Optimal Mission Division between Global and Regional Governance Institutions

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration

Abstract

Authority allocation, also referred to as mission division, is a widespread phenomenon no matter in economics or political science, which is equivalent to the term multilevel governance, and similar as decentralization or federalism at national level. The discussion of authority allocation at super-national level is mostly contextualized in European Union and its member countries, with largely neglecting the mission division between regional and global organizations. Mission division between regional and global organizations is a question about at which level a public good should be provided, or at which level an international mission should be managed. This paper aims to determine what the best authority allocation (mission division) between global and regional organizations based on the theory of public goods provision, and to give an estimate of how far the current world is from it. In other words, this study will contribute to showing whether and how the current global governance system could be improved both in theory and in practice.

This study approaches this question using formal models and quantitative analysis.

In my framework, three types of factors determine the optimal mission division between regional and global institutions: (1) functional factors (can also be regarded as factors about nature of missions, e.g., externality), (2) social functions, and (3) cost structure of missions. The baseline model explains the trade-off among three types of factors with regard to determining optimal authority allocation between global and regional institutions. Then assumptions are relaxed along two directions: states’ choice problem and social planner problem. The difference between these two directions lies in whether states make choices out of their own interests or combined welfare of all nations, and this difference leads to different model extension logics, indifference logic and optimization logic. Following the logic of indifference, model extension along the direction of states’ choice problem is conducted by taking competition between regional institutions into account and considering regions with different sizes. Following the logic of optimization, model extension under the assumption of a social planner is conducted by thinking about countries with different sizes, figuring out effects of different decision-making modes, and including IOs’ function of facilitating issue linkage. The formal models can not only explain the determination of mission division, but also explain some significant phenomena in the field of international organizations. For example, the models explain why regional institutions can cause global inefficiency and why general-purpose organizations are usually regional while task-specific organizations are usually global.

In the section of empirical analysis, firstly, I conduct an expert survey to evaluate the factors and their effects on determining whether and to what extent a mission should be managed by a regional or a global institution using questionnaire. Then, I compare the estimated optimal mission division with the division in practice across governance missions to figure out the pattern of the distance between optimal and current mission division, and thus figure out in which areas reforms in global governance are most needed.

Author

• Wan Peng, London School of Economics and Political Science