Many of today’s global challenges – climate change, migration, digitalisation – can only be tackled when states cooperate. But the principle of multilateralism and the norms that underpin the global order are widely believed to be in crisis. Emerging powers, notably China, are using their growing geopolitical weight to exert pressure on the multilateral system, while some of its former champions – first and foremost the United States – have muted their support. As core global governance instruments, international organisations are where these dynamics play out in practice: many of them have become contested and even gridlocked.
This trend also stems from a perception shared by states especially in the Global South that the international order has failed to deliver – that it is ineffective or undemocratic – and thus needs to be overhauled or abandoned. Other actors, including the European Union, seek to reinvigorate the multilateral system by upholding the elements that work, reforming those that need to change, and extending global governance to new areas.
In this literature review*, we present the results of our quest to better understand to what extent international institutions have been effective and democratic across different policy fields, whether and where they have become more or less effective and democratic over time, and why. Structured around these two core features of international institutions – their effectiveness and democratic governance – we synthesise insights from research that has been thriving for more than three decades.
To what extent have international institutions been effective and democratic across different policy fields?
Specifically, we:
- Explore patterns of institutional effectiveness over time as well as across policy areas and types of organisations;
- Identify key determinants of what makes an international organisation effective (such as, for instance, institutional designs, resources, or legitimacy);
- Analyse how inclusive, transparent, accountable, and representative international organisations have become overtime;
- Pinpoint key determinants of what makes an international organisation democratic (such as domestic democracy levels, norm diffusion and emulation, legitimacy deficits, and functional benefits);
- Identify patterns in democratic governance across different types of organisations.
Overall, we find that international institutions have proven to be effective governance actors and have become more democratic since the end of the Cold War. They are crucial in addressing transboundary problems and generate outputs with which states comply. They have also become more inclusive, transparent, accountable, and representative over time. Factors such as organisations’ material resources and legitimacy as well as their internal make-up – in terms of the domestic regime types and capacity among member states – account for these developments.
At the same time, the literature is often ambivalent, sometimes fragmented, and at times even contradictory. And few of the prevailing problems with international organisations have been solved. Many of the democratic features we identified are rather shallow, and the process of democratisation has largely stagnated since 2010. Moreover, we still know relatively little about how the global crises of recent years have impacted the effectiveness and democratic character of international institutions, as neither of these dimensions have been comprehensively addressed in recent research.
Citation Recommendation: Sommerer, Thomas and Andrea Liese. 2024. “Can International Institutions Still Deliver? Patterns and Sources of Effectiveness and Democracy in Global Governance.” ENSURED Research Report, no. 1 (April): 1-48. https://www.ensuredeurope.eu.
*This is one of three literature reviews on global governance. Read the other two reviews to learn about the robustness of international institutions and the EU's support for international institutions.
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