education. Even more emphasis was put on national planning. "Meeting basic human needs" was interpreted to mean that the economic and social needs of the poorest of the poor were to be addressed directly with programs geared to reach them rather than focusing exclusively on large construction projects.
By 1980 still another doctrine was superimposed on the previous one. The Third World debt crisis made it clear that development planning was falling victim to overall economic conditions, declining national government finances, balance-of-payments crises, and rising social dissatisfaction. The bank realized that merely preaching austerity and cutting back on government services would not aid development. Hence the development doctrines—trickle down, basic human needs, and redistribution with growth—were now subordinated to an overall macroeconomic approach labeled "policy-based lending," which subsumes "structural adjustment" and "sectoral adjustment" lending. The bank proceeded to finance government budgets directly in order to avoid large-scale curtailment of social services. The most recent redefinition is still unrolling. It may eventually imply the subordination of the entire program to an ecoholistic perspective as environmental-impact assessment is being incorporated into all lending operations.
All this was possible only because the dominant coalition changed very slightly. The Western countries remain its core. Japan became a member of the coalition, and after 1973 some of the oil-exporting countries joined too. The bulk of the Third World has been kept out of the coalition despite its clamor to be included. At the same time, the United States' hegemonic position declined. McNamara pursued his policies despite opposition from the Nixon administration because he was able to find support from his expanded coalition. A. W. Clausen and Barber Conable continued the expansion of objectives even though
some in the Reagan administration opposed it and despite pressure from the U.S. Congress to tie development lending to the borrower's policies on human rights, among other special conditions.
The extent to which these important redefinitions and broadening of objectives were fully institutionalized is unclear. Each redefinition aroused some staff dissent, and each was also accompanied by the creation of new subunits in the bank. The new units never completely replaced the old ones. Each redefinition curtailed some of the powers of the older units without removing them altogether. The basic-human-needs approach did not end the lending for infrastructure and energy projects. And until the current debate, a long-standing rhetorical commitment to environmental and resource issues had not resulted in a marked integration of the ecological perspective into the older economic ones. In short, although the institutional growth pattern matches the learning model, we cannot conclude that the logic of the new programs also became consistently predominant in the bank's internal life. A lot of the redefinition involved the adding of new problems without fully integrating them with the older approaches in the form of coherent sets of solutions. Both problem redefinition and institutionalization remain incomplete in the sense that the new and more complex sets are not fully coherent with the older ones. The failure to integrate successive approaches, in turn, resulted in several failed projects that embarrassed the bank and caused great internal questioning of the imperfectly nested knowledge bases. It would be accurate to say that as the bank's approach became more ambitious and complex, the knowledge underlying its program became less consensual.[7]
I am grateful to Don Babai for this information. See his Between Hegemony and Poverty: The World Bank in the World Economy (forthcoming) and his identically titled Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1984. Also part of the picture are tactical linkages and the opportunistic mixing of knowledge with interests that question the legitimacy of multilateral development banking. One of the main pressures that brought about the inclusion of ecology in the bank's program came from U.S. NGOs that allied themselves with right-wing opponents of the World Bank and the IMF in the Congress. This unusual alliance succeeded in attaching appropriate conditions to legislation authorizing U.S. participation in recapitalizing the World Bank and the IDA. For an example of World Bank-IMF efforts to seek an increase in technical knowledge to improve development aid, see Robert Cassen et al., Does Aid Work? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
The International Monetary Fund
Does the learning model apply to the IMF in the same way as it does to the World Bank? The two stories differ in many ways. The IMF, like the World Bank, followed the incremental-growth model until the end of the 1960s. None of the key descriptive and evaluative variables changed much during that period, as the IMF carried out the task for which it was designed: the maintenance of flexibly stable exchange rates by means of short-term loans limited by the borrowers'
Figure 6. The learning model and the International Monetary Fund
capital quotas, and the correction of balance-of-payments deficits. In doing its job, the fund invented a new reserve asset, the Special Drawing Rights (SDR), and became the forum at which central bankers regularly discussed global monetary relations. But all of this took place under the rule of the original dominant coalition of Western industrialized states and depended on the willingness of the United States to permit the use of the dollar as the world's main reserve asset. This era ended when the United States, in 1971 and 1973, said it would no longer play this role. At this point the IMF's mission became clouded and the nongrowth model took over. The story of the IMF differs from its sister institution's in that it overcame turbulence, whereas the bank never had to confront this challenge (Figure 6).[8]
See Kenneth W. Dam, The Rules of the Game (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); John S. Odell, U.S. International Monetary Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); Cox and Jacobson, Anatomy of Influence, chap. 8; R. Russell, "Transgovern mental Interaction in the International Monetary System," International Organization 27 (Autumn 1973); B. B. Crane, "Policy Coordination by Western Powers," International Organization 38 (Summer 1984); John Gerard Ruggie, "Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982); C. Lipson, "The International Organization of Third World Debt," International Organization 35 (Autumn 1981); B. Cohen, "Balance of Payments Financing," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982); Joanne Gowa, Closing the Gold Window (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); H. S. Bienen and M. Gersovits, "Economic Stabilization, Conditionality, and Political Stability," International Organization 39 (Autumn 1985); and Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Kendall W. Stiles, "Bargaining with Bureaucrats," International Journal of Public Administration 9 (January 1987): 1-43, presents a decision-making model for the IMF with respect to standby credits for debt relief that is consistent with my argument, though not intent on distinguishing between learning and adaptation; see also his treatment of the IMF negotiations with Argentina in the 1980s in Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 29 (Fall 1987): 55-85. See also Manuel Guitan, Fund Conditionality, pamphlet series no. 38 (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 1981), and Margaret G. de Vries, The International Monetary Fund, 1972-78: Cooperation on Trial (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 1985), and The International Monetary Fund in a Changing World, 1945-1985 (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 1986).
When floating exchange rates replaced the Bretton Woods rules, the IMF lost not only the responsibility for maintaining a stable monetary environment but also its role as the main global forum for the multilateral discussion and analysis of monetary and other macroeconomic trends. Under Bretton Woods, epistemic communities of macroeconomists were important actors. The abandonment of the Bretton Woods rules signaled the evaporation of consensus among economists; epistemic groups were no longer able to broker a consensus. The fund adapted to this situation by developing a number of "compensatory-financing facilities" designed to help the developing countries most severely affected by the oil crisis and the global recession. The adaptation involved ways of financing balance-of-payments deficits that could not be covered under the original quota rules. It adapted also by borrowing money from private markets. But it could find no substitute for its earlier role as a forum of global consultation because the United States was increasingly unwilling to consult and the larger developing countries demanded a stronger role in the dominant coalition. Macroeconomic coordination was therefore shifted to the Bank for International Settlements, the Committee of Twenty, and eventually to the annual economic summits of the major industrial countries.
The debt crisis that engulfed the monetary scene around 1980 became the occasion for real learning. The IMF found a new mission in becoming the main analyst of the ills of countries about to default, the main planner for their recovery, and therefore the guarantor of re-scheduled
and new loans made to shore up their ailing economies. IMF "conditionality" was the guarantee sought by the lenders and accepted by the borrowers who had nowhere else to turn. Many IMF routines and beliefs had to change in order for this to happen. The sharp distinction between short-term lending and long-term investment was abandoned as the fund began to make policy-based loans aimed at medium-term structural adjustment. It coordinated its work with that of the World Bank and with the lending activities of governments and private lenders. Knowledge became more consensual as the purpose of lending expanded. Conditionality was adjusted to suit the political needs of the largest debtors. Problem definition changed as the overall health of national economies, and of the global economy, became the core of the nested set. Bargaining became simpler as consensus on these issues came to prevail among the lending countries, though the borrowers were clearly chagrined even by the relatively moderate conditions imposed on them. Monitoring compliance became a major activity, relying on detailed reporting and involving shared administration. The IMF's authority and legitimacy increased sharply at first in the judgment of the new dominant coalition (which the United States rejoined in 1983), but not in that of the borrowers. Authority declined as soon as borrowing countries saw ways of escaping the conditionality provisions, or when they were willing to shoulder the burden of being ostracized financially upon refusal to meet their debt obligations. The IMF's legitimacy never improved in the eyes of Third World countries, especially when credit was stopped to punish violations of conditionality. The survival of the institutions developed to carry out the IMF's new mission is still not assured. Neither the task environment nor the task domain seems stable enough to warrant optimism.
Having reviewed what appears to be a real success story for the two Bretton Woods institutions, it is sobering to remind ourselves again that attributions of success and failure are artifacts of the observer's perspective. Perhaps the real criterion of successful learning ought not to be financial stabilization, the resumption of exports, or halting the decline of national income. Alternative criteria might be growth resulting from national or collective self-reliance based on economic development policies that are explicitly redistributive and that favor the public over the private sector. Many observers committed to egalitarianism
and dependency reduction have urged that organizational successes associated with managed liberalism are really failures.
Such comments ought to be borne in mind when we assess the Bretton Woods institutions. Both are, broadly speaking, part of the West not only because they disburse Western money but also because they represent economic thinking and skills primarily associated with the West. Successful crisis management by the bank and the fund, in effect, means the continued predominance of skills and analyses that are part of managed liberalism. Classical liberalism reasserted itself unsuccessfully as the United States under the Reagan administration often expressed opposition to bank and fund policies; the United States (sometimes joined by Britain and West Germany) opposed loans to countries it did not favor and often questioned the relaxation of conditionality. In all instances, however, the opposition was eventually muted or withdrawn, though the adherents of classical liberal principles could take satisfaction in the bank's and fund's insistence on a reduced state role in the economy of the borrowers and on support for a revitalized private sector.
We thus arrive at a paradoxical picture in which epistemic communities encouraged by the bank and fund—associated with Western thinking even though the individuals are often nationals of Third World countries—dominate policy-making and the administration of loans, while antidependency-minded delegates from the same Third World countries denounce the Bretton Woods twins as "heartless" in the U.N. General Assembly and in UNCTAD. Which of the two is "right," of course, is not an issue that is easily settled as long as the criteria by which success is judged remain controversial. It is clear, however, that my measure of successful learning is deeply enmeshed with the continued predominance of Western ways of thinking. The knowledge that informs the policies that seem to manage crises successfully is not truly consensual as long as it is effectively manipulated to the West's advantage by epistemic communities that are themselves Western and are favored by those who dominate the bank and the fund.
Unsuccessful Organizational Learning: Case Studies
The cases of successful learning just reviewed are the more spectacular ones. Whether there are factors common to all of them will concern us
in the next chapter. There are also cases of temporary fragmentary learning—cases that illustrate the possibility of creative spurts in a setting of incremental growth.
Such cases include the reorganization of the U.N. Development Program after 1970, the reinvigoration of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) after the entry into force of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and the coordinated attack on the Sahelian crisis by the United Nations and the major donor agencies and governments united in the Club du Sahel. The UNDP reforms came about as a result of the U.N. soul-searching (in the form of the Pearson and Jackson reports) and resulted in the major institutional innovation known as country programming. IAEA reforms were achieved because the developing countries expected aid increases in exchange for submitting to greatly stepped up IAEA monitoring. The Sahel program reflected not only an immediate crisis but also a major problem redefinition of the cause of the crisis. All three episodes were made possible by agreement among a dominant coalition of wealthy industrialized states and the Soviet Union on a new definition of the problem to be solved—an agreement by no means necessarily shared by all Third World countries.[9]
On the IAEA, see Benjamin N. Schiff, International Nuclear Technology Transfer (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983); Mason Willrich, ed., International Safeguards and Nuclear Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). On famines and the Sahel, see C. Kirkpatrick and D. Diakosavvas, "Food Insecurity and Foreign Exchange Constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies 23 (1985): 239-50; T. W. Stephens, "After the Famine: Food Aid Policy and Management Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa," Food Policy 11 (1986); W. I. Terry, "Social Science Research on Famine," Human Ecology 12 (September 1984).
UNDP has returned to incremental growth, the future of the United Nation's special efforts in the Sahel is clouded because of the abandonment of the special unit for African crises, and the success of the IAEA's nonproliferation regime is doubted by many.Several other episodes featured efforts to change routines and procedures, and they were almost successful. The reasons for their failure are as instructive as the reasons for the success of the World Bank, UNEP, and WHO. These failed attempts include the work of Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant to improve U.N. conflict management, the effort to define the oceans and outer space as global commons, two attempts in FAO to link food security with international commodity market reform, two episodes in the ILO's history, and UNESCO's espousal of the New World Information and Communications Order.
Successful crisis management by the U.N. secretary-general, which almost meets all the evaluative indicators we apply to our cases, was used on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1965, most prominently in the Suez, Congo, and Cyprus crises.[10]
See Ernst B. Haas, Why We Still Need the United Nations (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1986); Henry Wiseman, Peacekeeping (New York: Pergamon, 1983); Arthur Lee Burns and Nina Heathcote, Peace-keeping by UN Forces (New York: Praeger, 1963); and Mark W. Zacher, Dag Hammarskjöld's United Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
These attempts featured shifting dominant coalitions, a sharp increase in voluntary contributions of funds and military personnel, and a sophisticated nestingof peace, domestic political stabilization, and economic assistance. Pragmatic decision making took place, accompanied by "almost similar" bargaining styles among members of the dominant coalition. Institutionalization of the routines proved a complete failure, however, because the coalition did not outlast the specific crises and could not agree to a permanent formula for financing future operations. Put differently, no ideological consensus took hold among the states concerned and no epistemic communities developed to broker more consensual knowledge.
Work in the United Nations with respect to the oceans and outer space was informed by the "common heritage of mankind" doctrine—a way of nesting activities and benefits associated with these commons that differs sharply from the rule that anybody can use these spaces for national purposes and that special rights of access and use accrue to those who get there first. The episode is properly interpreted as another clash between the ideologies of managed liberalism and dependency reduction, and between dependency reduction and ecoholism. United Nations efforts, as masterminded by the secretariat, were concentrated toward changing the old rule. In the case of the law of the sea, the bargaining became a free-for-all that very early escaped the control of the secretariat, experts, and epistemic groups. We know the results, though the ultimate fate of the main institutional innovation, the International Seabed Authority, is not yet known. Things remain unresolved with respect to the major questions of the peaceful uses of outer space. Whether remote sensing and direct television broadcasting from satellites should be subjected to international rules remains in question. The debate continues between those who wish to retain their present advantage in the use of radio frequencies and geostationary satellite orbits and the claimants who want more access to these spaces. The developing countries complain that they lack equal access to international telecommunications facilities and computer links. In the United Nations efforts are under way to improve their terms of access. None of these issues has as yet been redefined consensually. As more consensual knowledge develops about the relevant technologies, their costs and benefits, perhaps managed interdependence will take over. Efforts to bring this about have so far foundered on the lack of congruence among the major informing ideologies.[11]
James K. Sebenius, Negotiating the Law of the Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Barry Buzan, Seabed Politics (New York: Praeger, 1976); Per Wijkman, "Managing the Global Commons," International Organization 36 (Summer 1982); Marvin Soroos, "The Commons in the Sky," International Organization 36 (Summer 1982); Karl P. Sauvant, "Transborder Data Flows," International Organization 37 (Spring 1983); Rita Cruise O'Brien and G. K. Helleiner, "The Political Economy of Information in a Changing International Economic Order," International Organization 34 (Autumn 1980); and George Codding and A. Rutkowski, The ITU in a Changing World (Dedham, Mass.: Artech House, 1982).
In the history of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
two major attempts were made to "nest" knowledge of commodity markets, nutritional requirements, and development needs in such a way that might make an institutionalized solution possible. The first attempt occurred in the late 1940s when the executive head, Sir John Boyd Orr, sought a mandate for FAO to organize the major commodity markets into commodity agreements with automatic features for stabilizing prices and supplies. He lost because the knowledge base he claimed was not consensual. It was effectively disputed by the major grain-exporting countries, even though he was backed by certain epistemic communities. The same linkage among food-related issues resurfaced in 1974, this time supported by more powerful epistemic communities. It resulted not in victory for FAO as such (though the organization succeeded in defusing the acute criticism to which some of its members had subjected it), but in a new global plan for food security in the developing countries and for an international food reserve.[12]
On the FAO, see Raymond F. Hopkins and Donald J. Puchala, The Global Political Economy of Food (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); idem, Global Food Interdependence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Thomas G. Weiss and Robert Jordan, The World Food Conference and Global Problem Solving (New York: Praeger, 1976).
Major institutional innovations were agreed upon, including the creation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Council, with ambitious schemes for interagency coordination of new programs. But little new came of this. The more consensual knowledge base that seemed to have emerged by 1975 faded into obscurity as weather conditions improved, crops became abundant, and developing countries showed little eagerness to curtail the growing of cash crops for export. The crisis apparently over, the world relaxed into more familiar routines, and FAO resumed turbulent nongrowth. Yet we cannot conclude that a lesson, though not learned on two occasions, will forever fall victim to short-run thinking. Two stimuli for the redefinition of the food problem proved too weak. The next one, given the existence of more consensual knowledge and the appropriate political goals, may be powerful enough.UNESCO's entire history has been one of turbulent nongrowth because the organization has never had a cohesive dominant coalition, an agreed ideology, or a commitment to an identifiable nested problem set. In fact, it is difficult to identify the problems UNESCO was to solve. It was always a "garbage can." A major effort to change this pattern was made in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the developing countries, aided by the Soviet bloc, attempted to fashion a more complexly nested problem set anchored in the use of advanced communications
technology for dependency reduction. The resulting programs were the New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO) and the idea of science and technology geared to development. The NWICO combined the assertion of sovereignty and cultural autonomy for developing countries by legitimating controls on the outflow of news and information, restricting the access of the industrialized countries to events in the Third World. In addition, the NWICO called on the West for an intensive sharing of modern communications technologies, subsidizing the creation of Third World communications facilities, and providing the Third World with easier access to global telecommunications and satellite operations under Western control. The program for science and technology for development called for intensified transfers of technological skills to the Third World by means of greatly expanded U.N. programs to meet the special technological needs of non-Western countries.[13]
See Volker Rittberger, ed., Science and Technology in a Changing International Order (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982); Wilson Dizard, The Coming Information Age (New York: Longman, 1985); Thomas McPhail, Electronic Colonialism (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981); Dan Schiller, Telematics and Government (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1982); and Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
The science and technology program was never adequately funded. Nor did it achieve any internal coherence or clear purpose. The NWICO, in fact, proved to be extremely divisive. It was opposed by the Western countries and resulted in the withdrawal of Britain and the United States from UNESCO. Nor was the program implemented in its entirety. The story suggests that problem redefinition that is not grounded in consensual knowledge and agreed political objectives stands no chance.The International Labor Organization also experienced two efforts at radical program redefinition. The first occurred in the 1930s when the ILO leadership, in alliance with the international trade union movement that officially represented labor in the organization, sought to mount an international public works program in order to practice Keynesian countercyclical economics at the international level. The suggestion was made at an unfortunate time because it coincided with the advent of fascism in Europe. The legitimacy of representatives of fascist governments was being challenged, and the participation of Italy and Germany in the ILO was being curtailed. At roughly the same time the United States decided to join the ILO. The program was stillborn because it too was not based on sufficiently consensual knowledge, and it lacked support from a coalition with agreed goals. The ILO survived the crisis of changing governmental participation and shrinking interest in the international labor standards it had featured
up to that time by finding new patrons and catering to them. It did so by emphasizing the kind of labor standards of interest to the new patrons and by downgrading those that no longer had a clientele. It did adapt incrementally.
The ILO's second program redefinition was made in the 1970s in the form of the World Employment Program, which was tied to the notion of meeting basic human needs. The redefinition left intact the earlier ILO effort to provide technical assistance to trade union organizing, improve industrial relations, write labor conventions, and broaden the human rights of workers. It sought to superimpose on these older programs a scheme for enhancing employment in developing countries that would ease the trauma of urban migration and employment instability for new entrants into the labor force. All of this was to be done through systematic employment planning, which implied more industrial and urban planning at the national level. The program was justified and legitimated by the principles that international economic aid should help the poorest of the poor and also protect developing countries against the power of multinational firms.[14]
Ernst B. Haas, Mary Pat Williams, and Don Babai, Scientists and World Order (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 285ff; Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964); International Labour Office, Employment, Growth and Basic Needs (New York: Praeger, 1977); E. A. Landy, The Effectiveness of International Supervision (London: Stevens, 1966); and Walter Galenson, The International Labor Organization (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
The entire program reflected the fact that the old dominant coalition of Western countries no longer ruled, that the coalition of Third World countries had priorities that differed appreciably from those of the earlier ruling coalition. Yet there was a broad consensus behind the attempted redefinition as far as political goals were concerned. The program certainly reflected dynamic and interconnected objectives and sought to nest problems much more coherently and ambitiously than had been true before. It failed to take off because the consensual knowledge for achieving it was lacking. The necessary enthusiasm was absent in several countries where the scheme was tried, and before it could be institutionalized, the Third World was victimized by the major economic traumas of the late 1970s.8
The Three Models of Change: A Comparison
It is time we compared the three models of change in an effort to pinpoint when and why each is likely to dominate events. The discussion of the preceding three chapters is summarized in Tables 4 and 5. The experience of the member organizations of the U.N. systems is given in Table 6. We saw that unique associations of particular configurations of the variables with each of the three models are rare. True to the spirit of Weberian investigations, it is more accurate to say that each model tends to show certain elective affinities with certain variables, a finding that argues against our making a strong causal argument. Moreover, since our account to this point has been confined to organizations with a universal membership and a global mission, we now have to examine the record of regional organizations.
Regional Organizations
Regional organizations pose a problem. A good many regionals are charged with working toward the economic (if not political) integration.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
of their members. Their task is not to protect their members' sovereignty, but to overcome it, to transform the members into a more unified whole in which nation-statehood is left behind in the interest of creating a new and larger political entity. Their success in this endeavor is usually modest. But it is not judged most effectively by using the variables employed so far.[1]
The entities in question are the European Community, European Free Trade Association, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, Central American Common Market, Caribbean Community, the former Latin American Free Trade Association, Latin American Integration Association, Andean Common Market, Latin American Economic System, Economic Community of West African States, the former East African Community, West African Economic Community, Central African Customs and Economic Union, Mano River Union, Economic Community of the Great Lakes States, Central African Economic Community, South African Customs Union, Preferential Trade Area of East and Southern Africa. See R. I. Onwuka and A. Sesay, eds., The Future of Regionalism in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1985); S. K. B. Asante, The Political Economy of Regionalism in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1986); Dominic Mazzeo, African Regional Organizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ali El-Agraa, ed., International Economic Integration (London: Macmillan, 1982); Philip Taylor, Nonstate Actors in International Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984); Paul Taylor, The Limits of European Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Leon N. Lindberg and Stuart A. Scheingold, Europe's Would-Be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); and Joseph Grunwald, ed., Latin America and World Economy (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978). Key concepts for analyzing regional integration are given in Philippe C. Schmitter, "A Revised Theory of Regional Integration," in Regional Integration, ed. Leon N. Lindberg and Stuart A. Scheingold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
It is safe to say, however, that none of the common markets and free trade areas has managed to follow anything resembling the managed-interdependence model, with the occasional exception of the European Community.There are other regional organizations that cannot be readily evaluated with our scheme. Regional development banks abound, but most of them gear their operations to the World Bank through cofinancing arrangements and are therefore difficult to evaluate as separate entities. Commodity agreements (such as the International Coffee Agreement) are "regional" in the sense that they include among their members only the major producer and consumer states; so are commodity producer organizations (such as the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC]), even though they include only the sellers. The purposes of such organizations are too restricted, however, and their half-life too short to provide useful data for my purposes.
