The Politics of Contender Institutions in International Regime Complexes (POLCON)

• Applicant: Dr. Benjamin Daßler
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523112465

The way states coordinate and govern political issues on the international level has changed profoundly throughout the last decades. Driven by the geopolitical transformations since the end of the Cold War in many issue areas new intergovernmental arrangements have been created with overlapping or complementing functions of pre-existing international institutions. Virtually all domains of global governance today are organized in arrays of 'overlapping and partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions governing a particular issue-area' Within these complexes, states can select among a set of institutional alternatives competing for authority. As a result of this growing density of regime complexes, many formerly central and uncontested legacy institutions today find themselves in a state of institutional competition with alternative multilateral arrangements. Yet, we know very little about the actual intentions and strategies of these newly created IOs once they entered preexisting regime complexes. When and how do these newly created institutional actors decide to cooperate with legacy institutions, when do they decide to compete? To gain a foothold in their regime complex, what strategies do newly created competitor institutions adopt? When and how do these strategies vary across issues and over time? Taking an organizational, cross- policy area perspective, POLCON will provide empirical as well as theoretical answers to these questions by systematically analyzing the inter-institutional politics of newly created competitor institutions over time and space. To reach this overarching goal, a vast amount of original quantitative and qualitative data covering inter-institutional activities in four different issue areas (Financial Stability, Development Aid, Energy Governance, and Security) will be collected and analyzed drawing on open and on-demand available data from International Organizations (IOs) as well as interviews with IO officials and government officials from member states.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants