An ever more entangled Union? The European Union’s interactions with global governance institutions

ABSTRACT

Contemporary global governance is characterized by a diversity of institutions. The European Union (EU) interacts with these institutions in multiple ways. Despite their importance, the interactions of the EU with different types of global governance institutions have remained underexplored in EU scholarship. The papers in this special issue address this research gap. They map the EU’s interactions with different types of global governance institutions. They also explore the factors that explain patterns of interactions. In this introduction, we develop a common analytical lens that unites the contributions to the special issue and identify our main research questions. We map different types of global governance institutions and discuss the ways in which the EU interacts with them. We also bring together the main insights from the individual contributions and discuss avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• global governance
• inter-organizational interactions
• institutional complexity

Introduction

Scholarship on global governance has proliferated. It has described the many different global governance institutions that aim to address transnational and global problems (Lake 2010). It shows that many issue areas of global politics, such as trade, climate change, and global health, that were once governed by relatively distinct rulesets and few organizations, are today regulated by multiple institutions that overlap and interact with one another in various ways. Consequently, the evolution and effectiveness of international institutions are fundamentally shaped by how they relate to other institutions operating within their policy domains (Raustiala and Victor 2004; Alter and Raustiala 2018; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Westerwinter 2022).

The governance of global health serves as an example. Here, problems are no longer governed by intergovernmental organizations alone, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Instead, governance occurs in an institutional complex which consists of diverse institutions that overlap and interact in multiple ways. This includes the WHO but also a plethora of formal and informal institutions with diverse memberships, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. Similarly, the climate change and international trade regimes consist of many different types of global institutions which develop rules to address climate change, govern trade, or try to link both issues. Extant work has mapped and described some of these regime complexes (Raustiala and Victor 2004; Davis 2009; Keohane and Victor 2011; Betts 2013). These studies find that over the last two decades, one can observe an exponential growth of new global governance institutions which interact with one another to address global challenges. These interactions have important consequences for inter-organizational relations and the governance of global challenges in the twenty-first century.

The European Union (EU) is a prominent part of this web of entangled global governance institutions and its position within this web shapes its foreign policy, how it can influence other global governance institutions, and ultimately its ability to contribute to addressing global challenges. Extensive research has analyzed the EU as a global actor from the perspective of the EU itself and how it positions itself in the world. This has resulted in different conceptions of the EU as a global actor, including as a ‘normative’ power (Manners 2002), ‘market’ power (Damro 2012), and ‘structural’ power (Keukeleire and Delreux 2015).

These studies aim to understand how the EU seeks to influence the global order through the diffusion of norms, ideas, and standards. Less attention has been given to the extent and the specificities of the EU’s involvement in global governance processes, how it interacts with different types of institutions, and how it operates within them. More recent research has examined the relations between the EU and various multilateral institutions in different sectors of global politics (Schunz, Damro, and Gstöhl 2018). However, these works focus on the EU’s interactions with specific organizations and focus less on how the EU interacts in different ways across international organizations and global governance institutions. Moreover, the concept of inter-organizational interactions remains underdeveloped in these works and only little attention is given to operationalization and empirical measurement. No research exists that systematically maps the EU’s embeddedness in the broader ecology of global governance institutions, how it interacts with different types of global governance institutions, and how these interactions can be conceptualized.

This special issue addresses this research gap. It focusses on the interactions of the EU with other global governance institutions as the unit of analysis. In doing so, we treat the inter-organizational interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions as the dependent variable. The interactions between the EU and other institutions that are involved in governing global problems are an important feature of global governance. On the one hand, given the increasing complexity of global politics, better understanding and explaining patterns of inter-organizational interactions is important in its own right. This is especially so given the broad interest of scholars and practitioners alike in inter-organizational coordination, cooperation, and conflict (Henning 2022; Westerwinter 2022; OECD 2021). On the other hand, advancing our understanding of inter-institutional interactions in global governance is important because it is a key driver of other critical outcomes in world affairs, such as the performance, effectiveness, and efficiency of multilateral institutions (Biermann and Koops 2017). An advanced understanding of the EU’s interactions with other global governance institutions is also key for a more complete analysis of the EU’s contributions to global governance and its influence on other institutions that govern world affairs.

The papers in this special issue map the EU’s interactions with different types of global governance institutions. They investigate the EU’s relations with both formal and informal global governance institutions. They also explore the factors that explain patterns of inter-organizational interactions. We find that the EU engages with a diverse set of global governance institutions, but with different degrees of intensity and in different forms. This variation is shaped by a complex set of factors at the unit and dyad level of analysis and the contributions to the special issue identify different drivers of inter-organizational interactions across these levels of analysis.