That still leaves us with eight general-purpose organizations that stress some or all of the following tasks: cultural cooperation, regional defense against outside aggression, and the collective security of the membership. These eight organizations are the Nordic Council, Commonwealth, Council of Europe, Organization of American States (OAS), Organization of African Unity (OAU), Arab League, Gulf Cooperation Council, and Islamic Conference Organization. In addition, there are five regional organizations with important economic missions other than the formation of common markets: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its International Energy Agency (IEA), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), and South Pacific Forum. These fourteen organizations can be evaluated in our terms.
An impressionistic summary of the experiences of these organizations is given in Table 7. Only the OECD, during its first fifteen years,
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
and ASEAN, in its first decade, display evidence of learning. Even though almost all regionals owe their origin to a fundamental decision on the part of the members to follow a dramatic new line of conduct, this commitment was not often matched by a carefully thought out set of problems and solutions. For example, the negotiations that led to the creation of OECD in 1960 give no evidence of anything more than a rather incoherent compromise between the United States and the European members. Nevertheless, despite the admission of three new members in the 1960s, the organization soon became a highly valued forum for the discussion of virtually all aspects of the economic and social issues that then preoccupied highly industrialized countries. OECD became the major center for the conduct of studies and analyses that later informed much national policy. In the 1970s the redefinition of the group's original purpose continued when the members gave OECD the function of a think tank in order to study the impact of technological change and to evaluate policies designed to speed it up or slow it down. Similar innovations were made with respect to environmental policy. In the most recent period, however, no further focusing of efforts was attempted, and the OECD lost some of its glamour.[2]
On OECD and IEA, see Ernst B. Haas, Mary Pat Williams, and Don Babai, Scientists and World Order (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 157-72; Peter E. Cowhey, The Problems of Plenty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Robert O. Keohane, "The International Energy Agency," International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978): 881-912; Davis B. Bobrow and Robert T. Kudrle, "Energy R & D: In Tepid Pursuit of Collective Goods," International Organization 33 (Spring 1979): 149-76; and Glen Toner, "The International Energy Agency and the Development of the Stocks Decision," Energy Policy 15 (February 1987): 40-58. For a thorough study exploring the extent to which learning as opposed to adaptation took place in the elaboration of collaborative research and development programs in the European Community, see Wayne Sandholtz, "Crisis and Collaboration in European Telematics" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1989).
Perhaps the most strikingly innovative success was the creation of OECD's International Energy Agency during the oil crisis of 1973. IEA was designed to plan and to set up an emergency oil reserve on which members were entitled to draw if they failed to gain access to their normal suppliers, and to work out the rules under which members could gain access to the reserve. IEA was also charged with stimulating and coordinating research and development efforts relating to conventional and nonconventional sources of energy other than petroleum, i.e., working toward energy self-sufficiency. It carried out these tasks to the satisfaction of its members until a change in the power of OPEC was thought to make most of these measures unnecessary.
Some regionals have attempted management of interdependence. In the OAS the more powerful Latin American member states in the 1970s sought to make the organization into a dependency-reduction agency by upgrading its economic and social programs, intensifying technology-transfer policies designed by the technology importers, and restricting the ability of the United States to dominate the organization,
especially with respect to conflict management and peacekeeping. Although some changes were made—over U.S. opposition—they never came close to meeting the demands of governments that adhered to ideologies other than managed liberalism; the OAS as a whole decayed. Only its human rights activities increased in scope and authority.
The Commonwealth experienced two episodes of incremental growth—the launching of the Colombo Plan early in its postwar life and the supervision of especially acrimonious elections in Africa in the late 1970s. Neither of these ever became part of a coherent program. Efforts to mediate the end of the apartheid regime also failed in this respect, though the Commonwealth continues to be what it has always been—a forum for the discussion of domestic and international issues among former British colonies. ASEAN began life with an ambitious scheme for the economic integration of its members and attempted to plan industrialization by way of complementarity agreements that were to divide some new industries among the participating states. But no such agreements could be reached, and ASEAN had to content itself with ad hoc consultations on economic and military-diplomatic questions. Managing interdependence was also attempted by the Nordic Council and the OAU. The Scandinavian countries proposed a Nordic common market, which Denmark rejected in favor of the more attractive and larger European effort. In the Lagos Action Plan, the OAU made itself the unsuccessful champion of a scheme for the economic integration of all of sub-Saharan Africa and sponsored several of the abortive subregional unions. SAARC, SADCC, and the South Pacific Forum all began their lives with diverse programs of economic cooperation that constitute a distinct intensification of relations among the members; but they do not yet show any evidence of learning to change their operations as a result of reevaluations in the wake of disappointment.
When Can Managed Interdependence Take Over?
It is time we drew some inferences from this survey. They will answer four questions. (1) What are the descriptive characteristics of international organizations most commonly associated in practice with successfully managed interdependence? (2) What is it about the substantive
issues associated with managed interdependence that suggest a special affinity for more consensual knowledge and analytic decision making? (3) How do the analytic variables cluster to result in three different modes of problem definition? (4) Is there something like a "creativity cycle" that explains the ups and downs of managed interdependence?
Descriptive Correlates of Managed Interdependence
What is it about the World Bank, WHO, IMF, OECD, UNEP, and the IAEA that enabled these organizations not only to adapt but also, at times, to learn? All but UNEP were ruled by relatively stable dominant coalitions. All of them were able to develop inner circles composed of particularly important states to manage issues of great salience. Therefore, the degree of ideological controversy was minimal. By and large, the notions associated with managed liberalism provided the principles for action. The dominant coalition was that of the large industrialized Western nations, joined in the case of WHO and IAEA by the Soviet Union. This was not true in the case of UNEP. Here, the initial compromise between ecoholism and pragmatic antidependency provided the ideological glue for later action, anchored in a relatively stable intercoalitional agreement. UNEP's coalition included a number of important developing countries in addition to the West and the U.S.S.R. Therefore, as long as these groups agreed on redefining problems in response to science-validated notions of an endangered environment, they were able to infuse the organization's programs with an impetus for action that transcended adaptive behavior.
When an organization is controlled by a stable dominant coalition, a number of other behavioral patterns emerge to facilitate learning. Personnel recruitment was never severely compromised by the pressure for national quotas; high technical qualifications remained the core criterion. Budgets in several of these organizations escaped the vagaries of disjointed incrementalism. Revenue (except in the case of UNEP) was raised relatively painlessly because the major members were very concerned with the execution of the programs. Secretariat autonomy remained high, monitoring capabilities were always adequate. Executive heads were able and motivated to exert independent
leadership in many cases, except in OECD. Moreover, these variables prevailed for long periods.
Substantive Correlates of Managed Interdependence
But it was not only the political fact of Western domination that made learning possible. In each case, the making and reforming of programs came to be based on a core anchoring concept, a strategic variable. For the bank, OECD, UNEP, and the IMF this variable was economic growth linked to an improved quality of life. Gradually, programs were designed to increase human welfare in a comprehensive sense, not merely increasing per capita GNP. Within this set, separate but linked programs for economic development, maintenance of welfare services, resource conservation, environmental protection, rural welfare, and urban life could be formulated. We can be almost certain that the intellectual skills of economic and social forecasting do not yet command a sufficient consensus to assure the continued coherence of the problem set; decomposition of the constituent parts is by no means precluded. Nevertheless, compared with thinking on these issues as recently as 1970, the problem of human welfare is now much more elaborately nested around a core concern.
The strategic variable for WHO is integrated health services at the rural level. It also orders a great many separate skills, traditions, and activities that earlier had been quite autonomous. The IAEA's core principle is the encouragement of civilian nuclear energy. This strategic variable—heavily dependent on the arcana of nuclear engineering, the economics of power generation, and the absorptive capacities of late-developing economies—is as much an expression of Western problem-solving methods as are the principles of public health and preventive medicine that inspire WHO.
For WHO and IAEA the reconceptualization of the problem to be solved resulted in tighter analytic linkages of causes in clusters of related activities and objectives that become increasingly difficult to decompose. We know, however, that, in principle, the learning process can just as easily result in the decomposition of a nested problem set, even though this outcome was not observed in a single case we coded
as learning to manage interdependence. Can it be that, empirically, a new conception of how to nest a problem simply involves a more complex linkage among variables and a more nearly nondecomposable set? Our instances of successful learning all involved the aggregation of more and more separate bits of information and theory into apparently nondecomposable clusters; this aggregation was then followed by partial disaggregation, but without losing all the coherence already achieved by having focused on a reasonably abstract strategic variable.
Moreover, there was something about the substantive issues at the core of the organizational mandates that facilitated learning: the knowledge relating to these issues was the special property of Western cultural and historical traditions. The logical and epistemological properties of modern Western thought were important facilitators of learning because they helped to focus research and program making around the substantive strategic variables. The systematic and synthetic procedures of science (including economics) figured heavily in the decisional and programmatic routines associated with organizational learning, more so than in cases of turbulent nongrowth; but the same explanation also holds in some instances of incremental growth.
The substantive mandates of the learning organization thus lent themselves particularly well to scientific problem solving. It is true that a permanent substantive scientific consensus on development economics, public finance, and monetary relations is as elusive as is agreement on environmental matters. However, the mere existence of rival schools of thought need not prevent organizational learning as long as single epistemic communities temporarily control policy in each organization. After all, ultimate truth is not at issue; everybody's consensual knowledge is socially constructed, not graven in stone or derived from eternal essences, despite its roots in the procedures of Western science.
I illustrate the argument. The World Bank staff claims that excessive reliance on parastatal development agencies and the subsidization of food prices hinder economic development. Many economists in developing countries (and elsewhere) disagree. But as long as economists of the bank's persuasion dominate policy making, their consensual knowledge in effect rules. The ecoholistic thrust of UNEP's program
is certainly not accepted as true by many environmentalists and development economists. But as long as these dissenters are not in the policy-making network, the opinions of their ecoholistic opponents provide an adequate expert consensus for a new problem definition.
With the exception of the IAEA, all these programs share one major feature: they are far from major military and political competition. (The obvious military relevance of the IAEA is held under control because all the major nuclear weapon states are committed to non-proliferation.) States find it quite possible to confront one another militarily and to dispute major political issues while maintaining a common commitment to economic growth that respects an improved quality of life. Moreover, the coalition that dominates the learning organizations is relatively free from major quarrels among its members. The United States and the Soviet Union do not disagree on public health and environmental issues; they are partners in seeking to slow down nuclear proliferation. And it is the coalition of industrialized states that is most concerned with the interplay of economic, environmental, and resource trends.
Two major conditions, then, underlie successful learning in and by international organizations. First, there must be a relatively stable coalition of like-minded states whose professed goals do not differ fundamentally from government to government. And, second, there must be sufficient consensual knowledge available to provide the rationale for the novel nesting of problems and solutions. Both conditions must be met. The existence of either, by itself, does not permit learning.
Creativity and the Founding of Organizations
Of the thirty-six major international organizations surveyed (see Tables 6 and 7), thirty were coded as having demonstrated learning at the time they were created. But only sixteen possessed organizational mandates at their creation that could be described as being composed of nested problem sets; the remainder were given programmatic missions that simply aggregated separate issues and problems without much concern for their intellectual or causal coherence.[3]
This section was inspired by the insistent questioning and thoughtful suggestions of Emanuel Adler.
In what sense is the design of a new organization a creative act that
constitutes learning on the part of member states' bureaucracies? We can consider such a design as a learning experience when it occurs as the result of a policy trauma, an event, or a fear that implied major loss or deprivation for the states that were responsible for the design. For instance, the United Nations' conflict management procedure was created because the major states wanted machinery in place to prevent another major war. UNCTAD's founding was the result of the determination of the developing countries to better their position in the international division of labor. The founding of the World Bank represented the belief by the major powers that there was a connection between democracy, prosperity, and peace. UNESCO's origins were tied to the once-popular notion that peace depends on high educational and scientific achievement and the wide dissemination of scientific knowledge. Among the U.N. family of organizations, only the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) seem devoid of an informing principle—a principle that characterized their founding as a deliberate break with an unacceptable past. Forty percent of the organizations were founded by the victors in the wake of a major war, 33 percent originated in a setting of intense economic disappointment in which major grievances against the developed countries were voiced, and the rest were organized out of the fear of a coming war or a major economic crisis. Learning in each case involved the desire to avoid past policies later recognized as mistakes. Earlier failure was attributed, at least in part, to insufficient interorganizational collaboration.
Learning to manage interdependence, in other words, is a creative act associated with the design of new arrangements in the aftermath of collectively experienced disasters. At least this dictum explains why new organizations with novel design features are set up. It fails to explain why more of them do not attempt the novel nesting of problem sets so as to attain nondecomposability or near-nondecomposability. Very few regional organizations met that standard: ASEAN had a sense of nondecomposability that did not survive the first decade of operations; SADDC and the South Pacific Forum have a sense of connectivity between economic, transport, and military tasks that has not had to withstand the test of time yet. Only OECD's International Energy Agency demonstrated near-nondecomposability at its founding,
which may have decayed during the 1980s. U.N. agencies did much better. In addition to being embedded in new regimes, almost all of them also demonstrated more elaborately constructed problem sets as compared with their predecessors. They clearly do reflect bureaucratic learning. When UNESCO, ITU, WHO, and UNIDO were set up, they failed to coordinate separate new tasks into an integrated problem set, even though ITU and WHO arrived at nested sets later in their lives.
Is the law of entropy operating here? Do organizations and their founders display insight, energy, and determination to fashion a brighter future, only to fall victim to divergent interests, flagging enthusiasm, and a tired staff? Considering that turbulent nongrowth and actual decline dominated only thirteen of our thirty-six organizations, such a judgment is at least premature. Considering further that ten organizations enjoyed periods during which they reorganized themselves effectively to manage interdependence, entropy does not seem to work very consistently, especially since most of the ten could not point to the existence of a nested problem set at the time of their founding. If entropy lurks in the wings, its role remains ill-understood (see Tables 6 and 7).
It seems clear that the shock of war and the disappointment with economic development are major occasions for learning to think anew about the need for regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. Threats to the environment and to the global commons can also be powerful stimuli. The most consistent and impressive sequences of attempted problem solving—resulting in the elaboration of more complex problem sets—all hinged on the demands of Third World countries in organizations dominated by Western political coalitions and epistemic communities espousing managed liberalism. The most likely explanation of learning is the interplay of Third World demands with reasonably receptive but far from uniformly sympathetic Western interests, knowledge, and routines. The interplay was at first based on dependency-reduction ideologies that were eventually "tamed" as a result of repeated failures to resolve economic crises. The organizational histories of the World Bank, IMF, and WHO can serve as parables of how states can learn to manage interdependence by redesigning organizational
programs to strengthen a regime to which they remain committed despite major stress.
Is Learning to Manage Interdependence Morally Preferable to Adaptation?
Now that we know the conditions under which most of the learning displayed by international organizations has actually occurred, can we assert that managed interdependence is best? Can we advocate it as the model that ought to be followed to assure the happiness of the world and the good fortune of the United Nations? It all depends on what "best" is taken to mean in this context. Suppose there is no stable coalition of like-minded states and not enough consensual knowledge to give us nested problem sets, the two conditions for learning. Would that force us to conclude that the incremental-growth model should be encouraged? Or that turbulent nongrowth is worse than organizational inertia? How can we tell if the lessons learned by the organizations that manage interdependence are the right lessons? How can we be sure until all the outcomes are known and until we can gauge the degree of satisfaction they engender?
To argue that the managed-interdependence model is the best of the three compels us to assert that the substance of the problem definition it attempts is normatively preferable to that attempted by the other two models. We would have to be confident that the particular nesting of problems attempted by an organization is the one most likely to deliver the desired outcome. I reiterate that all knowledge experienced by actors is socially constructed. Since there is no such thing as final and true consensual knowledge it is impossible to make a credible claim that one way of nesting problems is superior to another—except in the case of incontrovertible physical evidence. We have no warrant for confidence unless the routines and skills associated with the learning model consistently and more reliably produce the desired outcomes than is the case in the adaptive mode .
Let us now suppose that these routines do perform better than those associated with the models of adaptation. Let us suppose further that the beneficiaries—the clients of the organizations' programs—agree
among themselves that better health, more peace, higher living standards, and a wholesome physical environment constitute the utopia toward which our organizations should labor. Given all of these suppositions, we would be entitled to say that the learning model is practically and morally superior to the other ways of defining problems and arriving at solutions. We would have the right to state this conclusion not only because the learning model performs "better" but also because it alone contains the concepts and techniques necessary for reflecting on failure and thinking about doing better with a different definition of the problem.
These suppositions are not realistic. Most states endorse peace in general but feel it can be attained only if their archrivals are eliminated or chastened. Few governments profess a desire for peace at any price, and neither do their citizens. In principle, everyone prefers good health to bad. But does this preference predict the willingness of governments to budget for better health when there are competing claims for military funds? Few quarrel with the desirability of higher living standards. But most decision makers disagree as to whether the improvement should take the form of industrialization under state or private auspices, favor urban or rural dwellers, sacrifice agriculture to industry or the reverse. Everybody wants to be free of toxic chemicals. But not everyone is equally willing to put this goal ahead of defense, industrialization, or urban amenities. In short, the existence of universal, mass-based values does not assure agreement on how to order them. The disagreement is the stuff of national and international politics.
But we do know that the learning model provides a mechanism for the blunting of these differences. That is its great virtue. It offers routines and institutions for working out fragments of a value consensus. In the successful learning organizations, this "blunting" took the form of a rapprochement between two competing ideologies when their adherents realized that (1) uncompromising persistence in one's preferred ideology involved undesirable costs, and (2) a compromise would not fatally undermine one's preferred ideology. If we agree that the particular values likely to be enhanced by the learning model are indeed to be preferred to others, then the model is indeed the best. Even if we agree merely that self-correcting procedures for making decisions
are superior to fixed routines, then the learning model is still to be preferred.
Unfortunately, we cannot be sure of any of this. We do not know that appropriate routines for self-correction will be followed when outcomes prove disappointing. We dare not assume that the consensual knowledge of one epoch will remain consensual, that political goals agreed to at one point will continue to be preferred by those who matter most. We are not yet able to determine that the current compromises among world-order ideologies will be institutionalized. Therefore, since international interdependence will not soon come to an end, models of behavior that merely enable the organizations to adapt should be valued. They provide a hedge against time, an opportunity to preserve what is still desired, even in the absence of learning.
Between Adaptation and Learning
My discussion of the moral superiority of the managed-interdependence model over its two rivals is inconclusive. Any notion of superiority is hedged about by doubts, by counterpoint that can be summed up as the tyranny of the fortuna of habit over the virtù of learning.
Machiavelli, some of us suspect, often exaggerated. It seems a distinct overstatement to juxtapose habit to learning with the starkness he used to contrast virtù with the sluggishness of routinized fate. There is certainly an elective affinity between habit and the two models of adaptation; the persistence of established patterns and routines is responsible for some of the behaviors we associate with adaptation. The affinity between the imaginative and creative forces the author of The Prince identified as virtù with the behavior pattern I have called learning is equally clear. I argue in this section that neither adaptation nor learning wins any final and full victories, that the two coexist and interact. I also urge that no acceptable social scientific account of events is possible without bearing in mind the interaction of the two modes. The case for the superiority of learning cannot be made on value-neutral social science grounds.
One reason for this state of affairs is the ingrained tendency of political actors not to be readily persuaded by scientific knowledge. Historically, scientific knowledge that eventually becomes consensual
rarely provides a breathtaking new paradigm for politics. On the contrary, political advocacy and political routine seek to adapt new discoveries to previously held convictions. Discoveries in astronomy and biology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were by no means used immediately as the basis for a fresh view of humanity and nature. That came much later. These discoveries were instead pressed into service to reaffirm prior beliefs, some of which had been accepted since the time of Plato. They served as affirmations of the "great chain of being," the principle that God's perfect reason foreordains and preprograms everything, that everything that can be logically, is or will be.
Nothing much has changed since. New discoveries in the sciences and new technological inventions are immediately incorporated into prior beliefs, religious and secular. Few of us consider them as possible radical breaks with the past, as occasions for formulating political metaphors not considered before. In environmental politics, for instance, believers in classical and managed liberalism selectively incorporate and reject scientific findings; so do pragmatic opponents of dependency, while their more militant structural cousins tend to reject the arguments of ecologists as romantic or reactionary. Only ecoholists can be considered as embracing a new view of politics, a metaphor symbolizing and representing humankind's place in, and unity with, nature.
Sensitivity to the notion of habit-driven behavior should teach us to expect the impulse to reject new knowledge, thus explaining why international organizations produce very few important programmatic or institutional innovations.[4]
This section is based on intense discussions with Edward Miles.
Some, we know, do occur, but they tend to be vulnerable to the volatility of perceived interest on the part of member governments. After all, we must recall that international organizations exist only because, without them, governments would be unable to resolve a major public goods problem. In a setting in which mutual dependencies for the assurance of wealth and safety have become very great and relationships very dense, markets have failed to assure that the right services will be provided at the right time at a price everybody can afford to pay. The costs of providing these services—which would have to be assumed by all or some states—are too high to tempt single potential producers. In the absence of singleproducers, the burden of interdependence is experienced as a transaction cost by each state. International organizations are created to save states such costs.[5]
Transaction costs can also be assumed by state hegemons without involving the creation of international organizations; since the demise of the dollar-exchange standard there has been very little of that. Sometimes international organizations are created in the absence of a real public goods problem (UNESCO comes to mind); such organizations spend a lot of time searching for a mission and survive only because they manage to acquire a clientele that gets accustomed to the organization's largesse, even though the services being performed could be carried out equally well by some entity other than an intergovernmental organization. Rationalistic theories of institutions explain the fate of the first example; they do not explain the UNESCO case.
