Friedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.

This article argues that opportunities for unilateral influence within international bureaucracies create a delegation problem akin to that in coalition governments. Parties in coalitions that suspect each another of diverting from the coalition bargain avail themselves of mechanisms, such as junior ministers and parliamentary scrutiny, to monitor their coalition partners’ actions within the executive. Similarly, states that suspect cooperating partners of abusing their unilateral influence within the bureaucracy employ mechanisms, reminiscent of those in coalition governments, in order to ‘keep tabs’ on one another. I illustrate the plausibility of this claim using the case of the European Commission. However, this delegation problem of interstate control can be expected to apply more widely. The article has implications for the study of international organization, international delegation and informal governance.

The efficiency-oriented part of the literature on informal governance points to institutional costs as a reason for governments to prefer to cooperate with each other through commitments that are not binding. Left unexplained is what I call the dilemma of informal governance: how informal governance copes with the problem of cheating, to which formal governance has traditionally provided the solution. I show that like-mindedness, the current solution to the dilemma, is convincing but underspecified. Working from a model of governance encompassing the three time-honored dimensions of obligation, precision, and delegation, I analytically explore two other solutions, one that fails, information transmission, another that works, outside option, which I borrow from the power-oriented part of the literature on informal governance. A key finding is that informal governance, despite being neither self-enforceable nor informative, is sustainable for mild Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) types in the presence of outside options. I illustrate the model findings by tracing an historical correlation between power polarization and formalism in the design of security regimes.

According to principal-agent theory, states (the principals) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states impede control and consequently enhance the agent's autonomy, whereas agreement allows for effective control and limited autonomy. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this article argues that conflicts among states need not always impede effective control. On the contrary: if an international organization comprises a sufficient number of policies, there are gains from the exchange of control over its portfolios that are of special sensitivity to different member states. As a result, international organizations exhibit informal spheres of national control, or national fiefdoms. The article demonstrates the theory's plausibility using the example of the European Union and other international organizations. It has implications for the literature on delegation and informal governance.