Collectively and individually, the papers make important empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of the EU’s role in global governance. First, they go beyond case studies and introduce analyses based on a range of novel datasets and quantitative methods which shed light on how the EU interacts with different global governance institutions. They also employ mixed-method research designs that combine case study and statistical analysis. Second, theoretically the contributions advance our understanding of the concept of inter-organizational interactions in global politics and what drives these interactions.

The remainder of this introduction proceeds in four steps. The next section introduces the concept of inter-organizational interactions. Section three discusses different types of global governance institutions and how the EU interacts with them. It also introduces the contributions of the special issue linked to these different types of institutions. In section four, we zoom in on the main contributions of the special issue, focusing on the interactions between the EU and formal intergovernmental organizations as well as the EU and other types of global governance institutions. The final section concludes by highlighting areas for future research on the EU’s involvement in complex global governance.

EU inter-organizational interactions as dependent variable

The EU interacts with other global governance institutions in a variety of ways.¹ We define inter-organizational relations or interactions broadly as ‘the interaction(s) between two or more organizations’ (Biermann and Koops 2017, 3). Inter-organizational interactions may occur in a range of configurations, from dyads and triads to larger organizational clusters to entire organizational fields and networks. They can take place among formal intergovernmental organizations, informal institutional arrangements, public-private governance initiatives, or a mix of different institutional forms (Abbott and Faude 2022; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Westerwinter 2022). Interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions may take a range of forms, including overlapping memberships, information exchange, flow of financial resources, joint projects, joint policy making, regulatory download and upload, as well as more permanent institutional interactions, such as partnerships, secretariat provision, or observer status (Tokhi, this issue; Roger, this issue; Westerwinter, this issue; Kreienkamp, Pegram and Coen, this issue; Saz-Carranza, Vandendriessche, Nguyen and Agell , this issue).

Based on the contributions to this special issue, we identify two dimensions across which inter-organizational interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions may vary: the intensity of interaction (depth and frequency) and the formality of interaction (from formal to informal). While these dimensions are not the only lines along which interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions may vary, they constitute fundamental features of inter-organizational relations that have been highlighted in the existing literature as consequential for organizational and other outcomes (Biermann 2008; Biermann and Koops 2017; Betts 2013).

First, the EU’s inter-organizational interactions may vary in their intensity in terms of depth and frequency (Biermann and Koops 2017). The EU may, for example, exchange information with some organizations more than others or engage in a larger number of joint projects with some organizations compared to others. In their analysis of cooperative and conflictive interactions between the EU and 36 formal intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), Saz-Carranza et al. (this issue) document the different frequencies with which the EU interacts with other IGOs across years, finding striking variation between the most frequent interlocutors, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and less frequently interacting organizations, such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Likewise, in his analysis of EU membership and observer status in 33 formal IGOs between 1957 and 2013, Tokhi (this issue) shows that the EU has become deeply involved in the formal decision-making of some IGOs (e.g. WTO, FAO), while it has maintained only informal relationships with other organizations. Similarly, membership overlap may be more pronounced with some organizations than others (Reinsberg and Westerwinter 2022).

Second, inter-organizational interactions may vary in terms of their level of formality (Betts 2013). The EU may be a member or founder of a global governance institution (Roger, this issue; Westerwinter, this issue) and therefore formally linked to that institution based on a written agreement or institutionalized framework (Westerwinter, Abbott and Biersteker 2021). By contrast, with other global governance institutions it may only maintain irregular informal interactions in terms of information exchange or ad hoc funding. As a result, the interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions vary across the formal-informal spectrum. This applies to formal IGOs (Saz-Carranza et al., this issue), informal IGOs (Roger, this issue), transnational regulatory networks (Jordana, Holesch and Triviño, this issue), and transnational public-private governance initiatives (Westerwinter, this issue).

The contributions to this special issue unpack how the EU interacts in different ways and degrees with different global governance institutions. They also seek to explore the factors that might explain these different forms and degrees of interactions. Based on existing literature and the contributions to this special issue, we begin to theorize the drivers of variation in the EU’s inter-organizational interactions. While some of these factors are rooted in rationalist theories of international organizations, others are based on works on inter-organizational relations and more constructivist understandings of organizations. Different contributions to the special issue focus on different factors. Together, they provide a basis for a better understanding of the EU’s inter-organizational interactions which can guide future research.