Once set up, the organization will be animated by various bureaucratic networks, the components of which exist at the national as well as the intergovernmental levels, among governmental units and among nongovernmental organizations with a stake in the agenda. Actual discussion, negotiation, study, and—eventually—action is the result of activities within and among these bureaucratic networks. Private interests and parties are involved in most instances, though the intensity of the involvement differs with issue area. Involvement is most intense in organizations with a mission involving scientific, engineering, and medical personnel.[6]
The involvement of private groups is nonexistent with respect to conflict management and collective security, except when nongovernmental insurgents are a party to a dispute. There is no direct participation of private groups in the discussion and negotiation of economic and monetary agreements, except in certain regional integration efforts. Private groups, however, are increasingly active, and their presence is being tolerated more and more in discussions that were formerly monopolized by government delegates, such as on human rights and arms control issues.
Whenever the leadership of an organization heavily dependent on scientific and technical personnel fears that knowledge has changed so as to put into question the mission of their organization, the scientific component risks being corrupted because scientific questioning is choked off. The original knowledge then becomes dogma. Systematic evaluation of organizational performance is avoided because it might threaten the dogma. The corruption of science and scientific objectivity will lead the organization into the turbulent nongrowth pattern.[7]
The corruption of the scientific process is by no means inevitable or universal. It was avoided by IAEA, OECD, the World Bank, IMO, and WMO. On the other hand FAO, ILO, UNCTAD, and the U.N. itself, not to mention UNESCO, have all suffered from the phenomenon. Learning is inhibited not only because of the possible corruption of scientific knowledge or the faulty understanding of the scientific aspects of a problem. Equally common is widespread misunderstanding of a problem's inherent social processes and routines, particularly in economic and social development aid. Such misunderstandings then impede successful project implementation. The organizational defensiveness to be expected in the face of failure is as likely to militate against learning with respect to social processes as with scientific ones.
The emphasis on habit-driven behavior leads us to another sobering conclusion: if solutions to conflicting welfare claims are being offered that imply obvious redistributive or regulatory interventions (which are certain to make very visible short-term losses to important constituencies), then the acceptance of the relevant knowledge by governments is very much in doubt. Hence the amount of analytic decision making to be expected is limited by the immediacy and clarity of the welfare trade-offs; substantive linkages will be few. Epistemic communities can realistically aim at the elaboration of more intelligently nested problem sets only if they control all levels of bureaucratic activity—national and intergovernmental. That control, however, is likely to differ sharply both with the degree of consensus about the applicable knowledge and with agreement about the "publicness" of the good being provided. Science as such can be expected to generate policy-relevant knowledge only if governments perceive the need
for it to solve problems they cannot avoid having to solve, and if they cannot think of a way of doing this without making use of knowledge offered by epistemic communities.
But somehow the game goes on. Scientific knowledge does find its way into policy making that leads to substantive linkages, cognitively similar bargaining styles, and newly nested problem sets that aim at more effective problem solving. If virtù wins no final victory, neither does Dame Fortuna. The limitations of habit, real though they are, are often transcended by appropriate behaviors because no political routine is totally frozen. Almost certainly the ecoholist will never walk away with a complete victory, but neither will the classical liberal. They are condemned to interact with each other for a very long time. They can therefore be expected to experience international interdependence so as to create programs and rules that force them both to see their enmeshment as a nearly nondecomposable system. Still, we need some notion of how the cake of habit-driven behavior can be broken up. Hence we need a discussion of the role of institutions and regimes.
Institutions, Regimes, and Organization-Mediated Change
We say that collective experiences of this kind are "embedded in international regimes." States prefer to act autonomously, but the realization of their interdependence results in their decision to create principles and norms that reduce autonomy in order to make possible the production of more joint gains. The ensemble of principles and norms (as well as of detailed rules and procedures for resolving conflict) applicable to any given issue area is a "regime." Regimes, in turn, are informed by the world-order ideologies of their more important member states. Most of the successful regimes that have flourished since 1945 have been inspired by managed liberalism.
Regimes can function without international organizations, but international organizations are always constituents of an overarching regime. Regimes are the superordinate concept we use for describing the principles, norms, rules, and procedures around which state expectations converge toward a common problem-solving approach.[8]
See Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), for the authoritative discussion of this concept and its permutations. For an argument justifying the subordination of international organizations to the notion of regimes, see Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986): esp. 771. For an argument questioning that subordination, see J. Martin Rochester, "The Rise and Fall of International Organization as a Field of Study," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986). For a sympathetic critique of regime theory, see Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, "Theories of International Regimes," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 491-517.
International organizations are the agents that make rules and provide proceduresfor resolving conflict over them. The principles and norms that inspire a regime, however, are beyond the organization's grasp. They are the basic objectives on which the member states agree. Organizations reflect these principles (as expressed in the ruling world-order ideology) as they make up rules and procedures, but they do not create principles and norms. Therefore, the creation of organizations as well as of organizational change are functions of regime change. Organizations respond to changes in the perceptions of interest and value that occur at the level of the member states. It is not possible to design an organization without paying heed to the regime in which it is expected to operate.
Students of international organizations, especially would-be designers of improved organizations, frequently discuss organizations as if they were institutions; the confounding of the two is a serious error. Just as regimes are constructs to which organizations are subordinate, regimes in turn are merely varieties of the higher species we properly label "institutions." Since it is institutions that incarnate habit-driven behavior (and therefore favor adaptation over learning), we cannot elaborate on the creative interplay of adaptive and learning behavior without commenting on the malleability of institutions in general.
Robert Keohane defines institutions as "persistent and connected sets of rules that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations.… Specific institutions can be defined in the first instance in terms of rules; but we must recognize that specific institutions are embedded in practices."[9]
Robert O. Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Research Programs," International Studies Quarterly 32 (December 1988): 386. Keohane shows that two currently competing research programs—he calls them the "rationalistic" and the "reflective"—make different, but by no means totally incompatible, assumptions about the purpose, origin, and fate of international institutions. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate areas of complementarity between the two programs and to urge that we need both of them because full accounts using only one are not possible.
The rationalistic research program has some similarity to my adaptive mode of change in that its practitioners seek to account for behavior in terms of rational-choice criteria that tend to result in minimal change. The reflective program (into which this essay would fit) stresses the compatibility of rationality with behavior that self-consciously questions past modes of choosing, and therefore is closer to my learning model. Keohane's essay (like mine) can be read as a protest against commentators who insist on presenting different modes of analysis as absolutely opposed, incompatible, noxious, misleading, and sinful.
A regime, with its associated organizations, is a "specific" institution, nested in another specific institution—namely, the sovereignty of individual states within a system of states. "Practice" defines the manner of state behavior toward other states in this nested setting, much as the rules of any game shape the behavior and the expectations of the players toward one another.Institutions certainly favor habit-driven behavior, stability, resistance to change. A regime, therefore, can be designed to shore up a set of habits, to legitimate the status quo. However, as we saw in the case of international organizations created in response to an actual or expected disaster, institutions can also be altered deliberately to change practices so as to avert the expected trauma or to prevent the repetition of an earlier one.
We can envisage the transformative role of institutions as a five-step sequence. (1) Actors cooperating within an organization realize that joint gains are not being obtained because tasks are improperly conceptualized and knowledge is improperly used. (2) Disappointment with performance is communicated by these actors to their colleagues and constituencies in their home countries. (3) Political coalitions and epistemic communities form among ideologically allied countries and groups to suggest new norms and principles to govern the issue area of concern; these new norms and principles incorporate a sense of interdependent practices, roles and expectations that differ from the original institutional setting because they seek to prescribe new roles and new behaviors to compensate for the disappointing performance associated with the first set. (4) A new regime is negotiated that expresses the alternative principles and norms. (5) A new organization (or several) is set up to flesh out the regime with appropriate rules and decision-making procedures.
This sequence represents an evolutionary logic. Past events, past mistakes of policy, and past discoveries of science create a dynamic in which all actors—despite their ideological commitments that define their perceived interests—will be forced to consider the other's interests as if they were their own. The interests and the fates of the actors become intertwined not only in the judgment of the observer but also in the minds of the actors. The reality of the cognitively evolutionary pattern, in turn, limits and suggests the kinds of theories or organization on which we can draw in considering possible improvements in the design of international organizations.[10]
Evolution can, of course, also figure in an account that assumes the dominance of habit. Arguments about the ability of humans to adapt and to learn are often hedged about with notions of "hard wiring," built-in constraints on the ability to change owing to genetically determined limits on thought, or limits believed to be inherent in genetically determined selfishness reinforced by successful selection. Within this epistemological and ontological convention, evolutionary change means any alteration in behavior that has come into being despite such constraints. For illustrations, compare the opposing treatments of evolution by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Peter E. Corning, The Synergism Hypothesis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
My use of the term evolutionary is quite different and requires clarification and justification. I am making no claim whatever that the processes discussed under this label owe anything to conceptions propounded in either the Darwinian or the Lamarckian version of biological evolution. True, the processes and routines associated with habit-driven behavior look like adaptations that have been devised and institutionalized according to Lamarckian principles; since all evolutionary processes sketched by me result from human volition, not genetics, the analogy is false because institutional memory is not equivalent to behavior that is genetically controlled, though deliberately acquired. Since the processes that concern me do not resemble natural selection, any temptation to apply Darwinian adaptive principles must also be resisted.
Therefore, the branches of organization theory indebted to notions of natural selection are not applicable. Hannan and Freeman offer a population-ecology theory of organizational change that illustrates my point. They argue that most organizations do not adapt successfully to outside threat or challenge because organizational adaptation takes place at the level of "the species" rather than of individual organizations. Entire types of organization survive because the structures and routines that characterize them happen to have been selected for success. Hence it is futile, for the most part, to attempt to redesign organizations that are failing. That often makes things worse. Novel environmental challenges are best met by the design of a brand-new type (species), rather than the attempt to adapt existing ones. This conceptualization contains clear Darwinian and Lamarckian analogies. See Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change," American Sociological Review 49 (April 1984): 149-64. The authors also propose "random transformation theories" as instances of evolutionary dynamics. In the work of James G. March and Johan P. Olsen (Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations [Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976]), for instance, any link between rational intentionality and systematic analysis on the part of organizational managers seeking to adapt and actual success in adaptation and learning is portrayed as largely fortuitous. Path-determined change is seen as a much more powerful explanation, and paths can also be rendered as a form of natural selection (Hannan and Freeman, "Structural Inertia," 150).
Hannan and Freeman also discuss a third branch of organization theory (ibid., 150) that is directly applicable to my effort. We are here concerned with a family of theories they label "rational adaptation theory" (even though the label covers more than what I have considered as adaptation, and even though the question of rationality is problematic). All these theories share a commitment to the importance of intentionality on the part of managers. Organizational change is a matter of deliberate human design. The determinants of successful design changes are seen as contingent on understanding the social technologies involved, or on an appreciation of the resource base available for organizational action, or on the conformity of organizational structures with the surrounding social norms (or embeddedness in a larger regime), or on the fit of the organization into some functional scheme (e.g., the needs of capitalist accumulation or of socialist construction). Representative authors include James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The 'Iron Cage' Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields," American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147-60; Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, Organization and Environment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik, The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); W. Richard Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). If any of these theories are "evolutionary," the meaning of that term should not be linked to the biological context. It connotes, rather, the ability of thinking designers to improve the lot of their organizations through the progressive application of more intelligent ideas. Evolution here carries a cognitive meaning, not a materialistic one.
The fact remains that even the evolutionary view of institutions must make us wonder whether we can design our way out of the "crisis of multilateralism." If organizational change depends on regime change and if regime change is a function of the overall malleability of human institutions, then the learning mode can never be expected to win a final victory over the adaptive mode. The two will continue to coexist within the same organization. Some parts of the organization will not need to adapt at all; others will continue to be victimized by turbulence. But some will seek to transcend turbulence. Possibly the dissatisfactions that accompany turbulent nongrowth will be so overwhelming
that the governments will decide to engage in sweeping reforms of the entire system of international organizations.
The permanent interplay of adaptation and learning prevents us from making strong claims about deliberate design. If social science analysis has brought us to the point of being able to specify the interactions to be expected and to see the limits of the transformational power of each of the three models, then social scientific analysis has also confirmed for us that it cannot establish the superiority of one model over another. This means that we cannot hope to offer a final, full, and true account of the life of any single organization, or of a set of organizations. There is no such thing as a truly thick description that overcomes the tension between fortuna and virtù . All we can hope to sketch with confidence are counterpoint and temporary syntheses.
But we can do something else in addition. If social science is unable to resolve the question of quality, personal judgment ought to be able to handle the issue of which model is best for resolving the crisis of multilateralism. I am committed to the argument that learning is superior to adaptation. I do believe that learning implies the recognition of more complexly nested problem sets, not merely differently nested sets. Hence I do accept the challenge to think seriously whether and how the findings of the social scientific analysis of organizational change can be combined with a personal and normative commitment to design "better" organizations. This is the task of the final chapter.
9
Can Better International Organizations Be Designed?
It is tempting to design perfect institutions. That is why American culture has beatified the framers of the United States Constitution. They provided us with an almost perfect blueprint for national development—two hundred years of successful collective reevaluation. Why cannot a conclave of wise leaders do the same for the United Nations and the major regional agencies? If it is possible to spell out the characteristics of organizations that are able to learn, why can we not legislate ways of behaving that will routinize these characteristics?
The present offers an enormous temptation to do just that. Today's international organizations are said to be mired in "the crisis of multilateralism," a disease that has spread to them from its original source in the foreign policies of some of the more important member states. Exhortations for overcoming this crisis abound. Since the symptoms of the disease include shortcomings of the organizations, the remedy calls for new and improved organizational designs.[1]
For the most searching and critical report on the helter-skelter manner in which United Nations' tasks have developed and on the reasons for the lack of coherence and integration among them, see the so-called Bertrand Report of the United Nations Association of the United States, entitled U.N. Management and Decision-Making Project (New York: UNA-USA, 1986). Particular reports of importance within the overall project are these:
The U.N. in Profile: How Its Resources Are Distributed
Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Evaluation in the United Nations
U.N. Personnel Policy Issues
These papers summarize practices and shortcomings without necessarily suggesting improvements in design. The most searing suggestions for improvements are in Maurice Bertrand, Some Reflections on Reform of the United Nations, doc. IU/REP/85/9 (Geneva: U.N. Joint Inspection Unit, 1985).
Specific suggestions for improving U.N. practices are treated in the following publications associated with the Bertrand Report:
Fairness and Accountability in U.N. Financial Decision-Making
The U.N. at 40: The Problem and the Opportunities
Improving the Disaster Management Capability of the United Nations
Leadership at the United Nations: The Roles of the Secretary-General and the Member States
The Role of the United Nations in the Economic and Social Fields
Some suggestions for reform do not call for a change in superordinate regime, such as using the relations between the U.N. and various think tanks as an occasion for creating a "global watch" function, a systematic forecasting of looming new problems and issues; permitting a systematic policy of selective national financial contributions to programs one favors; upgrading the capability of the U.N. Disaster Relief Organization; or forcing a deep programmatic and financial soul-searching by prohibiting any member state from contributing more than 10 percent to the budget. Other suggestions, however, cannot be implemented without the kind of major evolution of norms and principles examined later in this chapter, such as the implementation of decisions already made to conform to guidelines based on rigorous program budgeting, a new personnel policy respecting the merit system, strengthening the link between budgetary and programmatic deliberations in the General Assembly, and reorganizing the economic and social machinery to resemble the European Community.
But remember: the interplay of knowledge and interest in international
organizations is merely a reflection of knowledge and interests that are really located within states. Therefore, we have to look at the way in which states experience their interdependence before we can address matters of organizational design.[2]
I take this opportunity to distance my inquiry from studies of international politics and organizations that derive from classical functionalism (not neofunctionalism). Such studies associate the growing density of national enmeshment in international organizations with the growing pursuit of welfare state-type policies at the national level and with the dominance of bureaucracy in decision making at that level. International interdependence will lead, it is argued, to ever tighter links among national bureaucracies working out their joint problems and meeting their common needs by means of membership in international organization. This trend will eventually lead to peace among nations as the normal condition. See Harold K. Jacobson, William Reisinger, and Todd Mathers, "National Entanglements in International Governmental Organizations," American Political Science Review 80 (March 1986): 141-59, for an example of this type of treatment.
I make none of these assumptions or claims. I study adaptation and learning as ways in which national bureaucracies behave toward one another, without making the inferences offered by functionalists about major transformation of the international system; nor do I preclude such changes. On the one hand, neofunctionalism does not claim that all bureaucratic activity in a setting of interdependence must relate to system change because national needs can no longer be met by national means. On the other hand, nothing in neofunctionalism precludes an interest in behavior patterns associated with adaptation and/or learning. It is probably high time that neofunctionalists seriously concern themselves with these behaviors.
I now argue that before we can seriously think about designing better organizations, we have to specify the crisis of multilateralism correctly. Only then are we in a position to inquire whether international organizations can be designed to become perpetual learners, and how to redesign them.The Crisis of Multilateralism as the Occasion for Redesign
Those concerned with ending the alleged crisis of multilateralism sometimes point to long-raging confrontations as the occasion for rescuing the U.N. conflict management function from the stigma of turbulent nongrowth. Could not the Gulf War and the Arab-Israeli confrontation, Angola, Kampuchea, and Western Sahara War each become an occasion for learning, for organizational innovation, as the Suez crisis and the Congo became for an earlier generation of U.N. leaders?[3]
For institutionally innovative proposals to end the Gulf War, see Aleksandr M. Belonogov, letter to the editor, New York Times, October 17 and 27, 1987; Cyrus Vance and Elliot Richardson proposed another formula (New York Times, October 16 and 20, 1987), only to be shot down by John Gerard Ruggie (October 22, 1987) and John L. Washburn (November 10, 1987), also in the New York Times. Washburn's proposal was a genuine innovation in that it offered a neutrality patrol that did not require the consent of the belligerents, though it would have lacked the anti-Iranian sanction implied by the NATO naval forces actually deployed. Iraq's victory reduced these opportunities for third-party intercession.
For innovative measures to end the Israeli-Arab confrontation, see Leon Gordenker, "The United Nations as a Third Party in Israeli-Arab Conflicts," and Nathan A. Pelcovits, "Uses of UN Peacekeeping on Arab-Israeli Fronts," both in Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 10 (March 1988): 60-113. Pelcovits also shows how the mandates of UNIFIL, UNDOF, and UNEF II have direct relevance to operations of similar U.N. forces that might be deployed in a non-Israeli West Bank and Gaza. Gordenker demonstrates that a hegemonic coalition (however instrumental) of the United States and Soviet Union, if it imposed a settlement on the Middle East, could upgrade the ability of the secretary-general to mediate, strengthen peacekeeping forces in the event of another indecisive war, draw more systematically on intelligence provided by existing peacekeepers and observers, and—most important—augment U.N. authority and legitimacy by rewarding those who comply with U.N. orders by means of aid, status, and other symbols of approval instead of merely relying on sanctions.
Commentators who engage in these imaginative exercises fail to remember that international organizations function as parts of larger regimes. Hammarskjöld was able to innovate (though his successor ran up against the limits of the global regime by 1965) because the dominant coalition supported him, because he had the leverage to build his own coalition at times, and because the innovations he proposed were consistent with the policies of his supporting coalition; Hammarskjöld's principled creativity received the instrumental support of key member states.[4]
Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (New York: Knopf, 1972). Also Pelcovits, "Uses of U.N. Peacekeeping," 86-87. The political context in which multilateral forces were permitted to penetrate the Israeli-Arab conflict is discussed by Saadia Touval, The Peace Brokers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), and D. P. Forsyth, United Nations Peacemaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
The United Nations of Javier Pérez de Cuéllar is ruled by a dominant coalition that was fearful of Big Power military action in the Gulf; and the Big Powers could not decide whether to favor neutrality or the condemnation of Iran. Military intervention measures were defended as neutral peacekeeping by some, while the same steps were seen as unneutral sanctions by others. As for the West Bank and Gaza, no genius for organizational design has been able to overcome Israeli dissension over the terms of a peace. So far, no outside hegemon is willing to compel the parties to agree. The crisis of multilateralism stems from the absence of political consensus, not from organizational malfunction.Is the Failure of Liberalism Evidence of Crisis?
It bears recalling that despite the crisis of multilateralism, the 1970s and 1980s saw intensive and occasionally successfull multilateral activity on Israel's borders. Is there then such a crisis? Is the situation a matter of concern to some but not to others? Among those who are most deeply disappointed with the performance of organizations in the U.N. family, the adherents of managed liberalism are the most vocal. In lamenting its passing from the scene, Thomas Hughes defines the American policy of the past in these terms:
The disposition, mindset or world view that for decades regarded as self-evident, and that almost automatically supported the following verities: international cooperation, consultation and conciliation; international law, institutions, norms and dispute settlement; economic interdependence, growth, and freer trade; international development aid and technical assistance; diligence in seeking arms controls; and restraint in the use of force, except when responding to clear provocation and then, if possible, under multilateral auspices.[5]
Thomas L. Hughes, "The Twilight of Internationalism," Foreign Policy 61 (Winter 1985-86): 25.
American policy, since 1981 at any rate, no longer adheres to these precepts. The crisis of multilateralism, then, has arisen from systematic American neglect of, if not contempt for, the United Nations. Hughes attributes the change to the breakup of the marriage between what some have called the "interventionist liberal" tradition of American foreign policy with anticommunism. Everything was all right as long as internationalism and anticommunism were both expressed in the same multilateral policies. This became impossible when the United Nations was no longer under Western control and when the power of the United States began to decline relative to the might of others. Once this was recognized, the unilateralist-interventionist tradition reasserted itself in Washington.
Much of this analysis is accurate, but it misses the point. Hughes and his supporters imply that the incremental-growth pattern is the only proper view of international organization. It corresponds to the liberal utopia. Slowly expanding international programs and gradually intensifying multilateral enmeshments promise a more harmonious world. If they also happen to correspond to the domestic and international
agenda of the hegemonic state, so much the better. Interest becomes the handmaiden of progress.
We know that the liberal view of organizational design and programming is no longer consensual. We cannot and should not hold that the only proper stance toward multilateral institutions is the liberal on, that slowly expanding consensual knowledge and the political objectives of managed liberalism (which include anticommunism) suffice to produce the only desirable model of institutionalized world order. To think in these terms is to miss the volatility of both knowledge and political goals, to associate the desired utopia exclusively with a single sectarian view. It is the essence of the managed-interdependence model that it cannot be based exclusively on liberal values. It must be based on meanings shared across several world-order ideologies once liberalism has in fact lost its hegemony. My argument in favor of the superiority of the managed-interdependence model is by no means a camouflaged endorsement of the American liberal-internationalist position. There is a crisis of multilateralism, but it is not well described by the despair of disappointed liberals. The answer to that crisis is not the fashioning of more numerous and more powerful international organizations.
To the liberal who believes in managing affairs rather than in the untrammeled workings of market forces, the crisis of multilateralism manifests itself in the fact that not enough real-world problems are handed over to multilateral organizations, that there is too much unilateralism and bilateralism, that there is insufficient willingness to compromise, and that there is a strong tendency on the part of the most powerful states to distance themselves from international organizations when they lack control over them. Managed liberalism cannot abide the tendency of the more powerful states to pick up their marbles and go home.
