The growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern have made international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but also increasingly difficult. If decision makers are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a specific problem, how do they define state interests and develop viable solutions? What factors shape their behavior? Under conditions of uncertainty, what are the origins of international institutions? And how can we best study the processes through which international policy coordination and order emerge? While a variety of analytic approaches have been used to address the problems of international cooperation, the approaches have yielded only fragmentary insights. At its core, the study of policy coordination among states involves arguments about determinism versus free will and about the ways in which the international system is maintained and transformed. Among the overlapping topics of debate are whether national behavior is determined or broadly conditioned by system-level factors, unit-level factors, or some complex interplay between the two; whether state policymakers can identify national interests and behave independently of pressures from the social groups they nominally represent; and whether states respond consistently to opportunities to create, defend, or expand their own wealth and power, to enhance collective material benefits, or to promote nonmaterial values.' A related question of

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Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

The neorealist-neoliberal debate about the possibilities for collective action in international relations has been based on a shared commitment to Mancur Olson's rationalist definition of the problem as one of getting exogenously given egoists to cooperate. Treating this assumption as a de facto hypothesis about world politics, I articulate the rival claim that interaction at the systemic level changes state identities and interests. The causes of state egoism do not justify always treating it as given. Insights from critical international relations and integration theories suggest how collective identity among states could emerge endogenously at the systemic level. Such a process would generate cooperation that neither neorealists nor neoliberals expect and help transform systemic anarchy into an “international state”—a transnational structure of political authority that might undermine territorial democracy. I show how broadening systemic theory beyond rationalist concerns can help it to explain structural change in world politics.

Collective Identity Formation and the International State

Social constructivism in international relations has come into its own during the past decade, not only as a metatheoretical critique of currently dominant neo-utilitarian approaches (neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism) but increasingly in the form of detailed empirical findings and theoretical insights. Constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect. It also concerns itself with issues that neo-utilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology. The constructivist project has sought to open up the relatively narrow theoretical confines of conventional approaches—by pushing them back to problematize the interests and identities of actors; deeper to incorporate the intersubjective bases of social action and social order; and into the dimensions of space and time to establish international structure as contingent practice, constraining social action but also being (re)created and, therefore, potentially transformed by it.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2601360.pdf

What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge

International regimes are attitudinal phenomena. They are thus subjective and exist primarily as participants' understandings, expectations or convictions about legitimate, appropriate or moral behavior. Regimes are identified and their tenets described by studying records of participants' perceptions gleaned either from interview transcripts or from appropriate documents. Theorizing concerning international regimes currently focuses upon identifying analytic characteristics that might become bases for comparative empirical studies and foundations for generalization. Particularly promising are comparisons of international regimes with regard to specificity, formality, modes of change, and distributive bias. The regime that buttressed late 19th century European colonialism is compared to the international food regime of the present day with respect to these analytic features. Observations on the two cases suggest reasons why some international regimes are durable and others fragile, why some invite wide compliance and others provoke deviation, and why some change while the international structure of power remains constant but others change only after the weak become strong.

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International regimes: lessons from inductive analysis

As noted in Chapter 3, the share of GNP that rich countries contribute to official development assistance
is in decline, in some states for over 20 years. In spite of the increased generosity of some states, since 1992
net aid disbursements from OECD states dropped, falling from over $62 billion to less than $50 billion in
1997. Not surprisingly, this decline has spawned interest in what caused it and what will happen in the
future. This chapter addresses these questions. Drawing on the earlier contributions to the volume, it
explores conditions influencing future bilateral and multilateral aid, with principal attention to large donor
states, since their outlooks shape their own as well as multilateral flows.

