Communications Technology and the Rise of Informal International Governance

• In Event: New Perspectives on International Collaboration

Abstract

An important change in multilateral diplomacy over the past thirty years has been the emergence of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) alongside—and sometimes on top of—traditional formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs). FIGOs were implicitly organized in a hierarchical manner, whereby Foreign Ministry representatives of states would meet at the international level, “legislate” what needed to be done in specific functional areas, and create rules to guide FIGO operational activity at the global level or, in some cases, domestic action by line departments. By contrast, IIGOs involve periodic networked interaction among heads of government to agree on rules that then guide either FIGOs or (increasingly frequently) domestic “line” departments; the line departments then interact among themselves on a networked basis rather than operating through a FIGO. Networks of lower-level national officials collaborate through Trans-Governmental Networks to advance cooperation aims from national capitals and work within the broad parameters and priorities established within IIGOs. Conversely, foreign ministries become less central losing power both to line departments and to more central Executive agencies such as the U.S. National Security Council or Canadian Privy Council.

We explain this transformation in terms of the new governance possibilities opened up by improvements in communication (from the telegraph to the internet) and transportation (from sailing ships to Air Force 1) that enables international cooperation to be institutionalized in a new way. These modes of international cooperation would have been infeasible or prohibitively costly without significant improvements in communication technologies. The result is a less centralized mode of cooperation and allows states to reduce greatly the governance and sovereignty costs associated with achieving a fixed measure of international cooperation. We explore the operation of this new form of global governance through the illustrative example of the Proliferation Security initiative.

Authors

• Duncan Snidal, Nuffield College, Oxford

• Michael W. Manulak, Carleton University