Classical liberals have no such difficulties. For them there is no crisis of multilateralism. The remedy for imperfect problem solving is in the improvement of national policy and occasional efforts at international coordination of national policies. Summitry among the most powerful is the preferred mechanism, not resort to the United Nations or the OECD.[6]
American policy under the Reagan administration approximated the classical liberal position, with certain important exceptions. Its preference for innocuous summitry among the seven most important Western states is modified by its agreement to certain automatic monitoring criteria for assessing macroeconomic indicators and policies that are quite inconsistent with classical liberal policy preferences. The Reagan administration's acceptance of the new powers and roles of the World Bank and the IMF constitutes another such exception. These policies are, however, fully consistent with managed liberalism.
The record on U.N. conflict management is also mixed. The denunciation of the optional clause governing the International Court of Justice's jurisdiction in the case of the Nicaraguan complaint against U.S. military intervention is a violation of international law that tends to undermine the court's authority and legitimacy. At the same time, the court had never before been seized of a dispute of this kind, and it was generally understood that it ought not concern itself with controversial military and ideological issues at all. Nor can it be said that there is a general consensus that such cases (of which the U.S.-Nicaraguan instance is only one of many that could be so treated) ought to be settled by adjudication. Therefore, it seems that Nicaragua's recourse to the court actually challenged international law and contributed to the crisis of multilateralism by making future recourse to the court in controversial cases even more problematical. Nicaragua was the real culprit, not the United States. Recall also the unsuccessful U.S. attempts made in 1987 to mobilize sufficient concern in the Security Council to intervene decisively in the Iran-Iraq war by using chapter 7 of the charter.
Yet for much of the Third World there is also a crisis of multilateralism,
albeit a very different kind of crisis. These countries hold that the failure of international institutions lies in their inability to force the developed countries to practice consistent policies of international redistribution of wealth and power. There is not enough aid, or the wrong kind. The United Nations fails to settle disputes of great salience to some Third World countries. The international law that ought to inspire the peaceful settlement of disputes is rigged in favor of Western principles. The United Nations is based on the wrong kind of law.
Ecoholists are equally dissatisfied. For them the crisis of multilateralism consists of unthinking policies of diffusing technology, neglect of the environment, piecemeal programming, sectoral thinking, runaway arms racing, and insufficient attention to resource depletion. Too much rather than too little incremental change is the chief lament of the ecoholist.
The crisis looks different depending on one's ideological position. Each critique fails to note that states do not establish or become members of international organizations unless they expect to benefit by so doing. No state joins because of a belief in multilateralism for its own sake. If there is widespread disillusionment with an organization, it results not from disappointed idealism, but from the recognition that the organization is unable to provide the desired benefits. Any discussion of redesigning it so that it can manage interdependence must therefore begin with a more accurate analysis of the crisis of multilateralism.
Patchy Interdependence and Leaky Sovereignty
The vessel of sovereign statehood is leaky; the pumps still work from time to time, but not consistently; the captain is not sure whether to beach the vessel or to join a fleet of similarly damaged ships sailing under negotiated orders. International organizations merely reflect these uncertainties. Interdependence cannot be managed unless the most important captains experience turbulence in similar ways and draw similar inferences.
Interdependence is patchy, not uniform. This statement requires a historical justification. Until the early nineteenth century, not even the
European states could be said to have exercised full sovereign authority over their own territories if judged by late-twentieth-century standards. The very idea of a strong state in firm control of its territory is new. Before the nineteenth century the government of a state claiming sovereignty over a specific territory rarely presided over a culturally uniform population. It usually had no ready access to much of the rural areas and was perennially unable to collect taxes. The state exercised only sporadic surveillance over foreign trade; the systematic regulation of foreign economic relations was unknown before World War I, with the exception of tariffs. The state relied on mercenaries, on foreigners as well as on its own subjects, for much of its military defense; reliable defense against military attack was unthinkable without alliances.
Today's state is expected to provide for the entire panoply of welfare concerns of its citizens and to assure their defense. Even though consistent practice toward these ends is found only in the First and Second worlds, the governments of the Third World are equally committed to the aim of providing for the welfare of their citizens. Probably even most Third World states today are stronger than their precolonial predecessors (if they existed at all). Modern states are not only stronger than their ancestors, but they are also expected to do a great deal more. Interdependence is patchy because some of them manage to do these things quite competently by acting alone, whereas others must rely on help from allied states and from international organizations. Interdependence is patchy because even the states that continue to be relatively successful in their autonomy are finding it more difficult to be so without help from their partners in trade, culture, and defense. But the fact remains that some are more interdependent than others, a fact of basic importance in understanding why multilateralism is not equally attractive for everybody.
Compared with conditions in the nineteenth century, states are actually more secure in enjoying their sovereignty. The principle of national self-determination is contested by nobody. Every group of tiny islands that desires sovereign statehood is given its independence, enshrined in international law and practice. Since 1945 more than eighty new states have come into existence; only one has been destroyed, though some have had governments imposed on them from the outside
Each government seeks to retain autonomy and control by regulating economic ties and immigration. Many invest in armaments to assure their defense, often at the expense of offering welfare services to their citizens. For thirty years barriers to the international flow of trade and money diminished; now the trend is once more toward raising these hurdles to links with the outside world. The state is very much alive, even if not uniformly healthy.
What cancers challenge state autonomy? International terrorists defy sovereignty and undermine the efforts of states armed to the teeth to defend themselves. Third World countries are unable to assure their own defense without buying weapons from others. Industrialized states, though disposing of arsenals of unprecedented technological complexity, seem unable to use them in many situations because appropriate targets are hard to find. Transnational corporations sidestep tariff barriers by investing directly in other countries, quite indifferent to the macroeconomic admonitions and worries of their home governments. They sell arms to customers barred from purchasing them by the home state. They dispose of proprietary technologies in defiance of the strategic preferences of ministries of defense. They contribute to nuclear proliferation despite international safeguards. National money markets have lost their autonomy, as have national accounting systems, because time and distance have been eliminated as barriers by instantaneous telematic communication. It is getting more and more difficult to label a corporation as being of a particular nationality. In short, the routine practices of modern society challenge the autonomy of states even in an environment of patchy interdependence.
Yet it also remains true that the actual ratio of domestic to international economic transactions is variable. Interdependence is patchy because the ratio favors the international side in some sectors while the nation continues to receive the lion's share of economic attention in others. The larger countries tend to remain more autonomous than the smaller developed nations; when more than one half of GNP is earned from international transactions, macroeconomic control over one's economy means very little. But even if the share is only a quarter of GNP, the ability of the government autonomously to determine monetary policy, arrive at employment or production plans, and cope with currency fluctuations becomes problematic. The drive for autonomy,
the desire to insulate oneself from the policies and preferences of others, can become very costly. Few governments, especially those in the Third World, are willing to pay the price of that untrammeled sovereign autonomy. Even patchy interdependence is difficult to resist with policies of deliberate isolation; and if it is not resisted, every country becomes more permeable to nongovernmental forces originating elsewhere in the world.
The domestic political institutions of nations are increasingly subjected to public pressures from abroad, pressures that often become the policies of governments and of international organizations. A state's domestic political arrangement used to be strictly its own business as long as it did not seek to export its values and institutions by force. International human rights campaigns, usually triggered by private groups, demonstrate that these days are gone. Governments are no longer shy in expressing their approval or abhorrence of the domestic practices of other governments. When electoral pressures are mounted, they will make these preferences a matter of foreign policy. The vulnerability of target governments, of course, differs enormously. The more dependent the government is on aid, trade, and investments, the more often it is likely to yield to such pressure, whether mediated or legitimated by international law and organizations or not.
Even communist states, until recently considered impervious to these processes, are subject to penetration. The more these states seek to live up to their welfare commitments by modernizing and decentralizing their economies, the more they come to depend on foreign trade and foreign investments. By opening up a centrally planned economy the communist states expose themselves to influences of all kinds that had previously been carefully excluded. It is doubtful that the sovereign control previously exercised can continue unscathed.
States living under these contradictory impulses must make unpalatable and difficult choices, many of which imply the reduction of autonomy. Once we add ecological considerations to the litany of uncertainties and worries, the picture becomes more complex still. The desire for autonomy, and the limited ability to exercise it, will certainly remain with us. But recognizing the costs of retaining full autonomy is also part of the picture. The frustrations that face policymakers
under these conditions define the turbulent field of international life. But since life is only marginally less turbulent at the national level, the so-called crisis of multilateralism is nothing other than the crisis of modern political life.
Two practical constraints make choice especially difficult under these conditions. Decision makers must opt for alternative conceptions of the territorial space to which choices are to be applied, and they have to weigh the short-run against various longer-run time perspectives.
Territorial sovereignty imposes a rigid conception of space. Decisions are to be made for the benefit and security of a delimited area and its inhabitants. But since many problems are no longer definable in terms of solutions that are specific to the area under the state's jurisdiction, the very notion of delimited territorial space loses some of its organizing vigor. Regional, global, and even outer space become almost equally salient for thinking about problems and solutions. Therefore, the symbolic and practical uniqueness of national territory becomes problematic. Yet regional governance has acquired a symbolic importance of its own only in the case of Western Europe; other instances of regional rather than national space as foci for governance are confined to such unspectacular matters as fisheries conservation and pollution control, which are not likely to arouse the emotional involvement of the citizenry. That leaves the coordination of national policies through the services of nonsovereign international organizations as a makeshift alternative to the sole authority of the sovereign state. Finding the "space" most appropriate for organizing political action remains a serious conundrum, expressed in the continuing search for regimes in which to embed international organizations.
The issue of time is hardly less serious. Winning a war, stabilizing the currency, raising employment levels, or preventing the importation of cheap foreign goods are urgent matters. The solutions are expected to bring results within the year. Electoral fortunes may depend on success. Much of government is taken up with very short-run concerns partly because of the importance of short-run experience and memory in securing the survival of politicians. But what if a decision is not likely to bear fruit for ten years? Planning the development and deployment of highly sophisticated new weapons systems, transforming
the ecology and economy of a semiarid area, raising the standard of living of rural populations in poor countries—these are programs that require a much longer time horizon before they can come to fruition. Yet decisions made now will determine their trajectory. A notion of time much more complex than short-run calculations is necessary before meaningful action is possible. Finally, most environmental problems require a time horizon of several generations. It is difficult to plan a world safe for one's grandchildren. Yet today's policymaker is expected to function simultaneously within the strictures of all three time horizons, to make interconnected decisions that are to take effect within each of the three perspectives.
Ambiguities of space and time in a setting of patchy interdependence and shaky autonomy describe the political context in which the issue of designing better international organizations must be faced. This is a very tall order. There is no consensual knowledge available to the political actor that tells him or her which space and which time perspective to favor or to discard. There are only ideologies that claim to have the answers. What we do to cope remains very properly constrained by the rules of routine because we have no proven and reliable alternative.
Not even the drafters of the U. S. Constitution included in their design the features we retroactively identify as learning. They did not plan and they did not anticipate that the principle of judicial review would have to be invented to maintain the separation of powers, to interpret the meaning of checks and balances, and to determine the extent of federalism. Nor did they anticipate that the balance between federal supremacy and states rights would oscillate and that a civil war would be fought to settle the issue. The Constitution was fashioned to prevent the rise of political parties, but they nevertheless became integral to the American system of government. The capacity to learn was not "designed into" the Constitution; we, the historians of change, recognize learning as we map how politicians who tried to live under the constitutional rules came to compromise their clashing demands. The most we can say is that the Constitution did not inhibit learning. If that is so, how can we, as observers of international regimes and organizations, marshal the hubris to offer suggestions for better designs?
The Normative Basis of Design
There are, then, identifiable conceptual and epistemological notions that command us to be modest in our efforts to improve the world. Once these notions, or forces, have been identified, we are entitled to try our hand at the trade of reform. Our continued modesty requires us to recall the core features of the three models of organizational change. Epistemologically speaking, I have dealt with adaptation by way of incremental growth and turbulent nongrowth as a value-neutral descriptive enterprise; but I have discussed learning to manage interdependence as something slightly different. In this section, I intend to show that the use of the managed-interdependence model as the basis for design requires a new approach to learning, a more normatively inspired personal approach, as a result of which learning is replaced by "cognitive evolution."[7]
An additional argument in favor of attempting a better design is that almost all U.N. agencies operate under rules that permit continuing efforts to nest problem sets in innovative ways. The rules governing voting, representation, recruitment of personnel, budgeting, and planning are not so restrictive as to preclude evolution in the appropriate direction. The rules have proved quite flexible enough to accommodate practices consistent with incremental growth, turbulent nongrowth, and managed interdependence.
Of course if one takes the position that these practices are of small importance because the reform of international organizations is purely a function of the regime needs of the member states, or of the growth of new knowledge-inspired demands for action, then the design emphasis must be placed on how such knowledge is to be matched with political interests, or on how interests can be changed. The argument for the possibility of reform then becomes an argument for the close study of epistemic communities and their influence on political practice.
The Descriptive Treatment of Adaptation
Both models offer descriptive accounts of adaptation. Organizations that practice incremental growth or turbulent nongrowth survive and may eventually learn to manage interdependence.[8]
The growing literature on "organizational culture" provides concepts and data on how we may study the sequential steps involved in organizational adaptation. For a review of the literature on organizational culture, see Meinolf Dierckes, "Unternehmenskultur und Unternehmensführung," Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft, no. 5/6 (1988). For a systematic statement of how organizational practices, myths, strategies, symbols, and values are shaped by novel experiences, and how these in turn are transformed into new organizational mandates and tasks to result in still newer cycles of adaptation, see P. Gagliardi, "The Creation and Change of Organizational Culture: A Conceptual Framework," Organizational Studies 7 (1986): 117ff. In Gagliardi's conceptualization, the new experiences are eventually integrated into the organization's prior value and symbolic system rather than leading to the kind of questioning and revaluations I have associated with learning. In other words, the Gagliardi framework, as compared with mine, stresses the retention and adjustment of prior practices.
The fact that both are strongly constrained by habit-driven behavior by no means forecloses either survival or eventual learning.An organization is able to undergo incremental growth if and when it works in a task environment free from the sudden intrusion of many new demands. Because there is no fundamental ideological conflict between old and new members, the new demands are not incompatible with the original task domain. New tasks and programs are not qualitatively or conceptually more complex than the original ones but are merely grafted onto the initial tasks. Hence the need for a differently nested problem set is irrelevant. Incremental growth is a version of positive feedback.[9]
The massive reform of the international organizational system with a master plan is hopelessly unrealistic. Can we not posit a less ambitious goal: the resumption of incremental growth? Such a resumption would require merely a reconstitution of a dominant coalition in each organization or each issue area. Programs would expand and be reinvigorated piecemeal; no overarching nesting would be attempted; existing knowledge, practical and theoretical, would suffice to mount the new programs. Undoubtedly, many demands that now are not satisfactorily met by international organizations could then be addressed.
It is quite likely that this can and will happen in some regional organizations. Under proper circumstances, the work of the South and Southeast Asian organizations can develop in this fashion. If actual warfare does not erupt in South Africa, it is conceivable that the Southern African Development Cooperation Conference will expand its coordinated program of infrastructure building incrementally. Similar increases in OECD responsibilities, as the rigors of postindustrial life in the West intensify, can also be expected. Whether a joint approach among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council will outlive the Iran-Iraq war is more dubious. In Latin America, incremental steps toward joint approaches to common problems are already visible on a bilateral basis and outside the framework of the existing regional organizations.
Incremental growth is also possible for those global organizations that have already learned to manage interdependence. Barring new major evaluations in the near future, it makes sense to envision WHO and the World Bank as engaging in further programmatic refinements and expansions within whatever consensus exists in each. There are many possibilities for expanding their respective programs, and the political preconditions for doing so seem to have been met.
Resumption of incremental growth in most of the U.N. system, however, is extremely unlikely. Transcending turbulent nongrowth would require the matching of new consensual knowledge with agreed objectives. There is too little evidence that this match is being approximated in the core areas of conflict management and macroeconomic programming. Consensual knowledge is lacking, and claims to knowledge are still identified with rival blocs and nations, though less so than a few years ago. Agreed objectives in the macroeconomic realm do not extend beyond the modest accomplishments in the monetary and financial fields. I hesitate to project into the future the evidence of increasingly shared military-diplomatic and conflict management objectives expressed by the U.S.-Soviet détente on arms control.
My conclusions on the possibilities of incremental change among international economic institutions and practices were greatly influenced by the material and the argument developed by Robert L. Rothstein, "Reform and Resistance in the International System: The Limits and Possibilities of Incremental Change" (Paper presented at the International Studies Association meeting, March 1986).
But the feedback covers a short time span and is experienced as discrete units or slices, "as separate and distinct actors, palpable properties and discontinuous events."[10]John Gerard Ruggie, "Social Time and International Policy," in Persistent Patterns and Emerging Structures in a Waning Century, ed. Margaret Karns (New York: Praeger, 1986), 215. This essay is a major contribution to the conceptualization of "political time" as something more than mere duration. It underlies much of the remaining argument in this chapter.
Under conditions of social turbulence, organizations grow incoherently, almost malignantly. The characteristics of positive feedback noted for incremental growth apply here as well, with a vengeance. We
now witness active conflict among several rival world-order ideologies. Each ideology advances demands that suggest a new task environment for the organization. Although each set of demands may be hierarchically ordered and contain logically nested problem sets, once several of these sets are simultaneously adopted as the organization's program, they lose whatever coherence they had enjoyed originally. There is no single dominant coalition. The organization is run by coalitions whose makeup differs from issue to issue. No consensus on the task domain can develop because the members have no agreed criteria for evaluating the program. Many groups of experts compete for attention—no single body of knowledge reigns supreme and no single set of interests shapes collective preferences.
The Learning Model: Description Plus
The model stipulates that decisive interventions are needed to deal with a persistent problem in public policy and that a decisive intervention should make use of any available body of expert-generated knowledge. Expert-generated knowledge tends to become consensual among all relevant actors; the clashing political objectives of actors can find a basis for reconciliation, or redefinition, by making use of it. Actors are in a position to reconceptualize the problem they are trying to solve in terms of more complexly nested sets. Inside the organization this cognitive reordering comes about because the two most important world-order ideologies may find a compromise once each sponsoring coalition realizes that it cannot defeat the other and yet must coexist in the same small world. In effect, the regime of which the organization is an executing agent comes to be ruled by a coalition of two key antagonistic coalitions.
Learning to manage interdependence occupies a slightly different epistemological position than that occupied by the models of adaptation. It is analytical and projective, based in part on what the observer believes about the forces propelling the actors to act as they do, not on what most actors perceive. It is based on a very different notion of social time than is true of the two models of adaptation.
Actors would have no problem in seeing themselves as animating the two models of adaptation and in appreciating that efforts to improve
their performance have to do with the unintended and unanticipated consequences of (possibly ill-informed) earlier choices. They would also grant their decisions are made in the context of a short time frame, concerned almost exclusively with immediate problems and solutions, a time frame in which slices of action are "incrementally" added to older slices without concern over the coherence of the ensemble.
A more complex conception of social time, however, is involved in animating the managed-interdependence model, i.e., "conjunctural" and "secular" notions of time. These conceptions of time may be too abstract to be readily graspable by practitioners.[11]
Occasionally, actors with a sweeping vision can and do follow the arguments of academic observers commenting on their doings, though the common experience of students of international organizations is to have their work dismissed as "overly theoretical" by the practitioners. How do we interpret the instances of practitioners who make it their business to innovate dramatically, to force their colleagues to see the world in a different perspective and time frame, people like Albert Thomas, Jean Monnet, Maurice Strong, Robert McNamara, and Raul Prebisch? They were able to draw on bodies of expert knowledge and so present it as to fit their personal ideologies and also to meet the political demands of their colleagues. Often such people have a distinct notion of secular time, of historic breakpoints of which they see themselves as exponents and agents. In short, they effectively combine the roles of politician and prophet. More commonly we encounter the prophet whose notion of secular time is his private dogma despite his belief that the message is of universal import. Among ecoholists such prophets have become commonplace. See, for instance, William Irwin Thompson, ed., Gaia: A Way of Knowing, Political Implications of the New Biology (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 1987). Executive heads of major U.N. agencies who stressed the prophetic over the political roles include Julian Huxley (UNESCO), John Boyd Orr (FAO), Brock Chisholm (WHO), and Dag Hammarskjöld during the last two years of his tenure at the United Nations. See Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1964), 119-25.
My inclusion of these properties in the description of the model, therefore, gives it an analytic property that still keeps it value-neutral (if the conceptions of social time are generally acceptable) but also pushes it in the direction of a pattern that derives its persuasiveness from the observer's personal values. "A conjunctural time frame depicts the basic units of time as cycles or similar configurations of temporal movement. Here, the corresponding view of the socially relevant universe focuses attention on the processes underlying actors, properties, and events."[12]Ruggie, "Social Time," 215; emphasis mine.
"Personal values can give rise to a still more abstract notion of time:Secular time is removed still further from everyday experience…. Climatologists delineate little and big ice ages, and ecologists make reference to biotic regimes. In each case, the frame of reference is a structural arrangement that governs the functioning of some system within certain boundary conditions. Secular time is measured by change in those structures: once they are transformed beyond the boundary conditions , a new historical era, climatological age, or ecological regime is said to come into existence.[13]
Ibid., emphasis mine.
When I describe the efforts of the World Bank and UNEP to redefine their programs, I am in effect using the notions of conjunctural and secular time to explain the difference between the older and the revised programs. To that extent I am entitled to use the term "learning" as a value-neutral descriptor. Now, however, I am setting the scene for claiming that the modest effort to design better international organizations must respect my argument that conjunctural and secular time are "better" than incremental time. My argument, in becoming
normative, therefore jettisons the term learning and now talks about cognitive evolution.
Cognitive Evolution
My discussion of an improved design for international organizations involves me in judgments about the direction of historical trends, in the assignment of historical roles to types of actors, in a patterning of institutional forces that cannot be directly culled from the reading of the historical record. As a designer, I am prescribing a mode of behavior—learning to manage interdependence—that has not yet been successfully institutionalized anywhere, though the prescriptions offered remain faithful to what I believe to be the givens of human affairs.
In the first eight chapters of this essay I made no claim to see history moving toward greater complexity among things, causes, and effects. I made no claim that the revaluation of programs and the renesting of problem sets must result in cognitively more complex nests, that our understanding of connections always moves from the simple to the complex. In the first eight chapters the argument was value-neutral because the heuristic of complexity was treated as one possibility, not a dominant trend. Readers of any ideological persuasion, believers in any conceivable utopia, can accept any treatment of change as applicable and perhaps even as instructive because I did not specify any particular direction in historical development, and because I saw no inevitable march toward a conceptualization of problems that approximates a nondecomposable system.
