The concluding chapter reflects on the future of American hierarchy and state development in light of the book’s findings. It discusses potential changes in American economic priorities and the rise of new hierarchies in the international system. The chapter explores the implications for partner states and highlights the need for further research on the role of nonstate actors, such as firms and international organizations. It also considers the normative implications of the book’s findings and underscores the importance of understanding the complex effects of hierarchy on state-building.

Why are American INGO foundings declining while there is still a great deal of unmet social need and available resources? This chapter argues that INGO foundings respond to population density. We test our argument in two ways. First, we use data drawn from tax records on American INGOs to establish that there is a curvilinear relationship between population density and foundings. Second, we present a qualitative case study of civil society and democracy INGOs, drawing on memoirs, document analysis, and interviews with INGO founders and long-time practitioners. The case study uses process tracing to demonstrate how the extent of mutual support vs. competition shifts in a population as density increases. Finally, the chapter concludes by extending our argument about INGO foundings to INGO deaths.

Why are American INGOs’ missions becoming narrower while global issues are arguably becoming more expansive and interconnected? This chapter argues that mission specialization is a response to growing population density. As many INGO sectors became denser, more concentrated, and more competitive in the early 2000s, entrepreneurs began seeking ways to distinguish their new organizations. Creating an organization with a specialized mission was one way to survive in a crowded sector and thus became a common strategy. We support this argument with an analysis of original data on American INGOs’ mission statements. A case study of humanitarian INGOs further illustrates the value of our approach.

Why are American INGOs increasingly dispersing their activities globally, avoiding “crowded” areas, when concentrating efforts in areas of acute need may be more efficient or just? This chapter argues that American INGOs’ geographic choices are a response to growing population density. INGOs are increasingly seeking out new geographic niches because many once-popular countries are now “saturated” and can no longer easily support more organizations. We support this argument with a statistical analysis of original and existing data on INGOs’ locations as well as a qualitative case study of environmental conservation INGOs.

The Introduction previews how population density and competition drive the strategies of INGO leaders and entrepreneurs. Our approach provides an explanation for three important but puzzling trends in the population of American INGOs. First, fewer INGOs are being created even though unmet needs remain substantial and available resources are steady if not increasing. Second, INGOs are becoming narrower in their missions even though global issues are arguably becoming more complex and interconnected. And third, INGOs are increasingly dispersing their activities globally, avoiding “crowded” areas, even though concentrating efforts in areas of acute need may be more efficient or just. We argue that existing scholarship has not yet examined or explained these consequential developments. We conclude by offering an overview of the book’s methods and chapter content.

This chapter provides an overview of our theoretical argument. We first discuss what international NGOs are and why they exist. Second, we argue that INGOs are motivated to survive to advance their ultimate goals related to social change. Third, we make the case that INGOs’ ideal strategies depend on the structure of the organizational population in which they operate. We draw particular attention to the role of population density (how many INGOs there are in a particular country, issue area, or both) and concentration (the share of revenues controlled by the largest INGOs in the sector). We argue that changes in these aspects of the population environment cause INGO entrepreneurs to make predictably different decisions about whether to found an organization, how specialized their mission should be, and where to locate their work globally.

In a world in which INGOs play such a large and fraught role, this book explores why they make the choices they do. In this chapter, we first review the book’s theory and its contributions. Next, we recap our empirical findings. We then consider how our theoretical framework might be extended to understand dynamics among INGOs headquartered in countries outside the United States and to explore cross-sectoral variation. We also consider growth in other populations of global governance actors – especially for-profit development firms, direct-giving campaigns, and domestic NGOs – and how these actors may be challenging INGOs’ dominance. We offer reflections on how the trends we identified in this book might influence INGOs’ effectiveness. Finally, we consider the study’s implications for public and private funders working with INGOs to affect social change.

Complex global and regional governance includes both the informality of governance institutions and informality around those institutions. National governments are only one category of actor, though an important one, among a more heterogeneous group of governors. The dynamics and evolution of globalization over time explain the emergence of complex governance in recent decades, an explanation that is complementary to those based on functionalism or domestic politics. Globalization alters actor incentive structures and reduces border effects, allowing nonstate and subnational actors to collaborate and reducing costs of participation in governance. Globalization has empowered actors: Emerging economies, INGOs, and MNCs. Globalization's future will continue to shape the prospects of complex governance.

We assess the development of informality in international climate policy on two levels: Whether informal organizations meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation, and what role informality plays under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Proliferation of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) has enabled the move from a rigid list of countries with and without commitments, to the Paris Agreement, under which each country contributes to mitigation. Within the UNFCCC process, we find a “formality-informality cycle,” in which actors sometimes render rules and procedures more flexible and hence more efficient, only to suddenly reverse this trend at other times. Such a high-profile reversal occurred in Copenhagen in 2009. Subsequently, through the use of highly transparent negotiation procedures, trust in informality increased again, allowing negotiators to successfully override Nicaragua’s opposition in Paris in 2015. Similar formality-informality cycles can be observed on specific topics within the UNFCCC negotiations, such as international market mechanisms.

The aim of this volume is not to provide or test a single theory of informal global governance but rather to provide a set of analyses that speak to a common set of theoretical, empirical, and methodological questions. More broadly, the aim is to advance the emerging research agenda on informality in world politics. We conclude the volume by highlighting four productive avenues for future research on informality, based on the insights of the empirical chapters.

Understanding contemporary global governance requires a focus on informality. States increasingly govern through informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational public–private governance initiatives, and other informal institutions. Even within formal institutions, informal practices complement or override formal rules. And diverse informal groupings operate in the orbit of governance institutions, framing novel issues and placing them on policy agendas. We address these three aspects of informality – of, inside, and around global governance institutions. We first trace the nature and extent of the shift toward informal governance. We then consider a range of factors that may be driving the shift, drawing on major streams of International Relations (IR) theory; we treat these as candidate explanatory variables. Finally, we summarize the findings on those variables, and other theoretical insights, from the empirical chapters of this volume.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.

Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.

This chapter concludes by addressing how this book’s analysis reconsiders sovereign power in IR and speculates on a structural model of responsibility that takes hybrid sovereignty seriously.

This chapter introduces the main argument of this book that global sovereign power is constituted by public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty, while sovereign authority is recognized as indivisibly public in Idealized Sovereignty. Public/private hybridity takes on different characteristics of contractual, institutional, and shadow forms based on the formalization and publicization of relations. In relation to hybrid sovereignty, the lived realities of different types of public/private hybridity are in tension with the idealized imperatives of determining what is public versus private.

This chapter develops the analytical dynamics of public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty. It first situates public/private hybridity in the global governance literature and then introduces three ideal-types. Contractual hybridity features formal and publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity features informal and partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity features nonformalized and nonpublicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. Finally, the chapter presents a Weberian-inspired research design to show off the three ideal-types in the empirics that follow.