The institutional design of NJMs varies considerably in the manner they enable, empower or constrain worker and community struggles. Whereas the UNGPs effectiveness criteria, along with other key contributions to the NJM design literature, emphasise the importance of procedural fairness, across the cases we studied purely procedural efforts were insufficient to address the deep imbalances of power between business actors and aggrieved communities. However, in some cases, these imbalances were ameliorated by aspects of institutional design that the UNGPs effectiveness criteria leave implicit: the financial and human resources the NJM can mobilise, the authority it can command and the extent to which its design enhances its capacity to exercise leverage in support of human rights redress. Even where the NJM’s design provides leverage, NJM staff frequently hesitate to flex institutional muscle for fear of jeopardising crucial resources and relationships. As such, the usefulness of transnational NJMs’ interventions often depends crucially also on factors beyond institutional design, namely the extent to which aggrieved communities are able to draw on and effectively deploy other forms of leverage and influence.

When NJMs fail to deliver remedy, criticism is often first levelled against their institutional design: the policies, processes and powers that characterise their operations. Chapter 2 interrogates literatures that conceptualise and critique effective design, primarily theories of non-judicial governance and regulation within the business and human rights scholarship focused on NJMs and approaches captured under the term ‘new governance’. Four elements of institutional design receive particular emphasis in these literatures: efforts to establish accessible and fair non-judicial procedures, processes that support socialisation and learning, strong institutional capacity and resourcing and provisions to help motivate businesses to engage with non-judicial redress processes. This scholarship, though, often overlooks important areas of ambiguity, firstly, whether and how design can encompass and respond to the divergent purposes and aims that animate grievance claims and, secondly, implications for institutional design that arise from recognising the embedding of regulatory and redress processes in broader, and highly unequal, social relations.

Some propose that states tie hands by signing alliance treaties. The presence of an alliance treaty increases the audience costs of violating a commitment to defend another state, having the effect of tying hands. This chapter argues that states prefer to keep their hands untied to make it easier to avoid getting drawn into the wrong wars. Accordingly, when states design alliance treaties, they routinely include flexibility language in the treaties that enable them to stay out of conflicts involving embattled allies without violating the treaty, thereby reducing or avoiding the audience costs of abandoning an ally. The chapter demonstrates that all alliances since 1945 include such flexibility language, including alliances signed by the US and Soviet Union/Russia. Further, the chapter demonstrates that in every single post-1945 case when a state allegedly abandoned an embattled ally, the flexibility language of the treaty means that the decision to stay out of the conflict did not technically violate the treaty. On the rare occasions when states want to tie hands more tightly to bolster deterrence, they make verbal statements that de facto reduce the flexibility of the alliance treaty, though such verbal statements are crafted to tie hands minimally.

This chapter considers questions of immigration institutional design in light of lessons learned from how Caribbean home-care aides currently work and travel. The growth in paid home care has been largely staffed by migrant labor – with some care workers operating outside of the scope of their visas. While these workers may technically be noncompliant, the author argues that most of these workers are in fact “good types,” who would have been favorably screened ex-ante for elder-care visas. The chapter proposes that we urgently devise a system that permits temporary entry of elder-care workers. If migrant care workers are permitted long-term temporary visas in which they can work in the US for a few months per year over several years, they have every incentive to comply.

Guarantor institutions (such as electoral commissions and anti-corruption watchdogs, which supposedly comprise the so-called ‘fourth’ or ‘integrity’ branch of the state) are increasingly of interest to constitutional scholars. In a given political context, a guarantor institution is a tailor-made constitutional institution, vested with material as well as expressive capacities, whose function is to provide a credible and enduring guarantee to a specific non-self-enforcing constitutional norm (or any aspect thereof). Arguing that guarantor institutions are more trustee-like than agent-like in character, this chapter defends the claim that the design of any guarantor institutions should seek to ensure that it has: (i) sufficient expertise and capacity to perform its functions effectively; (ii) sufficient independence from political, economic, or social actors with an interest in frustrating the relevant norm it is meant to guarantee; and (iii) sufficient accountability to bodies with an interest in upholding the relevant norm.

This chapter identifies three shortcomings in our preparedness for the governance of future worlds of consumers and AI. If our governance is to be smart, there must first be a systematic gathering of regulatory intelligence (to understand what does and does not work). AI givernance will require new institutions that are geared for the kind of conversations that humans will need to have in the future to adjust to a radically different approach to governance

Chapter 7 assesses the overall findings of the book and provides outlooks and perspectives. The responses of international institutions to transformative novel technologies are mostly deficient in that they do not meaningfully contribute either to the realization of associated technological promises or to the avoidance of perils. Exceptions do exist, however, particularly where transformative novel technologies have a strong normative fit with pre-existing regulatory frameworks and can thus be assimilated by them with relative ease. The chapter also offers broader reflections on how to improve institutional responses to transformative novel technologies and then goes on to elaborate on some conceptual issues that have emerged in the previous discussion: from technology and path dependence to the role of the precautionary principle to the potential problem of ‘slippery slope’ effects in research and development. The chapter then tentatively discusses how the theoretical framework of this book would apply beyond the environmental domain. I conclude with some final considerations on the notion of ‘techno-fixes’ in the global politics of environmental sustainability.

Chapter 7 concludes Making International Institutions Work. It opens with a brief review of the main findings and the role of each stage of the empirical investigation in establishing them. I then discuss the book’s contributions to international relations, international political economy, and political science as well as other fields of social science. The third section draws out lessons for policy and practice. I identify a variety of stakeholder-specific strategies for safeguarding policy autonomy and promoting accountability reforms, contributing to a lively ongoing debate among academics and practitioners over how to achieve an effective and accountable global institutional architecture. Finally, I reflect on the book’s implications for some notable emerging issues in global governance – including responding to international crises and challenges to the modern liberal order – outlining promising avenues for further research.

This chapter elaborates the book’s theoretical framework. It proceeds in three stages. First, based on a microfoundational analysis of the incentives facing states and international bureaucrats, I make the case that the former are more liable than the latter to engage in opportunistic behavior that imperils institutional performance. Second, I flesh out the concept of policy autonomy, explaining how its different components provide the basis for gains in performance and why it cannot be reliably established and maintained through institutional design. Third, I explore the true origins of policy autonomy, elaborating the causal mechanisms by which (certain types of) operational alliances and governance tasks insulate bureaucrats against state capture. The chapter concludes by summarizing the framework’s observable implications at the macro and micro levels.

Why do some international institutions succeed and others fail? This opening chapter introduces the subject of Making International Institutions Work. It begins by describing the motivation behind the book, presenting striking examples of differences in the performance of international institutions, explaining why such variation is puzzling for conventional theories of international cooperation, and highlighting its growing substantive importance. I then define the book’s two central concepts – international institutions and institutional performance – clarifying the precise scope of my analysis. This is followed by a brief review and critique of relevant literature. The last three sections provide an overview of the book’s argument, research design, and structure.

In Chapter 11, John Patty draws on recent developments in behavioral economics to consider how political overseers, such as congressional oversight committees or agency heads, can deal with the extraordinary complexity of their job. Modern political organizations are composed of a hoard of individuals making innumerable choices, so how can overseers make sense of it? Patty introduces the concept of bracketing – how principals and agents group choices to compare among them when contemplating actions. Bracketing can affect how principals such as congressional members evaluate the consequences of bureaucratic behavior, the flow of evaluative information available to such principals, and the incentives for government officials to allocate or misallocate their efforts. Patty discusses how bracketing may influence features of institutional design, centralization of authority, and specialization. Additionally, bracketing has implications for policy evaluation and planning.