Now, however, I do make exactly these claims. I am persuaded that human endeavors, roughly after 1600, acquired a qualitatively new content as public policy and collective public choice gradually became the means for asserting society's control over nature. The invention of analytic methods and the discoveries about nature made it possible to declare humankind's independence from nature (and from God, many thought) by taking a direct hand in changing the quality of human life on earth. It is only after 1600 that collective decisions intended to improve health, wealth, welfare, and peace became really practical. It took another two hundred years before they grew commonplace.
As a result, humankind was able to see causal connections among diverse phenomena that until then had been experienced as disparate things, not as constituents of single systems. If ambitions for solving social and economic problems rose, so did the appreciation of the deep-seated connections among the factors that together result in what we recognized as "the problem." In short, with the invention of the scientific method and the development of the scientific spirit and of scientific institutions, the world of cognition expanded in such a way as to give us conceptualizations of cause-and-effect patterns that approximate the idea of a nondecomposable system. When pushed far and deeply enough, everything is connected to everything else. The history of human consciousness—with its great breakpoints in the late Renaissance and in the twentieth century—reflects and expresses this trend. The recognition of large systems also gave rise to the hubris from which we have suffered ever since: if we understand better how things are connected, we ought to be able to control them better too. International organizations are expressions of the same hubris. The appreciation of complexity fuels the hope that we can design ourselves into greater health, wealth, and happiness. Yet we also know, as a result of the same history of human consciousness, that the amount of suffering, threat, and death attributable to the modern cognitive revolution—through its consequences in technology and human organizational skills—is staggering. International organizations are among the instruments designed by humankind to improve the trade-off between the benign and the malign consequences of increasing complexity. The acceptance of complexity and the common desire to master and exploit it are even the driving forces behind such relatively ineffective organizational behaviors as those summed up in the turbulent non-growth model.
But how helpful to human happiness is it to know that things are more complex than they used to be? Recall our discussion of Karl Deutsch's hierarchy of human purposes relevant to informed decision making—the hierarchy that began with an automated antimissile battery and ended with a program for world peace. In order to be able to use the battery without accidentally triggering a nuclear war, it was found necessary to program the entire system of action as if world
peace were to be assured forever. Recognizing that one is enmeshed in a nondecomposable system may not be helpful at all.
For Herbert Simon this is fortunate. Going the entire Deutschian sequence would lead to a recognition that everything bearing on peace or prosperity is linked to everything else in the world. Seeking the fullest possible explanation of a phenomenon as a precondition for action suggests that one must recognize and map every connection before one acts. It also implies that such connections must exist, if only we look hard enough. Put differently, the anticipation of finding such connections will lead a decision maker to conclude that he or she is enmeshed in a total, a nondecomposable, system, a situation of tight linkages among components that make the success of a minor move depend on fully understanding the consequences of that move on all other parts of the system. Learning to recognize and to live in a nondecomposable system thus turns out to be no boon at all because it forecloses action. Simon therefore prefers to live in decomposable systems in which piecemeal action aimed at something less than optimal outcomes is possible. Most of us would agree. If errors are made in such a system, at least the entire construct will not be destroyed. For Simon, then, learning means altering institutions so that they encourage the making of "weak altruistic" decisions, choices that enable us to defer the immediate gratification of our interests in order to see first how they effect others, and therefore us, when we are demonstrably enmeshed in a linked system of some kind.[14]
Herbert A. Simon, "Rationality in Psychology and Economics," in Rational Choice, ed. Robin M. Hogarth and Melvin W. Reder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). The discussion of Deutsch is in chap. 2.
My combining of complexity with decomposability requires a special justification. The two need not be conflated. In principle, it is possible to see simple systems of causation that are not decomposable by their very nature; it is also possible to have complex systems that are fully decomposable. Complexity usually refers to the number of nodes in a system of interacting parts; decomposability refers to the possibility of disconnecting causal arrows linking the nodes without causing the breakdown of the entire system.
My argument that complexity implies nondecomposability but ought to lead to near nondecomposability is based on the stipulation that underlies my treatment of knowledge: all knowledge is socially constructed. As long as we do not know what the final truth or the real reality looks like, any statement about a cause-effect chain is provisional and biased by the ideological filters worn by all actors. Actors tend to see complex causal chains as if they also constituted nondecomposable systems (problem sets). They must be shown that their problem can be solved part by part; near nondecomposability must be asserted. The test of the truth, or the reality, of this cognitive act of decomposition is whether the problem is in fact solved (or at least made manageable) without causing the breakdown of the entire system of causation suspected to be operative. If decomposition fails to bring the anticipated improvement, it is possible that cognitive problem solving has run up against physical or material (noncognitive) limits. The resulting image of reality, then, is no longer a "constructed" one.
Causal systems rendered as "block recursive hierarchies" may have the properties claimed for the problem sets I am analyzing. Such hierarchies are made up of linked causal chains, but the various causal sets are arranged in hierarchies such that "higher" blocks subsume one or more "lower" ones. The entire array of blocks constitutes a nested system of causal connections. Whether any of the blocks are separable from the entire array in terms of problem solving depends on the length of the feedbacks among the blocks and the certainty of actor belief in the entire system. It is reasonable to think of the entire array as a system that is nondecomposable in principle; but since the actors are not sure of this (or, at least, they are not sure when and where they will run into the material limits the system implies), opportunities of disaggregation exist that can take the form of separating out blocks. Environmental protection policy that rejects extreme ecological claims is an example of this. (I am grateful to Jeffrey Hart for helping with this formulation.)
That kind of learning is what I prefer to call cognitive evolution.To evolve cognitively requires the ability to change one's behavior by reconceptualizing the world of organizational action in a more holistic, more interconnected manner after first disaggregating a causal schema found to be unsatisfactory. The recognition of a more complexly linked scheme with more parts than the original one, however, must then be followed by the attempt to disaggregate the whole in order to make organizational action possible. In other words, cognitive evolution encompasses the ability to compose and then decompose a nested problem set , provided that the consensual knowledge of the moment suggests that the resulting causal scheme is better than the previous one. Cognitive evolution means the ability to make choices intended to produce a "nearly nondecomposable" system of coupled parts.
This still would not be a normative judgment if I did not also hold that seeing things more complexly is a superior way of seeing. But because I also see things as properly being interpreted in more complex ways, and systems as really being more tightly coupled, and policies as accurately reflecting this state of affairs, I conclude that the new cognitive awareness is superior to its predecessors. Yet my judgment is certainly not shared by all, nor are its consequences seen as benign by everybody. I cannot be sure that I am right, though I prefer to think I am. Hence my argument becomes normative.
It is therefore possible for me to argue that the successful reform of international organization is a step in the moral evolution of the human species. I can make this argument without offering a specific set of values I want to strengthen, without announcing a discrete set of norms whose institutionalization I would hold to constitute moral progress.
Most commentators on international politics link the achievement of their personal utopias to the improvement of international organizations; they have specific values in mind. For them, progress is synonymous with the more consistent achievement of the particular values they cherish, whether these be equality among persons or among nations, the political rights associated with democracy or the economic rights cherished by communists, the subordination of economic development to ecological constraints or the surmounting of the same constraints through faith in the diffusion of advanced technologies. Progress is defined by the degree to which the ecoholistic, the liberal, or the socialist millennium is approached.[15]
For examples of substantive definitions of moral progress via reformed international organizations, see the chapters by Richard Falk, Elizabeth Mann Borgese, Johan Galtung, and Bert Röling in Global Planning and Resource Management, ed. Antony J. Dolman (New York: Pergamon, 1980). The pieces by Silviu Brucan, Arvid Pardo, and Harlan Cleveland illustrate what I mean by "procedural definitions" of progress.
To persist in a substantive (and therefore controversial and conflictual) definition of moral progress is to assure its nonattainment in international politics.Moral progress, if it is to be attained by means associated with international organizations, must be defined in procedural terms. Progress means being able to appreciate the lessons associated with more holistic problem sets, to be rendered nearly nondecomposable in order to become the proper subject for organizational action. Accepting this lesson means using proper analytic and bargaining procedures, confronting a problem with tolerance and the willingness to explore compromise. Above all, it means abandoning dogmatic conceptions and nestings of the set and being willing to experiment with alternative
ways of nesting. How would a designer in agreement with my argument proceed to advise his clients?
How to Manage Interdependence Better
Cooperation requires minimal consensus.
Satisfaction rests upon minimal contentment.
Wealth arises from minimal affluence.
Goals merit minimal faith.
Improvement depends on minimum consistency.
Wisdom demands minimal rationality.[16]Bo Hedberg, "How Organizations Learn and Unlearn," in Handbook of Organizational Design, vol. 1, ed. Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 22.
A designer may want to reduce an organization's reliance on sociocultural rationality beliefs, particularly during periods of problem solving, planning, or strategy forming. Technologies of foolishness address this goal. These processes treat data as theory, history as an enemy, and incongruities as opportunities. In these processes standard connections between data and conclusions are deliberately ignored and prior beliefs are explicitly challenged. (Lee S. Sproul, "Beliefs in Organizations," ibid., vol. 2, 218)
The notion of a "technology of foolishness" was invented by James G. March. See James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976).
E.F. Schumacher used to write of Buddhist economics; the writer of these maxims for designers must have been thinking of Zen organization theory. The maxims are addressed to the counterculture—to those who despair of habit and wish to start the world anew. The writer advances an ideology, though the purpose of designing new international organizations is to span ideologies, to combine them. These maxims celebrate irrationality, spontaneity, and improvization; they offer disdain for the overly rational but rotten past. Our task calls for using all the rationality we can muster to decide how to aggregate and recompose parts into wholes before we decompose them again into smaller wholes that can feasibly be implemented as programs.
Why Design Better International Organizations? Purposes, Possibilities, and Limits
The deliberate purpose underlying our desire to design is to help international organizations to evolve. Ordinarily, when theorists of management speak of organizational learning they intend the organization to be the beneficiary of the lore they offer. The purpose of learning, usually, is to promote the welfare of the organization, its ability to survive and to prosper. Learning really means to adapt successfully. Things are different in our universe. The purpose of learning is to enhance the welfare of the organization's members—individuals as well as collectivities. The welfare of the organization as such is a matter of total indifference because the organization is only an instrument for increasing the welfare of people and nations, no more and no
less. Member nations, in the form of bureaucracies active in the organization, are to acquire the skill to reorder problem sets. I reiterate that the reordering of problem sets and solutions does not mean the programming of a particular solution, the realization of a preset value. A better-designed organization is not an organization that realizes one's preferred ideology; it is an organization that can "think" more abstractly than in some previous iteration and can act more holistically.[17]
There is a theoretical argument to be made against designing so as to make the organization itself into a nearly nondecomposable system. My argument has been that what is being sought is a program based on a nearly nondecomposable problem set; I have not argued that this also requires an organization whose internal arrangements conform to the same principle. Lee Metcalfe, however, does offer such argument in questioning the advantages, in some instances, of loosely coupled organizations. He feels that loose coupling militates against serious long-range planning and therefore, at best, aids in short-run adaptation. It may be good for the organization, but not necessarily for its clients and supporters. See his "Designing Precarious Partnerships," in Nystrom and Starbuck, Handbook, vol. 1, 509-10.
If we desire such an organization, we need to talk about administrative arrangements and personnel practices, about hierarchies and coordination patterns, and about the sequence requisite for the improved use of consensual knowledge.New theories about the causes and solutions of whatever phenomenon is associated with "the problem" come first; the diffusion and advocacy of a theory demand the presence of a suitable epistemic community. Next, the experts committed to applying "their" knowledge to the solution of a policy problem seek consensus with other experts and an appropriate political audience. The sequence cannot get under way unless a group of political leaders is found and persuaded to relate the new (and more abstract) theory to an ambitious set of goals. The new theory must be experienced as a heuristic for explaining and simplifying complexity and must seem to resolve uncertainty. To the extent that such theories become consensual, politicians are weaned away from blaming their failures on recalcitrant allies, disloyal underlings, or malicious antagonists. Once the marriage of new theory and new political objectives has been consummated, joint efforts to make use of the nuptials for improved human welfare can proceed to more holistic decision making, substantive issue linkage, commensurable styles of bargaining, and innovatively nested problem sets.[18]
Personnel recruitment, budgeting, leadership, administrative intrusion, the role of nongovernmental groups, and the presence of experts do vary with learning as opposed to adaptation. We know from chapter 7 which of these is most frequently associated with the learning model. But we also know from chapter 8 that no overwhelmingly strong case can be made that only certain of these descriptive characteristics can be associated with successful learning. Thus, it is true that program budgeting is more consistent with cognitive evolution than budgeting by logrolling; but it cannot be claimed that logrolling must be absolutely banned in evolving organizations. Staffing by merit alone is best for cognitive evolution; but that doesn't mean that all practices that ignore merit are totally incompatible with it.
The lack of credible global efforts at macroeconomic coordination is an illustration of the distance that would still have to be covered in order to arrive at a better nesting of economic issues. I shall now make a case for a scenario of macroeconomic interconnectedness that approximates a nearly nondecomposable set and is consistent with a conjunctural view of social time.
I begin with a description of the present arrangements, concentrating on trade, monetary and financial relations, and foreign aid, but neglecting environmental, resource, communications, and public
health issues. The current coordination of programs between the regional development banks, the World Bank, and the IMF—while more extensive than ever before—cover only the relationship between domestic economic growth, indebtedness, and debt relief through re-scheduling and new lending. They do so on a country-by-country basis, not according to global calculations of economic health. They respect the demographic and resource potentials of client countries as separate entities, not their present and future positions in a system of relations. Trade and investment transactions among Third World countries are the concern of UNCTAD and UNIDO, which are hardly on speaking terms with the financial organizations. The technical assistance that must accompany new investment in order to result in growth is handled also on a country-by-country basis bilaterally and by UNDP, quite without systematic reference to overall global concerns.
Financial relations between the industrialized countries and the Third World are the business of the IMF and of consortia of creditor nations and private banks. It is unclear whether their decisions are shaped by detailed and systematic forecasts of the world economy as it must impinge on domestic growth. Trade between the Third World and the industrialized countries, of obvious relevance to the future economic health of both, is handled piecemeal by GATT and the European Community in the form of various exceptions to the rules of reciprocity and nondiscrimination, such as the granting of preferences to imports from Third World countries and subsidizing export earnings. But not all Third World countries belong to the GATT or the Lomé system. Nor are the trade rules linked to the arrangements for investment and monetary stability.
Agricultural trade and production, finally, do not fit into any of these arrangements. Trade in agricultural commodities, when not subject to a commodity agreement, is handled bilaterally without systematic reference to any of the other components of economic well-being. Aid to agricultural productivity is handled by FAO and IFAD and bilaterally, often in conjunction with World Bank programs, but without reference to future monetary stability or monetary tensions. All of these activities are carried out on a country-by-country basis. Only in the calculation of food shortages and the need to remedy them with food aid do global calculations enter the picture decisively.
Things are only slightly different if we focus on the developed countries. Trade relations among them (with the current exception of most of the Soviet bloc) are in principle subject to the GATT, though the exceptions to those rules are becoming almost as numerous as the amount of trade covered by them. Yet the GATT rules do not address monetary stability, investment flows, technology transfers, and debt relief. Trade goes forward in its own niche. Monetary relations and overall growth policies in relation to trade are discussed regularly and studied consistently by the industrialized-capitalist countries, in OECD, and in the annual economic summits. These consultations and the coordinated policies to which they sometimes lead, however, are designed to deal with intra-OECD economic relations, not with the global system. Yet these decisions obviously have important consequences for Third and Second world countries that trade with the industrialized-capitalist world and expect investments to flow in. In short, the pattern of northern economic coordination tends to neglect the effect of these measures on the global economy. From the vantage point of a designer of organizations capable of evolving cognitively, could matters be improved?
Before we answer in the affirmative, let us consider a few complications. Several regimes, which vary in internal coherence, authority, and legitimacy, coexist in this vital area of macroeconomic coordination. Some are housed in single organizations; most use several different ones whose activities are not systematically coordinated. These regimes are not nested within a single overarching macroeconomic hierarchy of theoretically informed demands and objectives. Nor are they well nested when examined individually. Only the World Bank—IMF group comes off reasonably well. Not that a holistic nesting was attempted and then successfully disaggregated into a nearly nondecomposable system. No such effort was made since 1950. Not even the trade regime is nested in such a fashion that member states can make analytic decisions about specific types of goods by deducing them from an agreed hierarchy of concerns, norms, and rules. If the monetary regime once contained such a hierarchy, it no longer does. There is no trace of superordinate nesting between the concerns of the trade and monetary regimes. Under these circumstances there can be no consensual definition and redefinition of problems in the organizations charged with implementing the regime rules. The organizations
are the helpless victims of the poor nesting of concerns in the regimes they serve.
Good nesting assumes the existence of consensual knowledge among economists. Such consensual knowledge could then be put to use in ordering and ranking the economic welfare goals of governments—goals that are clearly becoming increasingly interconnected and dynamic. As long as these goals are debated in the absence of consensual knowledge, we witness the unresolved confrontation among classical liberals, defenders of managed liberalism, and those who want to end Third World dependence. Transideological dialogue becomes possible only when knowledge about macroeconomic issues becomes more consensual. A better design for action cannot be devised until we get a consensus about the need for an overarching regime.
There are many kinds of regimes, each reflecting a different type and intensity of state demand.[19]
Examples of pooling, aiding, coordinating, and regulatory regimes are as follows:
Pooling: meteorological and environmental intelligence (WMO, UNEP); intelligence relating to activities of multinational firms and technology diffusion (UNCTC, UNCTAD, UNIDO); famine and epidemiological intelligence (FAO, WHO).
Aiding: everything relating to technical assistance for economic development and the flow of public funds for development (UNDP, World Bank, regional development banks).
Coordination: monetary policy (IMF, OECD, Seven-Power summits; industrial innovation that considers environmental concerns, social stability and economic growth (OECD).
Regulation: trade (GATT); disease control (WHO); environmental protection (OECD, parts of the UNEP); armed conflict (U.N.); telecommunications (ITU).
Some, perhaps most of them, merely pool the information that states need in order to act more effectively. Such regimes are evidence of a demand for more effective national action. Many regimes within the U.N. family aid states to implement tasks they are unable to accomplish by themselves, although the fundamental purpose remains enabling the aid-receiving state to be more effective and, eventually, perhaps, more autonomous. Coordination is a more ambitious regime responsibility. Here states seek to negotiate agreements on how they should act individually in order to bring about some generally desired future state of affairs. Implementation remains in state hands.None of the state demands that call for such regimes calls for rule-making and conflict-resolving activities. The most ambitious type of regime aims at regulating some aspect of state behavior. Regulation implies that specific rules of conduct are agreed to and that institutions for resolving conflict over the rules be set up. As far as rule making and conflict resolution are concerned, regulation takes place in the organization; but the implementation of the rules usually remains the responsibility of the member states. In very exceptional cases the organization has the power to implement directly; but if that happens, we have evidence that the members have in effect decided to integrate into a large entity rather than to continue to maneuver between autonomy and interdependence.[20]
That is why the study of regional integration is really a pursuit informed by theoretical and practical concerns quite different from the study of regimes and organizations. In efforts at regional integration, on the one hand, states have conceded that retaining sovereignty is less important than maximizing gains (or minimizing losses) from interdependence. On the other hand, the EC is the only case illustrating the reality of this event; see n. 22 for a discussion of failures of organizations and regimes attempting the same objectives among Third World countries.
The content of state demands determines which kind of regime is chosen, and that choice determines how the corresponding organizations are to be designed. If states expect to be able to be safe and wealthy without arriving at common rules of behavior, they will not opt for a regulatory regime. If they believe in the virtue of self-regulating free markets, they will not bother with a coordinating regime either. If the management of a resource is to be preferred over maximum exploitation in a prisoner's dilemma type of situation, then national control is preferable to the creation of any regime. But whenever claims for damages trigger the need for an agreed mechanism to resolve conflict, a regulatory regime is needed.[21]
For illustrations and elaborations on this theme, see Per Magnus Wijkman, "Managing the Global Concerns," International Organization 36 (Summer 1982): 511-36.
Designers can certainly explain these large options and correlates to their clients, but since the designers are unable to influence the underlying demands themselves, all they can do is to seek to fit the form of the organization to the needs encompassed in the desired regime.Being "embedded" in a regime means that the possibility of designing better organizations is seriously constrained. These constraints may or may not fit the ideas of rationalistic designers informed by microeconomic criteria, but they are certain to conform to the more generous rationality of the satisficer, a rationality that easily admits that habit, routine, and precedent may also contain rational elements by which decision makers who fear uncertainty choose to live. If decision makers motivated to break with parts of the past recognize the constraints as well as the opportunities, a would-be designer still has a window of opportunity. But that window is likely to be too narrow to encourage great expectations.[22]
Regional organizations in the Third World do not seem to pass any test of successfully fitting into regimes. We note in chapter 8 that very few regional organizations have managed to escape turbulent nongrowth, and that those that attempted to revalue themselves did not succeed. Repeated efforts in Latin America and Africa to create regional regimes for the attainment of antidependency goals have come to little. In the cases of the Caribbean, Andean, and Central American common markets, the member states reclaimed much of the autonomy they had relinquished earlier. In Africa, the member states never effectively yielded autonomy despite their agreement to do so. Instead, regional efforts were pooled to increase the members' bargaining strength in encounters with the industrialized world, via SELA in Latin America and via successive Lomé agreements in Africa. It remains to be seen whether the modest pooling arrangements of South and Southeast Asia and southern Africa will do any better.
The lesson is clear. Members of regional arrangements in the Third World have very little to offer one another. The factors that cause the turbulence engulfing these countries are not amenable to improvement through regional cooperation. Interdependencies within the regions are extremely patchy, with few obvious areas of symmetrical, mutual, and reciprocal dependence. Interdependencies run between the wealthy North and the poor South. Remedies for turbulence can be provided only by the North, not by regional partners in poverty. Third World states envisage improvement within the rules of a global regime fashioned to their demands. It is therefore no surprise that the demand for new and better global organizations has taken the lead over demands for new regional entities.
Let us assume that our designer has the great fortune to be able to design the U.N. system anew, subject only to the constraint that sovereignty be retained by the member states—that there is to be no hint of world government. What has our designer learned from the world's experience with international organizations since 1945 to enable him or her to do better than the designers of the post-World War II order? Is the cake of custom spongy enough to allow a design that permits the new organizations to keep on evolving?
Our designer ought to recall that at least two kinds of novel organizational forms were developed in the 1960s and 1970s that depart in significant ways from the familiar format of the United Nations system.
