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Political leadership and regime formation: on the development of institutions in international society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Oran R. Young
Oran R. Young
Affiliation:
Research Professor of Government, Senior Fellow of the Dickey Endowment for International Understanding, and Director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Northern Studies, Wolcott, Vermont.
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Abstract

Leadership plays a critical but poorly understood role in determining the success or failure of the processes of institutional bargaining that dominate efforts to form international regimes or, more generally, institutional arrangements in international society. An examination of the nature of institutional bargaining serves as a springboard both for pinpointing the role of leadership in regime formation and for differentiating three forms of leadership that regularly come into play in efforts to establish international institutions: structural leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, and intellectual leadership. Because much of the real work of regime formation occurs in the interplay of different types of leadership, the study of interactions among individual leaders is a high priority for those seeking to illuminate the processes involved in the creation of international institutions. Not only does such a study help to explain the conditions under which regimes form or fail to form, but it also provides an opportunity to bring the individual back in to an important area of international affairs.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Summer 1991 , pp. 281 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1991

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References

This article originated in a presentation prepared for the 1989 annual meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System. It evolved during 1990 into a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association and a presentation developed for a joint Harvard/MIT seminar on international institutions. For constructive comments and advice, I am indebted to several anonymous reviewers as well as to Stephen Krasner, Gail Osherenko, and the members of the research team that has worked over the last two years on a project funded by the Ford Foundation and entitled “International Cooperation in the Arctic: The Politics of Regime Formation.”

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26. For an account that stresses the importance of preventing the emergence of blocking coalitions, see Sebenius, “Negotiating a Regime to Control Global Wanning.”

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28. For a general account of entrepreneurial leadership under such conditions, see Frohlich, Norman, Oppenheimer, Joe A., and Young, Oran R., Political Leadership and Collective Goods (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

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