Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Commission, this book explores the different methods that states employ to ensure their interests are being served, and identifies the problems involved with monitoring and managing IOs. The contributors suggest that it is not inherently more difficult to design effective delegation mechanisms at international level than at domestic level and, drawing on principal-agent theory, help explain the variations that exist in the extent to which states are willing to delegate to IOs. They argue that IOs are neither all evil nor all virtuous, but are better understood as bureaucracies that can be controlled to varying degrees by their political masters.

Why do governments increasingly delegate sovereign authority to international organizations and what are the consequences of such choices? This volume employs a broad range of empirical techniques to answer these questions and argues that the issues involved in controlling international bureaucracies are very similar to those faced in domestic politics.

The European Union is composed of its fifteen member governments, yet these governments have chosen repeatedly to delegate executive, judicial and legislative powers and substantial discretion to supranational institutions such as the Commission, the Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. In The Engines of European Integration, the first full-length study of delegation in the European Union and international politics, Mark Pollack draws on principal-agent analyses of delegation, agency and agenda setting to analyze and explain the delegation of powers by governmental principals to supranational agents, and the role played by those agents in the process of European integration. In the first part of the book, Pollack analyses the historical and functional patterns of delegation to the Commission, the Court of Justice, and the Parliament, suggesting that delegation to the first two is motivated by a desire to reduce the transaction costs of EU policymaking, as predicted by principal-agent models, while delegation of powers to the Parliament fits poorly with such models, and primarily reflects a concern by member governments to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the Union. The second part of the book focuses on the role of supranational agents in both the liberalization and the re-regulation of the European market, and suggests that the Commission, Court, and Parliament have indeed played a causally important role alongside member governments as "the engines of integration," but that their ability to do so has varied historically and across issue-areas as a function of the discretion delegated to them by the member governments.

This title is an examination of the role and relevance of international bureaucracies in global environmental governance. After a discussion of theoretical context, reaserch design, and empiral methodology, the book presents nine in-depth case studies of bureaucracies.

Delegation is an ubiquitous social phenomenon linked to the growing differentiation of modern societies. Delegation is one of several different modes of organisation that exist to make collective action successful, but has been overlooked and under-researched. Using a rational choice institutional analysis and principal agent models, this book brings literature on delegation to bureaucracy, electorate to legislature to government within representative democracy together with literature on new forms of delegation such as non-majoritarian institutions, to provide a more complete and synthetic analysis of delegation in political systems. With a broad and comparative approach, this is an important volume for advanced students, researchers and professionals concerned with delegation in the areas of public policy, public administration and democratic theory.