One is a kind of organization that is part of a pooling/aiding regime among developing countries, such as Sistema Economica Latinoamericana (SELA), ASEAN, and the South Asian and southern African development organizations discussed in chapter 8. The characteristic feature of these organizations is that they offer members participation to their programs à la carte . States choose to participate in pieces of program to the extent that the piece relates to their national priorities; their financial obligation is restricted to the extent of their participation. Concomitantly, a state's influence varies with the number of projects it chooses to join. Much of what was said earlier about dominant coalitions, task domains, and task environments, therefore, ceases to apply. Put differently, the characteristics of turbulent non-growth are now institutionalized. Should this condition be considered permanent and should U.N. specialized agencies be systematically redesigned according to its logic?
The other institutional innovation involves the relaxation of the distinction between public and private, governmental and nongovernmental participation. The history and constitution of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature exemplify the point. UNEP's activities, in part, allow for the same relaxation, as well as for the principle of selective participation. The symbiotic ties between UNESCO and the International Council of Scientific Unions illustrate this mode of operation. The human rights program of the United Nations depends for much of its efficacy on the special role of nongovernmental groups. Obviously, the role of experts and of epistemic communities is enhanced as a result of this format. Is it conceivable that this formula could find acceptance in the World Bank, IMF, GATT, and the U.N. Security Council?
Maxims for Designers: What Ought Organization be able to do?
Answers to these questions are far from obvious. I intend to help our designer by enunciating a few maxims that underlie any detailed effort to reform international organizations. These maxims have to do with respect for past patterns of behavior and with the importance of secular time, with the minimization of management strategies that rely
on rules and hierarchies, and with the maximization of boundary-spanning roles. The maxims about habit and social time are logically prior to the other injunctions. Unless these maxims are observed, the advice on management strategies and rules will not work.
Maxim 1 . Do not seek to rationalize organizations that suffer from turbulent nongrowth or net decline by fundamental constitutional revision. This piece of advice contradicts a principle that urges the superiority of complete innovation in organizational design over adaptive tinkering. Hannan and Freeman argue that organizations that are merely reformed do not usually prosper, that failing organizations ought to be replaced with brand-new ones. On quasi-evolutionary grounds, they argue that organizational inertia favors survival; if an organization fails despite inertia, then experimenting with a new design is better than shoring up the discredited one.[23]
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change," American Sociological Review 49 (April 1984): 159-61. They also argue that failure and death rates are higher in organizations subjected to frequent efforts to change the design because such efforts never manage to stay ahead of the even more rapid changes in the organization's environment. They think time is the enemy of reform but that it rewards persistent laggards.
It is impossible to follow this advice in international politics. States have their reasons for preferring organizations with a familiar design even if the organizations do not perform satisfactorily. To substitute a new organization for each one that fails condemns governments to perpetual bargaining over optimal patterns of cooperation. New missions and mandates, not generalized dissatisfaction, beget the need for new organizational designs. Therefore, comprehensive constitutional reform is a poor idea.
The more appropriate image is that of a "self-designing" organization; member states, nongovernmental groups, and secretariat units rearrange their mode of operation to suit a redefined task after they conclude that prior practices will not suffice.[24]
The implementation of the Jackson and Pearson reports by the United Nations in the early 1970s is an example of major changes without constitutional rationalization, as they resulted in the introduction in UNDP of country programming and the system of resident representatives. The introduction of the Alma Ata program in WHO and the creation of the World Food Program by FAO and the United Nations provide similar examples.
Self-design is not concerned with streamlining for its own sake, with the neat rationalization of procedures. Self-design tolerates administrative redundancies as long as they do not undo the purposes of the programs. Centralized control over changes implies politicization and high visibility of the process of change. It is likely to defeat the purpose of the change.The key word is "coordination." In eschewing core constitutional change, the designer should also resist an overt reordering and centralization of authority. Coordination implies modesty. The governance of UNEP and IAEA are illustrations of change through coordination.
UNEP shows us how governance by coordination dominates apparent, but deceptive, centralization. It was understood from its origins in 1972 that UNEP would be a "catalytic" agency; it would stimulate other agencies to mend their ways in proenvironmental programming, not administer its own program. UNEP, constitutionally, is ruled by a governing council that reports to the General Assembly. The council scrutinizes and approves the budget and thereby determines program priorities and even content. But there the centralized control ends. Implementation and specific tasks are handled by each program unit, which is a subsystem with its own national and nongovernmental networks. Relations among the major programs—Earthwatch, regional seas, Habitat, desertification, and technical assistance to member governments—are conceptually unified in that they all serve improved environmental management. But the unity results from negotiated coordination among activities, not from centralized imposition by the governing council or the director. Although, conceptually, the human environment is a nondecomposable system, programs to protect it are treated as if the ensemble were a nearly nondecomposable system. The nesting of separate problems is by no means hierarchical, nor are the problems tightly coupled in incremental or conjunctural time.
Coordination is a good deal less coherent in the cases of the nonproliferation regime administered by the IAEA, national nuclear export legislation, ad hoc international arrangements, and regional agreements establishing nuclear-free zones. The story begins with the Baruch Plan of 1946, which treated military and civilian nuclear energy as a nondecomposable set of problems to be governed through a centralized U.N. arrangement with enforcement powers; the arrangement was to have been under de facto U.S. control for a considerable period. The rejection of this scheme by the Soviet Union triggered a nuclear arms race and a very widespread desire to establish civilian nuclear power industries. The American Atoms-for-Peace proposal of the mid-1950s pointed out the danger of both and proposed a tight coupling of civilian and military nuclear activities by conditioning increased technical assistance for civilian reactor development on the acceptance of international safeguards against the diversion of nuclear materials to military uses. The IAEA was the result of this bargain, but
the Soviets would not seriously consider participating until after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the first bilateral arms control agreements with the United States had given rise to symmetrical antiproliferation motives in Moscow as well as in Washington. The nesting remained hierarchical in stressing nonproliferation for military reasons over the diffusion of the technology for civilian purposes—a priority that was institutionalized after 1970 in the enhanced safeguards included in the Nonproliferation Treaty.[25]
Lawrence Scheinman, The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Order (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1987), Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Nuclear Learning and US-Soviet Security Regimes," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 371-402.
Several things happened after 1976 to loosen the regime, to make it less coherent and altogether more nearly nondecomposable. The industrialized countries sought to tighten the rules by coordinating their national nuclear export policies under the London Suppliers Agreement. They also sought to wean the developing countries away from their fascination with nuclear energy by demonstrating the shortcomings and dangers of the technology and stressing other nonfossil energy sources. The developing countries, however, demanded much more IAEA-furnished technical assistance and urged that the agency guarantee security of nuclear fuel supplies in the future. Moreover, the Third World did not express great dismay when China, India, and Pakistan (with help from Saudi Arabia and Libya) acquired nuclear arms; but it objected vociferously when Israel (claiming that Iraq had circumvented IAEA safeguards) unilaterally enforced the nonproliferation rules while challenging the regime with its own military nuclear program. Only those countries definitely opposed to nuclear arms demurred by concluding nuclear-free-zone agreements in the South Pacific and in Latin America—agreements neither Argentina nor Brazil consented to accept. In short, as objectives diverged after the mid-1970s, the problem set became much more decomposable—so fragmented that governance by coordination became problematic.
Maxim 2 . Respect the differences between incremental, conjunctural, and secular time and remember that an organization able to keep on learning has to make programs that use all three simultaneously. There is no "final lesson" to be learned. Evolving cognitively is just another way of saying: "Be ready to reorder your causal universe quite often. Be ready to recognize failure and to analyze the reasons you failed."
"Learning to learn" is an oft-mentioned nostrum that is impossible to apply to international organizations (see chapter 2). It cannot be programmed into the routines of organizations because the assumptions are too rationalistic for the setting. Motivated as well as unmotivated misperceptions on the part of actors will lead to "errors" that are unavoidable as long as actors remain the practitioners of bounded rationality and as such have good reason to value the short run over a more distant time horizon. Although we can help them to recognize this hiatus by introducing the notion of social time, we are most unlikely to succeed in substituting microeconomic for bounded rationality.
In order to inculcate an appreciation of social time we must first enable people associated with international organizations to distinguish success from failure. In the case of international organizations. one might think that this is not much of a challenge; failure seems so evident and pervasive. The scorecard presented in chapter 8 should remind us that the impression of failure is misleading. The appreciation of a program's failure or success is, of course, often a function of the world-order ideology to which the evaluator subscribes: to an opponent of dependency, industrialization programs that ignored environmental concerns were often successful, while to the ecoholist they exemplified disaster. Moreover, it takes time to judge the success or failure of a program. Only the dramatic cases of conflict management, refugee assistance, and disaster relief permit instantaneous judgment. Learning to recognize success and failure in most programs requires sensitivity to different time dimensions, and these imply different sensitivities to normative consequences and empirical linkages among causes.
Let us look once more at the inability to achieve global macroeconomic coordination, of activities relating to trade, economic aid for industrial and agricultural development, technology diffusion, and environmental protection. The removal of restrictions on trade, the giving of special preferences to the exports of developing countries, debt relief for the same countries, and the encouragement of exchange rate stability all constitute activities in incremental time. Their duration is short and the socioeconomic nexus in which these actions are embedded is shallow. Concern is limited to how specific economic sectors
will fare; links among economic sectors are considered only in the short run, neglecting altogether such things as housing, education, social mobility, or environmental and resource protection. Essentially GATT, UNDP, UNCTAD, UNIDO, and IMF operate in incremental time.
But once efforts are made to link these activities to the future of the social structure and military potential of the participating countries, we are operating in conjunctural time. Duration is now much longer than next year's trade or payments balance or employment statistics. The socioeconomic nexus is broader, deeper, and more abstract. There is now awareness of how increases in trade or changes in investment patterns relate to the development of indigenous scientific and technological capacity, and how this in turn relates to educational and skill levels, universities and social mobility, and the nation's future position in the international pecking order. When the programs of FAO, UNCTAD, and UNIDO become subject to the kinds of perspectives stressed by the World Bank and by various efforts to stimulate the transfer of technologies, the threshold leading to conjunctural time is crossed.
Secular time is reached when the thinking covers half-centuries and longer, when the socioeconomic nexus includes all of the above plus a serious concern for society's relationship to nature. Secular time implies thinking about resource depletion and environmental limits, about how these aspects of nature facilitate and impede the social, economic, and political processes that constitute the core of attention in conjunctural time. No international agency today consistently observes secular time.
Which is the correct social time to apply in thinking, planning, and programming? The question is silly. All are relevant; all must be used. But they are already being used, the skeptic will respond. The point is that appropriate measures now go forward simultaneously without coordination , without carefully sequencing and adjusting steps (properly taken in different time frames) according to their net consequences in social time.
The consequences of this failure to coordinate cannot be described as merely implying more or less welfare. More than quantitative differences seen in a linear sense are involved. Temporal coordination also
implies a sophisticated analytic heuristic that allows us to see how single or related measures work themselves out differentially, depending on the time frame we choose.[26]
For additional examples, and for a demonstration of the analytic techniques available for rendering social time and applying it to the analysis of public policy problems, see F. Gregory Hayden, "Evolution of Time Constructs and Their Impact on Socioeconomic Planning," Journal of Economic Issues 21 (September 1987): 1281-1312.
And, finally, sensitivity to social time is also a normative sensitivity, an awareness that time concepts mean that various policies have different moral implications for different population groups. This sensitivity might then lead us to a new vision of what we mean by organizations.Technological revolution, along with holistic science, will continue to change temporal constructs and extend real time in use and in concept. The extension will be used for social-technical-environmental spacetime planning and coordination…. More and more, it is understood that local, regional, national, and supranational processes must be coordinated and controlled if humans are to solve problems. This will lead to system real time and beyond that to social time, where the events are not just sequenced by the system but the socio-technical-environmental system is determined by the conscious temporal concept of timeliness through discretionary social institutions.[27]
Ibid., 1306.
Maxim 3 . Minimize hierarchies and regulations in designing better international organizations. Since an awareness of social time implies a particularly sensitive response to various interdependencies, this awareness ought to be recognized in the way units of organizations and cognate organizations relate to each other. Coordination, in short, depends on how interdependence is "organized" among departments and units. The most common way of doing this involves hierarchical control from the top down. Top management decides what interdependence means and what measures of coordination are appropriate for producing effective programs. Staff are expected to follow the clues given from the top, expressed as regulations. The regulations governing life in the organization are the social technology for transmitting the "proper" view of interdependence and coordination downward; they are the mechanism for making sure that the views of the top become the modus operandi of the staff.
This procedure, no matter how appropriate in other organizations, is not the optimal one in international organizations. Hierarchies are most effective when departments are charged with similarly interdependent tasks, when there is a great deal of task homogeneity. But hierarchies become much less effective if this homogeneity cannot be
taken for granted and when the number of departments concerned is very great. In the U.N. system, however, there are many superficially similar departments that have overlapping task domains. In fact, they have very strongly developed ideas of their mandates, which they see as quite heterogeneous.
Instead, what ought to be stressed is feedback, interactive planning capacity, and conflict resolution through bargaining. Feedback takes the place of reliance on regulations and formal programs; it links all participating departments to each other and to intelligence about the effects of projects and activities; it makes self-monitoring an integral part of planning. March, Simon, and J. D. Thompson consider feedback "expensive in terms of managerial time." It probably is, but no more expensive than regulations and programs that are disregarded because staff consider them inapplicable. Interactive planning is "continuous … simultaneous at several levels and across departments; highly participatory; and comprehensive—it considers ends, means, resources, organization redesign and implementation. Interactive planning seeks to reduce uncertainty about the future by collaborative objective-setting processes. Planning becomes more a coordination than a control strategy since it is done by and with departments rather than for them."[28]
Joseph McCann and Jay R. Galbraith, "Interdepartmental Relations," in Nystrom and Starbuck, Handbook, vol. 2, 70-71; 73-74.
Obviously, there is no hierarchy available to impose decisions once dependence on regulations and programs is not an option; planning must rely on freely negotiated bargains among the participants as a means of resolving differences.Maxim 4 . Stress boundary-spanning roles. International organizations are deeply enmeshed with and dependent on their environments, a condition we must consider inescapable no matter which model describes the operation. Hence learning to do well must imply close enough relations with the environment to allow for feedback to operate while still leaving the organization a modicum of autonomy. Minimizing the importance of the boundary between the organization and its environment facilitates the flow of resources and of information into the entity. Personnel with skills and needs honed to the boundary-spanning purpose will be sought.[29]
Leslie L. Roos, Jr., and Frederick A. Starke, "Organizational Roles," in ibid., vol. 1, 290-308.
Special bureaucratic networks should be built among organizations occupying adjoining environmental space (among international organizations, betweenthem and national governments, and with nongovernmental organizations) and personnel ought to be trained to recognize and build networks.[30]
These roles and techniques are described by Noel M. Tichy, "Networks in Organizations," in ibid., vol. 2, 225-49.
The most important part of such a network is the "linking-pin organization," which has "extensive and overlapping ties to different parts of a network [and plays] the key role in integrating a population of organizations. Having ties to more than one action set or sub-system, linking-pin organizations are the modes through which a network is loosely jointed."[31]
Christer Jönsson, "Interorganization Theory and International Organizations," International Studies Quarterly 30 (March 1986): 42, quoting H. Aldrich and D. A. Whetten in Nystrom and Starbuck, Handbook, vol. 1, 390. The functioning of networks that span boundaries can just as easily impede both learning and adaptation. The powers and roles that constitute the network are quite neutral with respect to the purposes to which the network will be put and therefore cannot be uniformly interpreted by an observer as contributing to learning and to nothing else. The only way to avoid this design flaw is to make sure that networks function in accordance with what was said above about the learning of social time.
How to Operationalize the Maxims: Some Hints for Designers
How can these maxims be translated into routines that will give us nested problem sets of the right kind? It is all very well to show that actors must be sensitive to organizational failure before the roof comes crashing down and to tell actors to be conscious of the subtleties of social time if they want to spot failure early. But how does one make decision makers sensitive to social time? How can one sensitize them to the logic of path-dependent development and to the need for breaking the logic, to abandon the path, to choose a new one that will be less constraining?
Good nesting requires that actors, not merely observers, believe in the normative and practical superiority of nearly nondecomposable systems. Unless the actors realize that the attainment of their objectives is not possible without better nesting, a mere preaching of the dogma will achieve nothing. And actors will not accept the dogma unless they are led to the appropriate inferences by the recognition that the practices and social knowledge that provided guidance in the past are no longer adequate. There is little a designer can do to help beyond reminding actors that they must keep open the channels that permit transideological communication.
Therefore:
Regimes ought to be kept flexible in terms of informing principles. The dominant coalition should always be ready to compromise some of the principles and norms as it seeks to co-opt actual and potential antagonists.
Maintaining the possibility of compromise among principles and norms requires that equal flexibility be maintained with respect to rules and procedures. The authority of rules and procedures should never be an end in itself, but a means for arriving at more consensual principles and norms.
The staff of the organization should never be completely subservient to the dominant coalition. Staff beliefs should remain open to the possibility of interideological compromise.
The executive head should always be on the lookout for reconstituting the dominant coalition so as to increase transideological communication.
A hegemon should not impose the preferred ideology so as to foreclose the possibility of wider transideological communication.
A hegemon, or hegemonic coalition, should not profess an ideology so well nested and ordered as to foreclose the accommodation of potentially compatible opposing ideologies.
Designers can certainly explain why previous efforts at piecemeal action brought disappointing results. But unless their lectures are couched in consensual knowledge, they are unlikely to find an appreciative audience. One method for making bits of insight and information more theoretically consensual is to open up the decision-making routines and analytic procedures of international organizations to the scrutiny of those whose minds must be changed in order to redefine a problem in a more complex way. Increasing the transparency of decision processes is a necessary, though far from sufficient, step in encouraging a transideological dialogue. Regimes and their organizations become less threatening to the outsiders when their inner workings are better understood. Once understood and subjected to knowledgeable critique, the routines can then be revised to the satisfaction of the outsiders while accomplishing what the staff and the dominant coalition wish to do. Transparency does not guarantee successful and consensual redefinition of problems. But without it, no consensual redefinition seems possible.
By increasing the transparency of the decision process, some of the errors and misperceptions stemming from systematic bias can be diminished, if not eliminated. If a decision-making unit is subject to the
kinds of distorted perceptions and interpretations that cognitive psychologists study as unmotivated misperceptions, then the critiques and objections triggered by that transparency should also act as a corrective. Complaints of ineffective aid programs caused by incomplete data on implementation, caused in turn by the cognitive biases of the aid officials unwilling to listen to analysts with whom they disagree, could be stilled if an open review of implementation and follow-up routines were to take place in which national aid officials and nongovernmental experts were also permitted to participate. Increased transparency, especially about implementation, is likely to increase trust and respect for what is being attempted, to encourage understanding for lack of success, and to make international officials less defensive.
Stronger measures are required to reduce the force of motivated misperceptions—errors in judgment that are caused not by bias but by institutional practices and motives designed to protect the staff of an organization at the expense of more effective performance. We know that such behavior is often quite consistent with organizational adaptation. However, it is never consistent with the growing appreciation of causal and cognitive complexity. It is not clear that measures to increase the transparency of decision processes would make much difference in eliminating motivated error.
I therefore suggest that reformist designers insist on various novel modes of decision making referred to as multiple advocacy, planning and analysis by temporary teams, and rotating devil's advocates. The systematic participation of such units in decision making makes the survival of practices that defeat an organization's purpose much less likely. Multiple advocacy already exists in the political organs of international organization, some would say. How else would one characterize the cacophony of debate over policy? But true multiple advocacy calls for more than invective, distrust, and the attribution of malicious motives to one's antagonist: it demands systematic defense of a position by marshaling what knowledge is available. Multiple advocacy is the practice of making the best systematic case—data-based case—for an option within the policy-making confines of a bureaucracy in opposing an equally systematic case put forward by someone else in the same unit. Few international agencies make decisions according
to this scheme. Hearing the defender of a rival policy is not standard operating procedure, but it ought to be.
Multiple advocacy can be done by temporary teams of analysts. By making sure that the same person or unit does not become a specialist in multiple advocacy, nobody acquires a vested interest in a given position or style of analysis. Persons and units charged with the development of the preferred policy in one context are given the task o preparing the opposing position in the next iteration. Possibly, nobody then acquires a permanent commitment to any stance. If care is taken to perform multiple advocacy through the medium of temporary, mixed teams representing several organizations, the degree of commitment to a specific position is likely to be undermined.
Devil's advocacy is a technique whereby one person in a decision-making team is charged with representing the opposing side or an antagonistic interest. The participation of this devil's advocate in the decision-making effort is likely to flush out unspoken assumptions and undemonstrated causal connections. The inclusion of all of these innovative decision-making techniques in organizational routines would add up to a very considerable increase in the range of options considered and in the degree of transparency.
None of this amounts to serious advice about deliberately designing organizations that engage in permanent cognitive evolution. In the last analysis, observers and well-wishers of international organizations have very little to offer. There are powerful reasons for the sway of routine, just as there are good reasons for questioning habit. The people responsible for the flawed ways that we call the "crisis of multilateralism" are far from being either fools or knaves. We must admit this, or any attempt to prescribe novel ways of coordinating activities to usher in a more benign world is an act of ultimate hubris. Instead, we ought to look to a master of science fiction for a more playful and permissive view of evolution.
In his novel—set on the planet Solaris, which is dominated by a huge, sentient ocean—Stanislaw Lem describes an imperfect but evolving god. The ocean of Solaris evinces curiosity, cruelty, creativity, and detachment—qualities that baffle the scientists from Earth. The ocean appears to be a god still in his infancy, who plays at being
creative and curious without quite knowing why. He is "an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness." "For this god," says one scientist to another, "the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs…. Solaris could be the first phase of the despairing god. Perhaps its intelligence will grow enormously. All the contents of our Solarist libraries could be just a record of his teething troubles … and we will have been the baby's toys for a while."[32]
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961; New York: Basic Books, 1971), 205-6.
One can think about human progress in similar terms, as an open-ended groping for self-improvement, without a final goal, without a transcendent faith, but with frequent reverses and sporadic self-questioning about the trajectory of change. The very meaning of self-improvement will not stand still. Its content means one utopia for one generation. country, or group; it means quite another one for later generations. Progress is a childlike, groping god, not a purposeful master of the universe. It is difficult to have faith in such a deity. But the lack of faith should not prevent us from asking what makes progress happen.
Progress is a secular god who tolerates the things people, nations, and other large human collectivities do to themselves and to one another. Progress manifests itself more directly and forcefully when such collectivities pause to think about what they do, when they consider doing things differently in the future. Then they engage in what we usually call "learning."
