Final Report Summary - DELPOWIO (Delegation of Power to International Organizations and Institutional Empowerment over Time)
How powerful are international organizations (IOs)? What shapes their ability to affect global governance outcomes? Research on the delegation of political authority to IOs has recently begun to develop broader comparative data to gauge IOs’ formal power. This empirical research on the institutional design of IOs has created significant insights into the variance of IOs’ formal tasks and issue scope. Yet, two limitations make it difficult to gauge the actual power of IOs to shape global governance outcomes. First, the strong focus on the formal delegation of tasks and issue areas neglects the fact, that to be an effective player in global governance, IOs need to be equipped with the necessary capabilities to fulfil their tasks. Second, measuring IO power simply in terms of the formal rules specified in a delegation contract and similar legal documents limits our understanding of the dynamics of IO power considerably. By definition, principal-agent relationships are static. After completing the delegation contract, IO tasks, issue scope, and capabilities are expected to be fixed until further notice. Yet, empirical examples like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund suggest that IO power is much more dynamic. To address these limitations, this project offers three contributions to the literature: First, we propose a more encompassing concept of IO power, which incorporates three principal components of IO power (tasks, issue scope, and capabilities). Second, we introduce the concept of empowerment, which helps to grasp the formal and informal changes in IO power over time. Third, we introduce a novel dataset on IO capabilities, which measure the formal rules governing IOs staff and financial resources and the actual capabilities available to IOs. These original data on capabilities of six major IOs over 65 years show that capabilities vary not only across IOs but also over time. Although formal rules remain rather constant, the number of staff and the amount of financial resources, and thus the ability of IOs to shape global governance outcomes, change substantially over time.