Old institutional designs do not always sit easily with contemporary politics. Demands for change arise, creating tensions among actors; however, institutional change is not ubiquitous. Some institutions are stickier than others. This puzzle nourishes Phillip Y. Lipscy’s insightful and thought-provoking account of why rising or reemerging powers are sometimes successful in their revisionist policies within international institutions, and other times not. His look to international institutions as “facilitators of cooperation [and] moderators of shifts in the international balance of power” (p. 267) is a welcome addition to the international organization (IO) literature.
On the basis of theoretical foundations that rest on rational choice and historical institutionalist insights, Lipscy emphasizes the role that policy area characteristics and institutional rules play in explaining the variation in renegotiating distributive institutional change. Some policy areas (e.g., international finance), he argues, limit the creation of multilateral or bilateral alternatives and leave little leverage for states to renegotiate the institutional status quo. Consequently, international institutions in these policy areas can maintain rigid distributive rules—often reflecting bargaining deals that favor the United States as the most powerful state to date. Other policy areas (e.g., development aid, trade) encourage a competitive institutional environment that can be used by rising or reemerging powers to renegotiate distributive deals within multilateral institutional setups. If these initial international institutions do not already have flexible rules that govern decision-making, they have to create them or face the possibility of becoming irrelevant. The United States, in these instances, is often forced to make concessions beyond its preferred outcomes. This argument is buttressed by a formal model and diverse empirical chapters on institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the United National Security Council, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and Intelsat based on quasi-experiments, statistical analyses and archival data, while keeping sight of alternative explanations and addressing idiosyncrasies where information is available.
Renegotiating the World Order addresses a big gap in the IO literature: comparative institutional theorizing across policy areas. While international institutions exist in most, if not all, policy areas today, their proliferation across these policy areas varies. Recent IO scholarship has begun to theorize the impact of policy area characteristics (Kenneth Abbott et al., eds., International Organizations as Orchestrators, 2015), but most still consider only one area, (implicitly) assuming that arguments can travel. Lipscy shows that such assumptions can be misleading. And he moves our attention away from substantive institutional outcomes, instead emphasizing IOs' variegated capacity to accommodate power disparities and wishes for more influence.
While I think that these are important contributions, Lipscy could have stated more clearly how these different institutions relate to one another in what the book’s title promises to be the “world order.” As it is, the book is more about comparative institutional resilience and change and is only weakly linked to world order. The author looks at a plethora of state and nonstate actors but does not discuss the role that these actors play in ordering the world. Also, he could have addressed whether the international institutions discussed are equally salient in constituting world order. Arguably, actors might be more willing to concede influence in some institutions than in others. For example, Lipscy observes that “policymakers clearly care about the terms of representation” (p. 203) in the UNSC, but do they equally care about them in other institutions? Through these omissions—and once we accept that international institutions are a good proxy for world order—the book invites further research about whether all international institutions are equal sites of determining the terms of world order, as well as whether order is primarily a reflection of the position of powerful states in institutions or also about the ideological substance that they try to bring to these institutions.
Another important insight comes from Lipscy’s argument that the existence of attractive or unattractive institutional alternatives heavily influences the likelihood of institutional change. He points to scope conditions under which to expect potential inter-institutional competition (i.e., policy areas that encourage institutional alternatives and where the initial organization has rigid internal rules, pp. 27–28). However, what I find missing is any reference to the regime complexity (and all its other names) literature. A body of scholarship has been established around questions of institutional alternatives: why they exist, how they impact policymaking in various multilateral forums, and what strategies are available to actors in such circumstances. When Lipscy, for example, talks about the likelihood of having alternative options, he basically refers to regime shifting. His work provides scope conditions under which we should expect “states and nonstate actors [to] relocate rulemaking processes to international venues whose mandates and priorities favor their concerns and interests” (Laurence Helfer, “Regime Shifting in the Intellectual Property System,” Perspectives on Politics, 7(1), 2009).
While Lipscy argues that “competitive policy areas should be characterized by the ‘survival of the fittest’” (p. 120), one point that the book hardly mentions, but which the regime complexity literature addresses, is that overlapping institutions do not necessarily compete with one another—irrespective of the rules that govern them (Karen Alter and Kal Raustiala, “The Rise of International Regime Complexity,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 14, 2018). Competition concerning the “influence over the allocation of finite resources, headquarter locations, and appointments of nationals to leadership positions” (p. 54) are not necessarily zero-sum. Institutions can pool resources, thereby freeing resources for other institutions. Also, issues can be linked and headquarters can be multiplied. That said, Lipscy provides a nourishing theoretical foundation to discuss not only the propensity for institutional change within single institutions but also the ways institutions can interact with one another, especially in terms of the kind of (inter)dependencies and inter-institutional interactions that are created based on policy area characteristics.
While I very much appreciate the effort that goes into covering an impressive array of different institutions across policy areas, one confusing aspect of the book is its definition of policy areas. Lipscy admits that the term is ambiguous, but this does not explain why regional integration projects and collective legitimization can be considered as policy areas. The UNSC for example, exists within the so-called policy area of collective legitimization (p. 33) which, according to the author, has a low propensity for competition. Conversely, as he argues, security has a high propensity for competition. Where does this leave the UNSC? And while collective legitimization is discussed in conjunction with the UNSC, it is not with the World Bank and the IMF, which arguably are also institutions that strive for this goal. Lipscy further observes that policy area characteristics “are relatively static” (p. 57), but he also claims that some IOs such as the UN “were designed to be transformative, reshaping the fundamental nature of their policy areas” (p. 205), or that policy characteristics can change due to technological innovation (p. 199) and/or become more competitive (p. 183). It remains unclear how this sits with his notion of policy area characteristics. What can explain IOs’ transformative nature, technological innovation, and increased competition? As agency is secondary to his account and much explaining is being done through policy area characteristics, such questions invite further research and theorizing that contribute not only to the study of IOs but also to politics more generally.
These questions and concerns notwithstanding, Lispcy provides us with great comparative insights into the workings of a large set of international institutions over time. Renegotiating the World Order joins a growing number of scholarly works on the institutional complexities that more and less powerful states find themselves in, as well as on the opportunities and constraints that arise from them. It is a fruitful stepping stone from which to further conceptualize and theorize (institutional) world order-making.