Subject Index
A
Adaptation, 3 , 73 Fig. 2
and administration, 90
and authority, 92
and bargaining, 72 -73, 92
and budgeting, 90
and decision-making styles, 72 , 91
and decomposability, 93 -96
and determinism,
and environment, 29 -30
and error, 36
and error correction, 33 -34
and evolution, 33 ,
and experts, 90
and functionalism,
and habit-driven behavior, 45 , 169 -72
identification of, 71 -72
as incremental growth, 4 , 93
indicators of, 88 -92
and innovation, 37
and institutionalization, 86 , 92 , 104
and issue linkage, 72 , 91 -92
and knowledge, 72 , 91 , 102
and leadership, 91
vs. learning, 167 -69, 174 , 188 -89
and legitimacy, 92
and monitoring compliance, 90
and nongovernmental organizations, 91
occurrence of, 37 , 72
and organization theory,
and organizational culture,
and organizational design, 175
and personnel recruitment, 90 -91
and political goals, 91
and praxis,
and problem definition, 92 , 167
and redundancy, 124 -25
and regimes, 53 -54
and representation, 89
and revenue, 90
and secretariat autonomy, 89 -90
and setting, 4
and social time, 188 -89
and structuration,
and turbulence, 122 -23
as turbulent nongrowth, 4 , 93
and voting, 90
and world-order ideologies, 89
Administration: and adaptation, 90
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100 -101
and learning, 90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 131 , 133
and organizational decline, 90
and power, 64 Table 1, 67 , 69
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 116
Agent-structure problem,
Ambiguity, and decision making,
Antidependency, 66 Table 2
Arab-Israeli conflict,
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 157 , 159 , 160
Authority, 87 -88
and adaptation, 92
and incremental growth, 95 Table 5, 104
and learning, 92
and legitimacy, 87 -88
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 138
and monitoring compliance,
and organizational decline, 92
and turbulence, 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 95 Table 5, 121
Autonomy, organizational, 29 -30
B
Bargaining, 80 -83
and adaptation, 72 -73, 92
and coalitions, 82 , 83 , 103 -4
and cognitive styles,
and consensual knowledge, 82 -83, 96
and decision-making styles, 80 -83
and garbage can model,
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103 -4
and issue linkage, 76 , 78 -79, 80 -83
and knowledge, 172
and leadership, 71
and learning, 72 -73, 92 , 130
and managed interdependence, 95
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
Table 596, 130 , 136
and nesting, 72 -73, 83
and New International Economic Order, 81 -82
and organizational decline, 92
and organizational design, 195
and problem definition, 85 , 104
and turbulence, 110 , 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 119 -20
typology of, 83
and U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, 81 -82
and win-sets, 78 -79
Behavior, 4 , 70 -71
and budgeting, 64 Table 1
and incremental growth, 101 -2
and leadership, 64 Table 1, 70 , 71
and managed interdependence, 134 -35
and nongovernmental organizations, 64 Table 1, 70 -71
and personnel recruitment, 64 Table 1, 70
and turbulent nongrowth, 116 -18
and voting, 64 Table 1, 70
See also Habit-driven behavior
Block recursive hierarchies,
Boundary decisions, 60
Boundary maintenance, 30
Boundary-spanning networks,
Boundary-spanning roles, 207 -8
Bounded rationality: and decision making, 30 -33
and habit-driven behavior, 43
and international organizations, 55
Bretton Woods institutions, 149
Budgeting: and adaptation, 90
and behavior, 64 Table 1
and cognitive evolution,
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 101
and learning, 90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 134 , 161
and organizational decline, 90
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 109 , 117
Bureaucratic networks, 207 -8
C
Causality: and cognitive evolution, 191
and consensual knowledge, 30 -31
and learning, 24 , 128
and managed interdependence, 128
and turbulent nongrowth, 118
Causation: and cognitive approach, 9
and decision makers, 10
and game theory, 10
and scientific knowledge, 10
Coalitions,
and bargaining, 82 , 83 , 103 -4
and fragmented issue linkage, 78
and incremental growth, 97 -99
and international organizations, 18
and learning, 128 -29, 164 , 188
and managed interdependence, 128 -29, 135 -36
and organizational design, 18
and political goals, 103
and secretariat autonomy, 67
and turbulence, 111 -12
and turbulent nongrowth, 115 , 188
Cognitive approach, 9
Cognitive choice patterns, 38
Cognitive decision making,
Cognitive development,
Cognitive evolution, 190 -94,
and budgeting,
and causality, 191
and consensual knowledge, 192
and decomposability, 192
and international organizations, 191
and learning, 187
and nesting, 192
and organizational change, 174
and organizational design, 187 , 190 -94, 211 -12
and personnel recruitment,
and social time, 203
Cognitive styles,
Collaboration: and antidependency, 66 Table 2
and classical liberalism, 66 Table 2
and ecoholism, 66 Table 2
and interests, 2
and managed liberalism, 66 Table 2
and structuralism, 7
and world-order ideologies, 65 , 66 Table 2
Collective goods, and rational choice, 14
Commonwealth, and incremental growth, 160
Complexity, and decomposability,
Compliance, monitoring of. See Monitoring compliance
Conflict, within organizations, 56
Conflict management, and crisis of multilateralism,
Conflict resolution, and organizational design, 207
Consensual knowledge, 20 -23
and bargaining, 82 -83, 96
and causality, 30 -31
and cognitive evolution, 192
and cultural space,
and decision-making styles, 96
and decomposability, 96
defined, 21
and epistemic communities,
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
74
and fragmented issue linkage, 80
and ideology, 20 -21
and innovation, 30 -31, 37
and institutional constraints on, 38 -40
and institutionalization, 86
and issue linkage, 74 , 77 -78, 96
and learning, 130 , 188
and macroeconomic policy coordination, 197 -99
and managed interdependence, 96 , 130 , 135 , 162 -64
and nesting, 84 -85
and organizational design, 209
and political goals, 75
and problem definition, 96
and public policy, 22 -23
and regulation,
and scientific knowledge, 11 , 12 ,
and tactical issue linkage, 79 -80
and turbulence, 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 188
and United Nations,
and U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 5
and U.N. Environmental Program, 163 -64
and World Bank, 12 -13, 163 -64
Constitutional revision, 201
Coordination: and hierarchy, 206 -7
and interdependence, 206
and International Atomic Energy Agency, 202 -3
and organizational design, 201 -3
and social time, 205 -6
and U.N. Environmental Program, 202
Core technology, 15
Creativity cycle: and learning, 164 -67
and managed interdependence, 161
Crisis management: and incremental growth, 104
and institutionalization, 86
and turbulent nongrowth, 121
Cultural space,
Cybernetic decision making,
D
Debt crisis, 147 -48
Decision making: and ambiguity,
and bounded rationality, 30 -33
and cognitive choice patterns, 38
and error,
and International Monetary Fund,
and knowledge, 75 -76
and learning,
and organization theory,
and rationality,
and reciprocity, 39 ,
and structuralism, 8
types of, 59 -61
Decision-making styles, 76 Fig. 3
and adaptation, 72 , 91
and bargaining, 80 -83
and consensual knowledge, 96
and fragmented issue linkage, 78 , 80
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103
and institutionalization, 86
and issue linkage, 77
and learning, 72 , 91
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 96 , 135 -36, 137
and New International Economic Order, 119
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 209 -10
and substantive issue linkage, 77 -78, 80
and tactical issue linkage, 79 -80
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118 -19
Decomposability: and adaptation, 93 -96
and block-recursive hierarchies,
and Bretton Woods institutions, 149
and cognitive evolution, 192
and complexity,
and consensual knowledge, 96
and institutionalization, 137
and knowledge,
and learning, 165 -66
and managed interdependence, 96 , 129 , 131 , 136 -37, 162 -63
and nuclear nonproliferation regime, 203
and organizational design, 194 ,
and turbulent nongrowth, 120
and U.N. Environmental Program, 202
Dependency, and crisis of multilateralism, 180 -81
Determinism, and adaptation,
Domain consensus, 55
E
Ecoholism, 66 Table 2
and collaboration, 66 Table 2
and crisis of multilateralism, 181
and incremental growth, 106
Effectiveness, 26
Entropy, 166
Environment, 27 , 29 -30, 55 -56
Epistemic communities: 40 -46;
and consensual knowledge, 74
defined, 40 -41
and diffusion of scientific knowledge, 48 -49
and habit-driven behavior, 44 -46
and incremental growth, 93 , 100
and institutionalization, 174
and international organizations, 42
and knowledge, 74
and learning, 90 , 129 -30, 163 , 188
and managed
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
interdependence, 129 -30, 131 , 132
and nesting, 171 -72
and nongovernmental organizations, 70 -71,
and organizational design, 195
and paradigms,
and praxis,
and rational choice, 43 -44
and social science,
and substantive issue linkage, 77 -78, 80
and turbulence, 122
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 118 , 188
and world-order ideologies, 65
Error, 34 -35
and adaptation, 36
and decision making,
and learning, 37
and organizations, 35
and rationality, 35 -36
and social time, 204
Error correction: and adaptation, 33 -34
vs. learning, 26
Essentially contested concepts:
Evolution,
Experts: and issue linkage, 76 -77
and organizational design, 195
and turbulence, 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 118
Experts, status of: and adaptation, 90
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100
and learning, 90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 132
and organizational decline, 90
and setting, 64 Table 1, 65 , 67
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 116
F
Feedback, 207
Food and Agriculture Organization, 151 -52
Fragmented issue linkage, 78 , 80
Functionalism, 25 ,
G
Game theory, 10
Garbage can model, 123 -24
and bargaining,
and organizational agendas,
and turbulence, 123 -24,
Gulf War,
H
Habit-driven behavior: and adaptation, 45 , 169 -72
and epistemic communities, 44 -46
and evolution,
and institutions, 173
and knowledge, 170 -71
and learning, 44 -46,
and rational choice, 43 -45
and regimes, 173
and structuration,
Hierarchy, 206 -7
Human rights,
I
Idealism, 213 n1,
Ideological consensus, 63 , 64 Table 1
Ideology, 30
Implementation, and turbulence, 112
Incremental growth, 4 , 97 -108, 187
and administration, 94 Table 4, 100 -101
and authority, 95 Table 5, 104
and bargaining, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103 -4
and budgeting, 94 Table 4, 101
and coalitions, 97 -99
and Commonwealth, 160
conditions and limitations on, 104 -8
and consensual knowledge, 93
and crisis management, 104
and decision-making styles, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103
and ecoholism, 106
and epistemic communities, 93 , 100
and experts, 94 Table 4, 100
identification of, 99 -104
and institutionalization, 95 Table 5, 104 , 107
and International Labor Organization, 153 -54
and International Monetary Fund, 145 -47
and international organizations, 52 -53
and issue linkage, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103 -4
and knowledge, 95 Table 5, 98 -99 102 -3, 105
and leadership, 94 Table 4, 98 , 102
and learning, 127
and legitimacy, 95 Table 5, 104
and liberalism, 179 -80
vs. managed interdependence, 53
and monitoring compliance, 94 Table 4, 100
and nesting, 106 -7, 187
and nongovernmental organizations, 94 Table 4, 100 , 101 -2
and Organization of American States,
and organizational design,
and over adaptation, 107
and personnel recruitment, 94 Table 4, 98 , 101
and political goals, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103
and power, 100 -101
and problem definition, 93 , 95 Table 5, 97 , 98 , 104
and representation, 94 Table 4, 100
and revenue, 94 Table 4, 100
and scientific change, 106
and secretariat autonomy, 94 Table 4, 100
and setting, 99 -100
and social technology, 105
and social
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
time, 105 , 106 , 187 ,
and task domain, 105 -6, 187
and task environment, 97 , 105 , 106 , 187
and technological change, 106
and turbulence, 111
and United Nations, 5 , 114 ,
and voting, 94 Table 4, 101
and World Bank, 142
and World Health Organization, 138 -39
and world-order ideologies, 94 Table 4, 99 -100, 105 , 187
Innovation: and adaptation, 37
and cognitive development,
and consensual knowledge, 30 -31
and international organizations, 7 , 14 -15
and revolutionary upheaval,
Institutional change, 5 , 11
Institutional constraints, 38 -40
Institutional structure, 15
Institutionalization: and adaptation, 86 , 92 , 104
and consensual knowledge, 86
and crisis management, 86
and decision-making styles, 86
and decomposability, 137
defined, 85 -86
and incremental growth, 95 Table 5, 104 , 107
and knowledge, 104
and learning, 86 , 92
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 137 -38
and nesting, 104
and organizational decline, 92
and turbulence, 110 , 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 95 Table 5, 121
Institutions, vs. organizations, 173 , 174
Interactive planning capacity, 207
Interdependence: and coordination, 206
and functionalism,
and international organizations, 170 -71,
and learning, 128
management of, 194 -212
and regimes, 172
and regional integration,
and social time, 185 -86
and state sovereignty, 181 -86
and turbulence, 109 -10, 122 , 181
See also Managed interdependence
Interest definition, 7
Interests: and collaboration, 2
and game theory, 10
and knowledge 75 , 76 Fig. 3
and institutionalized norms, 12 -13
and power, 12 -13
and scientific knowledge, 11 , 12 -13
vs. values, 2
International Atomic Energy Agency, 150 , 202 -3
International economic policy negotiations, 84 -85
International Energy Agency, 159
International Labor Organization, 153 -54
International law, 121
International Monetary Fund: and decision-making,
and incremental growth, 145 -47
and learning, 145 -49, 146 Fig. 6
and turbulent nongrowth, 147
International organizations: and autonomy, 29 -30
and boundary decisions, 60
and boundary maintenance, 30
and bounded rationality, 55
and change,
and coalitions, 18
and cognitive evolution, 191
and core technology, 15
and decision making, 32 -33
and decision-making styles, 59 -61
design of, 6 , 18 -20, 177 -212
distribution of power in, 57 -59
and domain consensus, 55
and environment, 27 , 29 -30, 55 -56
and epistemic communities, 42
and evolution,
and functionalism,
and incremental growth, 52 -53
and innovation, 7 , 14 -15
and institutional structure, 15
and institutions, 173 , 174
and interdependence, 170 -71,
and interest definition, 7
and issue linkage, 4
and knowledge, 4
and learning, 26 , 54 -55, 204 ,
and macroeconomic policy coordination, 197 -99
and modes of behavior, 4
and nesting, 54
and operational decisions, 60
and organization theory,
political objectives of, 4
and power, 4
and problem definition, 3
and program evaluation, 56 -57
and programmatic decisions, 60
and progress, 193 -94
and rationality, 55
and rationing of services, 55 -56
and redundancy, 124 -25
and regimes, 53 -54, 172 -73, 178
and regime types,
and rule-creating decisions, 60
and rule-supervisory decisions, 60 -61
and satisficing, 28 -35, 56
and scientific
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
knowledge, 14 -15
self-design of, 201
self-evaluation by, 204
and setting, 4
and social technology, 56
and social time,
and structuralism, 8
and symbolic decisions, 59 -60
and task environment, 15 , 55
and technical rationality, 29 -30, 56 -57, 58
and turbulence, 111 -15, 122 -25, 174
and turbulent nongrowth, 52 -53
and value definition, 7
and world-order ideologies, 65 ,
Interorganizational coordination, 133 -34,
Issue linkage, 76 -80
and adaptation, 91 -92
and bargaining, 5 , 76 , 78 -79, 80 -83
and consensual knowledge, 74 , 77 -78, 96
and decision-making styles, 77 , 79 Fig. 4
defined, 76
and experts, 76 -77
fragmented, 78 , 80
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103 -4
and international organizations, 4
and knowledge, 172
and learning, 72 , 92 , 130
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 130 , 136
and nesting, 84 -85,
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 195
and political goals, 76
and problem definition, 104
substantive, 77 -78, 80
tactical, 77 , 79 -80
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 119
and win-sets, 78 -79
and World Bank,
K
Knowledge, 73 -74
and adaptation, 72 , 91 , 102
and bargaining, 172
and decision making, 75 -76
and decomposability,
and epistemic communities, 74
and habit-driven behavior, 170 -71
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 98 -99, 102 -3, 105
and institutionalization, 104
and interests, 75 , 76 Fig. 3
and issue linkage, 172
and leadership,
and learning, 72 , 91 , 172 , 188
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 135
and nesting, 172
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 180 , 195
and political goals, 103 , 169 -70
and turbulence, 110
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118 , 171
and World Bank,
L
Law of the Sea negotiations, 151
Leadership, 71 ,
and adaptation, 91
and behavior, 64 Table 1, 70 , 71
and discretionary power of, 57
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 98 , 102
and knowledge,
and leadership style, 71
and learning, 91
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 135 , 161 -62
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 209
and social time,
and technical rationality, 102
and turbulence, 122
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 117 -18
Learning, 3 , 36 -37, 73 Fig. 2, 127 -54,
vs. adaptation, 167 -69, 174 , 188 -89
and administration, 90
and authority, 92
and bargaining, 72 -73, 92 , 130
and boundary-spanning networks,
and budgeting, 90
and causality, 24 , 128
and coalitions, 128 -29, 164 , 188
and cognitive evolution, 187
and consensual knowledge, 130 , 188
and creativity cycle, 164 -67
and debt crisis, 147 -48
and decision-making, 32 ,
and decision-making styles, 72 , 91
and decomposability, 165 -66
defined, 23 -24
desirability of, 27
double vs. single loop,
and effectiveness, 26
and epistemic communities, 90 , 129 -30, 163
and error, 37
vs. error correction, 26 , 34
and evolution, 33
and experts, 90 , 188
and Food and Agriculture Organization, 151 -52
and founding of organizations, 164 -67
and functionalism, 25 ,
and habit-driven behavior, 44 -46,
identification of, 71 -72
and incremental growth, 127
indicators of, 88 -92
and institutional constraints, 38 -40
and institutionalization, 86 , 92
and interdependence, 128
and International Atomic Energy Agency, 150
and
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
International Energy Agency, 159
and International Labor Organization, 153 -54
and International Monetary Fund, 145 -49, 146 Fig. 6
and international organizations, 23 -24, 26 , 204 ,
and issue linkage, 72 , 92 , 130
and knowledge, 72 , 91 , 188
lack of, 149 -54
and Law of the Sea negotiations, 151
and leadership, 91
and legitimacy, 92
and managed interdependence, 4 , 96
and monitoring compliance, 90
and nesting, 128 , 165 , 188
normative evaluation of,
occurrence of, 37 -38, 54 , 72
and organizational action, 20
and organizational culture,
and organizational design, 175 , 194 -95
and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 157 -59
and organization theory, 20 ,
and peaceful uses of outer space, 151
and personnel recruitment, 90 -91
and political goals, 91 , 188
predictors of, 27 -28
and problem definition, 28 , 92 , 128 , 188
and public organizations,
and rational choice, 31
and regimes, 53 -54, 166 -67, 188
and representation, 89
and revenue, 90
and scientific knowledge,
and secretariat autonomy, 89 -90
and social time, 188 -89
and structuration,
and transideological communication, 44 -49
and turbulent nongrowth, 127
and U.N. Conference on Trade and Development,
and U.N. crisis management, 150 -51
and U.N. Development Program, 150
and U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 152 -53
and U.N. Environmental Program, 140 -42
and value consensus, 168
and voting, 90
and World Bank, 142 -45, 143 Fig. 5
and World Health Organization, 138 -40
and world-order ideologies, 89 , 188
Legitimacy, 87 -88
and adaptation, 92
and authority, 87 -88
and incremental growth, 95 Table 5, 104
and learning, 92
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 138
and monitoring compliance,
and organizational decline, 92
and turbulence, 110 , 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 95 Table 5, 121
Liberalism: and Bretton Woods institutions, 149
classical, 66 Table 2
and crisis of multilateralism, 179 -80,
and incremental growth, 179 -80
and macroeconomic policy coordination,
managed, 66 Table 2
organizational design, 180
Linking-pin organizations, 208
M
Macroeconomic policy coordination: and consensual knowledge, 197 -99
and international organizations, 197 -99
and nesting, 197 -98
and organizational design, 195 -200
and regimes, 197 -99
and social time, 204 -5
and world-order ideologies, 198
Managed interdependence, 96 , 127 -54
vs. adaptation, 167 -69
and administration, 94 Table 4, 131 , 133
and Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 160
and authority, 95 Table 5, 138
and bargaining, 95 Table 5, 96 , 130 , 136
and behavior, 134 -35
and budgeting, 94 Table 4, 134 , 161
and causality, 128
and coalitions, 128 -29, 135 -36
and consensual knowledge, 96 , 130 , 135 , 162 -64
and creativity cycle, 161
and decision-making styles, 95 Table 5, 96 , 134 , 135 -36
and decomposability, 96 , 129 , 131 , 136 -37, 162 -63
defined, 128 -31
descriptive correlates of, 161 -62
and entropy, 166
and epistemic communities, 129 -30, 131 , 132
and experts, 94 Table 4, 132
and incremental growth, 53 , 107 -8
and institutionalization, 95 Table 5, 137 -38
and interorganizational coordination, 133 -34
and issue linkage, 95 Table 5, 96 , 130 , 136
and knowledge, 95 Table 5, 135
and leadership, 94 Table 4, 135 , 161 -62
and learning, 4 , 96
and legitimacy, 95 Table 5, 138
and monitoring compliance, 94 Table 4 , 134
and nesting, 128 , 129 , 131 , 162
and nongovernmental organizations, 94
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
Table 4 , 134
and Nordic Council, 160
occurrence of, 53 , 160 -67
and Organization of African Unity, 160
and Organization of American States, 159 -60
and personnel recruitment, 94 Table 4, 134 , 161
and political goals, 95 Table 5, 96 , 135
and power, 132 -34
and problem definition, 95 Table 5, 96 , 128 , 136 -37, 161 , 167
and regional organizations, 155 -60
and representation, 94 Table 4, 132
and revenue, 94 Table 4, 132 -33, 161
and secretariat autonomy, 94 Table 4, 132 , 161
and setting, 132
and social time, 189
substantive correlates of, 162 -64
and task domain, 131
and turbulent nongrowth, 53 , 128 -29
and voting, 94 Table 4, 134
and World Bank, 53
and World Health Organization,