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Political Economy Of Foreign Aid

The principles and norms adopted by the regime governing food aid in the 1950s have changed substantially during the subsequent three decades. Explaining the changes necessarily includes analyzing the efforts of an international epistemic community consisting of economic development specialists, agricultural economists, and administrators of food aid. According to the initial regime principles, food aid should be provided from donors' own surplus stocks, should supplement the usual commercial food imports in recipient countries, should be given under short-term commitments sensitive to the political and economic goals of donors, and should directly feed hungry people. As a result of following these principles, the epistemic community and other critics argued, food aid often had the adverse effects of reducing local production of food in recipient countries and exacerbating rather than alleviating hunger. The epistemic community (1) developed and proposed ideas for more efficiently supplying food aid and avoiding “disincentive” effects and (2) pushed for reforms to make food aid serve as the basis for the recipients' economic development and to target it at addressing long-term food security problems. The ideas of the international epistemic community have increasingly received support from international organizations and the governments of donor and recipient nations. Most recently, they have led to revisions of the U.S. food aid program passed by Congress in October 1990 and signed into law two months later. As the analysis of food aid reform demonstrates, changes in the international regime have been incremental, rather than radical. Moreover, the locus for the change has shifted from an American-centered one in the 1950s to a more international one in recent decades.

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Reform in the international food aid regime: the role of consensual knowledge

Many agencies of the United States Government with nominally “domestic” mandates play important roles in international affairs, and collaborate extensively with other governments and international organizations in the performance of their tasks. In some areas, these agencies rather than intergovernmental organizations play key management roles. Data gathered from a variety of sources indicate the extensiveness of this involvement, and suggest that it continues to expand, although not in linear fashion. Certain trends in governmental reorganization, such as those in the Agriculture Department, suggest similar patterns to those observed in business firms as they become more heavily involved abroad. More attention needs to be paid to international networks involving “domestic” governmental bureaucracies and governmental agencies traditionally oriented toward international affairs. From a conceptual point of view, we should think of “international organization” as including not only formally intergovernmental organizations, but all officials who participate significantly in these networks.

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The international role of “domestic” bureaucracy

The global food problem is delineated and a set of concepts for analyzing the world food system is provided and used to critically examine the food system. The global food problem consists of an interrelated set of elements which affect countries differently. These elements are 1) the food shortage threat; 2) instability in the food supply stemming from price fluctuations unpredictable markets and an undependable trade flow; 3) an unpredictable supply of food for importation; 4) low agricultural production in developing countries; and 5) malnutrition. The global food system consists of production centers consumption centers and distribution channels. Conditions that characterize the system are the result of regimes i.e. the rules and norms which control the system at any particular point in time. A regime can be identified by 1) observing transaction flows the allocation of resources and food diplomacy patterns; 2) by examining the agendas of food issue forums; and 3) by listening to the arguments used to bolster or criticize specific food policies. The global food system created by the current regime which has been in existence since the 1940s is a system which divides the countries of the world into surplus and deficit countries and has 2 distributional channels. These channels are 1) commercial sellers and buyers and 2) concessionally linked donors and recipients. The regime which created this system was imposed primarily by the US government. The regime is characterized by 1) a belief in the free market system 2) a willing to provide famine relief but a refusal to address the chronic malnutrition problem 3) the conditional acceptance of the distribution of food in the form of food aid outside the market system; 4) the promotion of the flow of technological information; 5) respect for national sovereignty which has the effect of preventing aid from reaching the poorest segments of the population of developing countries; 6) assignment of a low priority to the development of self-reliance in developing countries; and 7) a willingness to accumulate a grain surplus for distribution to countries with shortfalls. The activities of multinational agribusiness tend to reinforce and support this regime. The international food network consisting largely of UN agencies can modify the food regime by 1) encouraging governments to confront critical food issues 2) collecting and disseminating information about the food problem 3) providing services which governments are unable to perform because of political considerations; and 4) legitimize policies via multilateral sanction. The system supported by the present regime promotes the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy and ignores the need for distributive justice. There are some indications that a new regime is in the process of being developed as evidenced by the new international economic order.

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Raymond F. Hopkins

Papers

International regimes: lessons from inductive analysis

Political Economy Of Foreign Aid

Reform in the international food aid regime: the role of consensual knowledge

The international role of “domestic” bureaucracy

Perspectives on the international relations of food