The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU’s democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

ÔThis volume provides a welcome overview of the diverse ways in which informal practices and norms shape policy in national states, the European Union, and international relations. The wide range of cases that feature in the volume point to the normative and substantive importance of informality. This volume is a valuable contribution to a fascinating and under-researched topic.Õ Ð Gary Marks, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, US and VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands Acknowledging that governance relies not only on formal rules and institutions but to a significant degree also on informal practices and arrangements, this unique Handbook examines and analyses a wide variety of theoretical, conceptual and normative perspectives on informal governance. The insights arising from this focus on informal governance are discussed from various disciplinary perspectives, within different policy domains, and in a number of regional and global contexts. This Handbook is an important contribution that will put informal governance firmly on the map of academic scholarship with its review of the range of the different uses and effects of informal arrangements across the globe. Bringing together multidisciplinary contributions on informal governance arrangements, this Handbook will appeal to postgraduate students in political science and scholars within the field of political science and global governance.

The legal foundations of global governance are shifting. In addition to traditional instruments for resolving cross-border problems, such as treaties and formal international organizations, policy-makers are turning increasingly to informal agreements and organizations like the Group of Twenty, the Financial Stability Board, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. A growing number of policy-makers view such weakly-legalized organizations as promising new tools of governance, arguing that informal bodies are faster and more flexible than their formal counterparts, and better-suited to the complex problems raised by deepening interdependence. Yet, equally, political scientists have puzzled over these international organizations. At present, we still know relatively little about these bodies, why they have become so important, and whether they are indeed capable of addressing the immense challenges faced by the global community. In The Origins of Informality, Charles Roger offers a new way of thinking about informal organizations, presents new data revealing their extraordinary growth over time and across regions, and advances a novel theory to explain these patterns. In contrast with existing approaches, he locates the drivers of informality within the internal politics of states, explaining how major shifts within the domestic political arenas of the great powers have projected outwards and reshaped the legal structure of the global system. Informal organizations have been embraced because they allow bureaucrats in powerful states to maintain autonomy over their activities, and can help politicians to circumvent domestic opponents of their foreign policies. Drawing on original quantitative data, interviews, and archival research, the book analyzes some of the most important institutions governing the global economy, showing how informality has helped domestic actors to achieve their narrow political goals-even when this comes at the expense of the institutions they eventually create. Ultimately, Roger claims, the shift towards informality has allowed the number of multilateral institutions to rapidly increase in response to global problems. But, at the same time, it has coincided with a decline in their quality, leaving us less prepared for the next global crisis.

How is the United States able to control the IMF with only 17 per cent of the votes? How are the rules of the global economy made? This book shows how a combination of formal and informal rules explains how international organizations really work. Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best understood as equilibrium outcomes that balance the power and interests of the leading state and the member countries. Presenting a new model of institutional design and comparing the IMF, WTO, and EU, Stone argues that institutional variations reflect the distribution of power and interests. He shows that US interests influence the size, terms, and enforcement of IMF programs, and new data, archival documents, and interviews reveal the shortcomings of IMF programs in Mexico, Russia, Korea, Indonesia, and Argentina.

Characterizes the three distinct types of informal governance and provides a normative assessment of them.

Why do international organizations (IOs) look so different, yet so similar? The possibilities are diverse. Some international organizations have just a few member states, while others span the globe. Some are targeted at a specific problem, while others have policy portfolios as broad as national states. Some are run almost entirely by their member states, while others have independent courts, secretariats, and parliaments. Variation among international organizations appears as wide as that among states. This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire for self-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin. The book reveals both the causal power of functionalist pressures and the extent to which nationalism constrains the willingness of member states to engage in incomplete contracting. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO's membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010. Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.