and world-order ideologies, 94 Table 4, 129 , 132 , 161 , 180
Martingale processes, 112 -13
Mertonian imperatives,
Monitoring compliance, 68 Table 3
and adaptation, 90
and authority,
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100
and learning, 90
and legitimacy,
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 134
and organizational decline, 90
and power, 64 Table 1 , 67 , 68 Table 3, 69
and turbulence, 112
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 116
Motivated misperception, 210
Multilateralism: and Arab-Israeli conflict,
crisis of, 179 -81,
and organizational design, 178 -81
Multiple advocacy, 210 -11
N
National Security Council, U.S.,
Nesting: and bargaining, 72 -73, 83
and block recursive hierarchies,
and cognitive evolution, 192
and consensual knowledge, 84 -85
and epistemic communities, 171 -72
and incremental growth, 106 -7, 187
and institutionalization, 104
and international economic policy negotiations, 84 -85
and international organizations, 54
and issue linkage, 84 -85,
and knowledge, 172
and learning, 128 , 165 , 188
and macroeconomic policy coordination, 197 -98
and managed interdependence, 128 , 129 , 131 , 162
and organizational design, 195 , 208
and problem definition, 84 -85, 104
and turbulence, 122
and turbulent nongrowth, 188
and U.N. conferences,
and U.N. Environmental Program, 202
and world-order ideologies, 84
New International Economic Order, 81 -82, 119
Nongovernmental organizations: and adaptation, 91
behavior of, 64 Table 1
and conflict management and collective security,
and epistemic communities, 70 -71,
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100 , 101 -2
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 134
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 207 -8
and representation, 67
and secretariat autonomy, 67
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 115 , 117
and world-order ideologies, 65
Nongrowth, turbulent. See Turbulent nongrowth
Nordic Council, 160
Normative rationality, 32 -33
Nuclear nonproliferation regime, 202 -3
O
Operational decisions, 60
Organizational action, 19 Fig. 1, 20
Organizational agenda, and garbage can model,
Organizational change: and agent structure problem,
and cognitive evolution, 174
and international organizations,
and regional organizations, 158 Table 7
and United Nations, 156 Table 6
Organizational culture,
Organizational decline, 88 -92
Organizational design: and adaptation, 175
and autonomy of staff, 209
and bargaining, 195
and boundary-spanning roles, 207 -8
of bureaucratic networks, 207 -8
of coalitions,
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
18
and cognitive evolution, 187 , 190 -94, 211 -12
and conflict resolution, 207
and consensual knowledge, 209
and constitutional revision, 201
and coordination, 201 -3
and decision-making styles, 209 -10
and decomposability, 194 ,
of epistemic communities, 195
and evolution,
and experts, 195
failure of,
and feedback, 207
and GulfWar,
and hierarchy, 206 -7
and incremental growth,
and interactive planning capacity, 207
of international organizations, 6 , 7 , 18 -20, 177 -212
and issue linkage, 195
and knowledge, 180 , 195
and leadership, 209
and learning, 175 , 194 -95
and liberalism, 180
limits on, 194 -200
of linking-pin organizations, 208
maxims for, 200 -208
and motivated misperception, 210
and multilateralism, 178 -81
and multiple advocacy, 210 -11
and nesting, 195 , 208
of nongovernmental organizations, 207 -8
and organization theory, 18 -20
and political goals, 180
and problem definition, 195
and public-private distinction, 200
purposes of, 194 -200
and redundancy,
and regimes, 199 -200, 208 -9
of regional organizations,
and regulation, 206 -7
and social technology,
and social time, 186 , 189 -90, 203 -6, 208 ,
and territorial space, 186
and turbulent nongrowth, 201
of United Nations,
and world-order ideologies, 180 -81, 209
Organizational error, 35
Organizational evaluation, and social time, 204 ,
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 157 -59
Organization of African Unity, 160
Organization of American States, 159 ,
Organization theory: and adaptation,
and decision making,
and evolution,
and learning,
and organizational design, 18 -20
Outer space, peaceful uses of, 151
Overadaptation, 107
P
Paradigms, and epistemic communities,
Personnel recruitment: and adaptation, 90 -91
and behavior, 64 Table 1, 70
and cognitive evolution,
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 98 , 101
and learning, 90 -91
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 134 , 161
and organizational decline, 91
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 109 , 117
Political goals, 74 -76
and adaptation, 91
and coalitions, 103
and consensual knowledge, 75
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 103
and issue linkage, 76
and knowledge, 103 , 169 -70
and learning, 91 , 188
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 96 , 135
and organizational decline, 91
and organizational design, 180
and turbulence, 110
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118
types of, 74 -75
and world-order ideologies, 74
Politics, and scientific knowledge, 11
Power: and administration, 64 Table 1, 67 , 69
distribution in international organizations, 57 -59
and incremental growth, 100 -101
and interests, 12 , 13
in international organizations, 4
and managed interdependence, 132 -34
to monitor compliance, 64 Table 1, 67 , 68 Table 3, 69
and revenue, 64 Table 1, 67 -69
and turbulent nongrowth, 116
and World Bank,
Praxis,
Problem definition, 5 , 83 -85
and adaptation, 92
and bargaining, 85 , 104
and consensual knowledge, 96
and incremental growth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 97 , 98 , 104
and international organizations, 7
and issue linkage, 104
and learning, 28 , 92 , 128 , 188
and managed interdependence, 95 Table 5, 96 , 128 , 136 -37, 161
and nesting, 84 -85, 104 , 161
and organizational
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
decline, 92
and organizational design, 7 , 195
and scientific knowledge, 9
and turbulence, 122
and turbulent nongrowth, 93 , 95 Table 5, 120 -21
Professional staff, power and autonomy of,
Program evaluation, 56 -57
Programmatic decisions, 60
Progress, 193 -94, 212
Public organizations,
Public-private distinction, 200
R
Rational choice, 14 , 43 -45
Rationality, 55 , 204 ,
Rationing, of services, 55 -56
Realism, vs. idealism, 213 nn1, 9
Reciprocity, 39 ,
Redundancy, 124 -25,
Regimes: and adaptation, 53 -54
and habit-driven behavior, 173
and institutions, 173 , 174
and interdependence, 172
and international organizations, 53 -54, 172 -73, 178
and learning, 53 -54, 166 -67, 188
and macroeconomic policy coordination, 197 -99
and organizational design, 199 -200, 208 -9
and regional organizations,
types of, 198 -99,
and world-order ideologies, 172
Regional integration,
Regional organizations: and change, 158 Table 7
design of,
and managed interdependence, 155 -60
and regimes,
and turbulent nongrowth,
and world-order ideologies,
Regulation, 206 -7,
Representation, 65 -67
and adaptation, 89
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100
and learning, 89
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 132
and nongovernmental organizations, 67
and organizational decline, 89
and setting, 63 , 64 Table 1, 65 -67
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 115
Revenue, source of: and adaptation, 90
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100
and learning, 90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 132 -33, 161
and organizational decline, 90
and power, 64 Table 1, 67 -69
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 116
Revolutionary upheaval, and innovation,
Rule-creating decisions, 60
Rule-supervisory decisions, 60 -61
S
Satisficing, 28 -35, 56
Scientific change, 106
Scientific knowledge: and consensual knowledge, 11 , 12 -13
and decision-making, 12 -13
diffusion of, 46 -49
and epistemic communities, 48 -49
and institutional change, 11
and interests, 11 , 12 -13
and international organizations, 14
and learning,
and politics, 11
and problem definition, 9
and turbulent nongrowth,
and World Bank, 12 -13
Secretariat autonomy: and adaptation, 89 -90
and coalitions, 67
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 100
and learning, 89 -90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 132 , 161
and nongovernmental organizations, 67
and organizational decline, 89 -90
and setting, 63 -65, 64 Table 1, 67
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 115 -16
and world-order ideologies, 67
Setting, 63 -67
and experts, 64 Table 1, 65 , 67
and ideological consensus, 63 , 64 Table 1
and incremental growth, 99 -100
and international organizations, 4
and managed interdependence, 132
and representation, 63 , 64 Table 1, 65 -67
and secretariat autonomy, 63 -65, 64 Table 1, 67
and turbulent nongrowth, 115 -16
and world-order ideologies, 65
Social science,
Social technology, 56 , 101 ,
Social time, 205
and adaptation, 188 -89
and boundary-spanning networks,
and cognitive evolution, 203
and error, 204
and hierarchy, 206
and incremental growth, 105 , 106 , 187 ,
and interdependence, 185 -86
and international organizations,
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
and leadership,
and learning, 188 -89
and macro-economic policy coordination, 204 -5
and managed interdenpence, 189
and organizational design, 186 , 189 -90, 203 -6, 208 ,
and organizational evolution, 204
and rationality, 204
and turbulence, 111 , 113 , 123
and U.N. Environmental Program 189 , 202
and World Bank, 199
Staff autonomy, 208
State sovereignty, 181 -86,
Structuralism, 7 , 8 , 213 n1
Structuration, ,
Substantive issue linkage, 77 -78, 80
Substantive rationality, 31 -32
Symbolic decisions, 59 -60
T
Tactical issue linkage, 77 , 79 -80
Task domain
and incremental growth, 105 -6, 187
and managed interdependence, 131
and turbulence, 111
and turbulent nongrowth, 116 , 188
and world-order ideologies, 65 ,
Task environment: heterogeneity of, 55 , 57
and incremental growth, 97 , 105 , 106 , 187
and international organizations, 15 , 55
and turbulence, 110
and turbulent nongrowth, 109 , 116
and world-order ideologies, 65 ,
Technical rationality, 29 -30, 56 -57, 58 , 102
Technological change, 106 , 110
Technologies of foolishness,
Territorial space, 185 , 186
Transideological communication, 17 , 46 -49
Turbulence, 109 - 11
and adaptation, 122 -23
and authority, 112
and bargaining, 110 , 112
and coalitions, 111 -12
and consensual knowledge, 112
and epistemic communities, 122
and experts, 112
and garbage can model, 123 -24,
and implementation, 112
and incremental growth, 111
and institutionalization, 110 , 112
and interdependence, 109 -10, 122 , 181
and international organizations, 111 -15, 122 -25, 174
and knowledge, 110
and leadership, 122
and legitimacy, 110 , 112
and martingale processes, 112 -13
and monitoring compliance, 112
and nesting, 122
and political goals, 110
and problem definition, 122
and social time, 111 , 113 , 123
and task domain, 110 -11
and task environment, 110
and technological change, 110
Turbulent fields, 110
Turbulent nongrowth, 4 , 109 -25, 187 -88
and administration, 94 Table 4, 106
and authority, 95 Table 5, 121
and bargaining, 93 , 95 Table 5, 119 -20
and behavior, 116 -18
and budgeting, 94 Table 4, 109 , 117
and causality, 118
and coalitions, 115 , 188
conditions and limitations of, 121 -25
and consensual knowledge, 188
and crisis management, 121
and decision-making styles, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118 -19
and decomposability, 120 -21
and entropy, 166
and epistemic communities, 93 , 118
and experts, 94 Table 4, 116 , 118 , 188
identification of, 115 -21
and incremental growth, 107 -8
and institutionalization, 95 Table 5, 121
and international law, 121
and International Monetary Fund, 147
and international organizations, 52 -53
and issue linkage, 93 , 95 Table 5, 119
and knowledge, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118 , 171
and leadership, 94 Table 4, 117 -18
and learning, 127
and legitimacy, 95 Table 5, 121
and managed interdependence, 53 , 128 -29
and monitoring compliance, 94 Table 4, 116
and nesting, 88
and nongovernmental organizations, 94 Table 4, 115 , 117
and organizational design, 201
and personnel recruitment, 94 Table 4, 109 , 117
and political goals, 93 , 95 Table 5, 118
and power, 116
and problem definition, 93 , 95 Table 5, 120 -21
and regional organizations,
and representation, 94 Table 4, 115
and revenue, 94 Table 4, 116
and scientific knowledge,
and secretariat autonomy, 94 Table 4, 115 -16
and setting, 115 -16
Continued on next page
Continued from previous page
and task domain, 116 , 188
and task environment, 109 , 116
transition to, 107 -8
and United Nations, 114 -15,
and U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 152 -53
and U.N. peacekeeping, 5
and voting, 94 Table 4, 116 -17
and world-order ideologies, 94 Table 4, 115 , 188
U
United Nations: Conference on Trade and Development, 81 -82, 6
and consensual knowledge,
crisis management, 150 -51
Development Program, 150
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 5 , 152 -53
Environmental Program, 140 -42, 163 -64, 189 , 202
and incremental growth, 114 ,
and nesting,
and organizational change, 156 Table 6
and organizational design,
peacekeeping, 5
and turbulent nongrowth, 114 -15,
Unit interdependence:
Urgency, as predictor of learning, 28
V
Value consensus, 168
Value definition, 7
Values, and interests, 2
Voting: and adaptation, 90
behavior, 64 Table 1, 70
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 101
and learning, 90
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 134
and organizational decline, 90
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 116 -17
W
Win-sets, 78 -79
World Bank: and adaptation, 3 -4
authority of, 5
and consensual knowledge, 12 -13, 163 -64
and incremental growth, 5 , 137
institutional practices of, 5
and issue linkage, 5 ,
and knowledge,
and learning, 4 , 142 -45, 143 Fig. 5
legitimacy of, 5
and managed interdependence, 5 , 53
and power, 5 ,
and problem definition, 3
and scientific knowledge, 12 -13
and social time, 189
World Health Organization, 138 -40,
World-order ideologies, 66 Table 2
and adaptation, 89
and collaboration, 65 , 66
and epistemic communities, 65
and incremental growth, 94 Table 4, 99 -100, 105 , 187
and international organizations, 65 ,
and learning, 89 , 168 -69, 188
and macroeconomic policy coordination, 198
and managed interdependence, 94 Table 4, 129 , 132 , 161 , 180
and nesting, 84
and nongovernmental organizations, 65
and organizational decline, 89
and organizational design, 180 -81, 209
and political goals, 74
and regimes, 172
and regional organizations,
and secretariat autonomy, 67
and setting, 65
and task domain, 65 ,
and task environment, 65 ,
and turbulent nongrowth, 94 Table 4, 115 , 188
Index of Authors Cited
A
Adler, Emanuel, 253 n3
Alker, Hayward R.: on consensual knowledge and realist international relations theory,
Argyris, Chris A., and Donald A. Schon: on learning,
on organization theory and learning,
Asante, S. K. B.,
Ascher, William,
Ashby, W. Ross: on adaptation,
Assetto, Valerie J.,
Aufderheide, Pat, and Bruce Rich,
Axelrod, Robert: on learning,
Ayres, Robert L.,
B
Babai, Don: on World Bank,
Bacharach, Samuel B., and Edward J. Lawler,
Bandow, Douglas,
Baum, Warren C., and Sotkes Tolbert,
Belonogov, Aleksandr M.: on Gulf War and organizational design,
Bienen, H. S., and M. Gersovits,
Boardman, Robert,
Bobrow, David B., and Robert T. Kudrle,
Borgese, Elizabeth Mann,
Bozeman, Adda: on consensual knowledge,
Brickman, Ronald, Sheila Jasonoff, and Thomas Ilgen: on regulation,
Broad, Robin,
Brown, Christopher P.,
Brucan, Silviu,
Burns, Arthur Lee, and Nina Heathcote,
Buzan, Barry,
C
Caldwell, Lynton,
Campbell, Donald T.: on evolution,
Camps, Miriam, and Catherine Gwin,
Cassen, Robert: on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and development aid,
Chiang, Pei-Heng,
Chisholm, Donald: on coalitions,
Clark, William,
Cleveland, Harlan,
Codding, George, and A. Rutkowski,
Cohen, B.,
Cohen, Michael D., James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen: on garbage can model,
Conca, Kenneth,
Connolly, William E.: on essentially contested concepts,
Corning, Peter E.: on evolution,
Cowhey, Peter E.,
Cox, Robert W., and Harold K. Jacobson,
Crane, B. B.,
Crane, B. B., and J. J. Finkle,
Crane, Diana: on epistemic communities,
Cutler, Robert: on decision making,
D
Dam, Kenneth W.,
David, Paul A.,
Deutsch, Karl W.,
on cognitive evolution, 191 -92
on learning, 24 -25
de Vries, Margaret G.,
Dierckes, Meinolf: on organizational culture,
Diesing, Paul: on decomposability,
Di Maggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell,
Dizard, Wilson,
Donnelly, Jack: on human rights,
Dore, Ronald: on consensual knowledge,
on decision-making theory,
Dawkins, Richard: on evolution,
E
Eco, Umberto,
El-Agraa, Ali,
Emery, E. F., and E. L. Trist: on turbulence,
Etheridge, Lloyd S.: on learning,
Evan, William M.: on epistemic communities,
F
Falk, Richard,
Feinberg, Richard,
Finkle, J. J., and B. B. Crane,
Forsyth, D. P.: on Arab-Israeli conflict and multilateralism,
Foucault, Michel: on epistemic communities,
Franck, Thomas M.: on turbulence in the United Nations,
G
Gagliardi, P.: on organizational culture,
Galenson, Walter,
Galtung, Johan,
George, Alexander L.: on error,
Giddens, Anthony: on praxis,
on structuration,
Gilpin, Robert: on coalitions of coalitions,
Girling, Robert H.,
Gordenker, Leon: on Arab-Israeli conflict and multilateralism,
Gowa, Joanne,
Graham, Norman, and Robert Jordan,
Gramsci, Antonio: on power, 13
Grunwald, Joseph,
Guitan, Manuel,
H
Haas, Ernst B., ,
on human rights,
on learning,
on nesting in the United Nations,
on structuralism, 213 n1
Haas, Ernst B., Mary Pat Williams, and Don Babai,
Haas, Peter M.,
on epistemic communities,
Haggard, Stephan, and Beth A. Simmons: on regime theory,
Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman: on organizational change,
on organizational design,
Hayden, F. Gregory,
on social time,
Hedberg, Bo,
Hill, Martin: on turbulence in the United Nations,
Hoggatt, Richard: on turbulence in the United Nations,
Holzner, Burkhart, and John H. Marx: on epistemic communities,
on knowledge and policy making,
Hopkins, Raymond F., and Donald J. Puchala:
Hrebiniak, Lawrence G., and William F. Joyce: on adaptation,
Hughes, Thomas L.,
J
Jacobson, Harold K., William Reisinger, and Todd Mathers,
Jenkins, J. Craig: on organizational change,
Jönsson, Christer,
K
Kaufman, Johan,
Kegley, Charles W., Jr.: on idealism and realism, 213 n1
Keohane, Robert O.,
on institutions, 173
on idealism and realism, 213 n1,
on reciprocity,
on regimes,
on structuralism, 213 n1
Kirkpatrick, C., and D. Diakosavvas,
Krasner, Stephen D.: on regimes,
Kratochwil, Friedrich, and John Gerard Ruggie: on regimes and international organizations,
Kuhn, Thomas: on paradigms,
L
Landau, Martin: on redundancy,
Landy, E. A.,
Larson, Deborah Welch: on learning,
Lawrence, Paul, and Jay Lorsch,
Lem, Stansislaw, 211 ,
Leslie, J. Winsome,
Lindberg, Leon N., and Stuart A. Scheingold,
Lindblom, Charles L., and David K. Cohen: on praxis,
Lipson, C.,
Lynn, Laurence E., Jr.: on knowledge and policy,
M
McCann, Joseph, and Jay R. Galbraith,
McPhail, Thomas,
March, James G.: on decision making,
on feedback, 207
March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen,
on decision making,
on garbage can model, 123
on institutional constraints, 213 n1
on issue importance in organizations,
on organizational learning,
on technologies of foolishness,
Mazzeo, Dominic,
Merton, Robert: on epistemic communities,
Metcalf, Lee: on organizational design,
Metcalfe, J. L.: on turbulence,
Miles, Edward,
Mitroff, Ian, and R. O. Mason: on consensual knowledge,
N
Nelkin, Dorothy: on consensual knowledge,
Ness, Gayl D., and Steven Brechin: on organizational design,
Nye, Joseph S., Jr.,
on idealism and realism, 213 n1
Nystrom, Paul C., and Willima H. Starbuck
O
O'Brien, Rita Cruise, and G. K. Helleiner,
Odell, John S,
Onwuka, R. I., and A. Sesay,
P
Panneborg, C.,
Pardo, Arvid,
Pelcovits, Nathan A.: on Arab-Israeli conflict and multilateralism
Pfeffer, Jeffrey, : on organizational stability, 107
Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Gerald Salancik,
Please, Stanley,
Putnam, Robert: on bargaining,
on win-sets,
Putnam, Robert, and Nicholas Bayne,
R
Repetto, Robert,
Riggs, Robert E., and I. Jostein Mykletun: on functionalism,
Rimmer, Douglas,
Rittberger, Volker,
Rochester, J. Martin: on regimes and international organizations,
Röling, Bert,
Roos, Leslie L., Jr., and Frederick A. Starke,
Rosenau, James N.,
on habit-driven actor approach, 43
on habit-driven behavior, 45
on learning, 45
Rothstein, Robert L.,
on incremental growth,
Ruggie, John Gerard,
on Gulf War and organizational design,
on social time,
Russel, R.,
S
Sandholtz, Wayne: on research and development collaboration in the European Community,
Sauvant, Karl P.,
Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson,
on habit-driven behavior, 44
Scheinman, Lawrence,
Schiff, Benjamin N.,
Schiller, Dan,
Schmitter, Philippe C.: on regional integration,
Schoultz, Lars,
Scott, W. Richard,
Sebenius, James K.,
Sell, Susan K.: on learning and U.N. Conference on Trade and Development,
Sikkink, Kathryn,
Simon, Herbert A.,
on decomposability, 192
on evolution,
on feedback, 207
on learning, 192 ,
on substantive rationality, 31 -32
Smith, Anthony,
Smith, Roger K.: on regimes,
Snyder, Glenn, and Paul Diesing: on structuralism, 213 n1
Soroos, Marvin S.:
Sproul, Lee S.: on technologies of foolishness,
Stein, Janice G., and Raymond Tanter: on decision making,
Steinbruner, John D.: on cognitive styles,
on decision making,
on learning, 38
Stephens, T. W.,
Stiles, Kendall W.: on decision making in the International Monetary Fund,
on the International Monetary Fund and Argentina,
T
Taylor, Paul,
Taylor, Philip,
Terry, W. I.,
Tetlock, Philip: on foreign policy decision making,
Thompson, James D.,
on administration, 131
on feedback, 207
on organizational coordination,
Thompson, William Irwin,
Tichy, Noel M.: on boundary-spanning roles,
Toner, Glen,
Torrie, Jill,
Touval, Saadia: on Arab-Israeli conflict and multilateralism,
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman: on error,
U
Urquhart, Brian,
V
Vance, Cyrus, and Elliot Richardson: on Gulf War and organizational design,
W
Washburn, John L.: on Gulf War and organizational design,
Weber, Max: on typologies, 10
Weiss, Thomas G., and Robert Jordan:
Wendt, Alexander E.: on agent-structure problem,
Wijkman, Per Magnus,
Wilensky, Harold L.: on experts,
Willets, Peter: on nongovernmental organizations as epistemic communities,
Williams, Douglas,
Willrich, Mason,
Wiseman, Henry,
Z
Zacher, Mark W.,
Compositor: | G & S Typesetters, Inc. |
Text: | 10/13 Gailiard |
Display: | Friz Quadrata |
Printer: | Braun-Brumfield, Inc. |
Binder: | Braun-Brumfield, Inc. |
Preferred Citation: Haas, Ernst B. When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6489p0mp/