We start to systematically theorize the drivers of the EU’s interaction with other global governance institutions by distinguishing broadly between factors at two levels of analysis: the dyad and the unit or organizational level of analysis. The dyad level of analysis has already received some attention in research on inter-organizational relations in world politics (Biermann 2008; Biermann and Koops 2017). Here, we build on regime complexity literature and identify the overlap of memberships, issue areas, and governance functions as important possible driver of interactions between the EU and other global governance institutions (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Westerwinter 2022; Reinsberg and Westerwinter 2022). We expect overlap in all three dimensions to increase the likelihood of inter-organizational interactions and to facilitate the frequency of interactions. Whether or not these interactions can be expected to be of a cooperative or conflictive nature is less clear based on extant works. One group of authors highlights that inter-organizational overlaps constituting room for cooperation (Henning 2022). Others emphasize the tensions and conflicts that can arise from overlap in form of competition for state support, resources, and legitimacy (Hofmann 2009; Gehring and Faude 2013). In this special issue, Saz-Carranza et al. show that the interactions of the EU with other IGOs may be of a cooperative as well as a conflictive nature and that different factors shape different types of interactions. Most recently, scholars have argued for a non-linear relationship between overlap and inter-organizational collaboration (Westerwinter 2022).

At the unit or organizational level, a broad range of factors may enable or otherwise incentivize the EU to interact with other global governance institutions. Most fundamentally, resource dependence theory points us to resource requirements of the EU to achieve its goals (Biermann and Harsch 2017). The EU may reach out to other institutions to tap into their material and other resources and employ them for its own purposes (Abbott et al. 2015). Beyond resources, regulatory requirements may drive the EU to interact with international institutions and either implement their rules into its domestic context or try to shape international rules in line with its own policies (Kreienkamp et al., this issue). Finally, organizational culture and legitimacy requirements may point the EU outwards and make interactions with other institutions attractive (Biermann and Koops 2017).

Types of global governance institutions and issue areas

We assess the EU’s engagement with different types of global governance institutions. We identify four types of institutions which we will briefly introduce here to frame the contributions to this special issue; namely, formal intergovernmental organizations, informal intergovernmental organizations, transgovernmental networks, and transnational public-private governance initiatives. We further deepen our analysis of the EU’s engagement with global governance institutions through three issue area case studies related to trade, investment, and climate change.

Formal intergovernmental organizations

States negotiate and voluntarily enter into intergovernmental treaties or agreements with other states. In many cases, these treaties establish IGOs to implement and oversee an agreement. In these cases, the treaty typically outlines the obligations for the signatory states, the organization’s membership criteria and funding, and its mandate and rules of procedure, including rules for decision-making and enforcement. An IGO is characterized by (1) that it is established by a formal international treaty or agreement, (2) has a permanent secretariat, and (3) has states as members who are the decision-makers (Pevehouse et al. 2020).

The largest and most well-known IGOs, such as the United Nations (UN), make up the foundational pillars of the multilateral system but there are many other organizations that populate the international system. According to the Correlates of War Project’s IGO dataset, there have been around 350 formal intergovernmental organizations in operation each year between 2000 and 2014 – a number which has stayed roughly stable during this period as the number of organizations that ‘died’ and those that were newly created have been similar (Pevehouse et al. 2020).

Many IGOs allow a select group of organizations or states that are not formal members to participate as observers. Observers are given certain privileges of participation, though they are unable to vote or propose resolutions. Though the EU actively participates in multilateral cooperation and is a major funder of many IGOs, it is often unable to participate in IGOs as a formal member because of its status as a regional intergovernmental organization (Lenz 2021). Accordingly, the EU is formally recognized as an observer but not a full member of many formal IGOs, such as the UN or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), while its member states participate as full members. A small number of formal IGOs, however, have recognized the EU as a full member, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) which enables the EU to interact more intensively with these organizations (Wouters and Hegde, this issue).

Given the importance of formal IGOs in global governance and the different ways in which the EU interacts with them, two contributions to this special issue zoom in on the EU’s relationship with a range of IGOs, each using a novel dataset to analyze the interactions between the EU and IGOs. The paper by Tokhi starts from the observation that the EU has become involved in several international organizations in different capacities ranging from an observer to a full member. His paper seeks to understand under which conditions a formal IGO grants access to the EU and focuses on how interaction between the EU and the IGO is mediated by access provided by the IGO. In operationalizing access, Tokhi follows Tallberg et al.’s (2014) conception of access which not only focuses on membership but also influence. A second paper in this special issue by Saz-Carranza et al. focuses on the quantity and quality of interactions between the EU and 36 IGOs based on the Global Data Event Language and Tone (GDELT) database which allows for an analysis of the interactions between the EU and an IGO based on news items. GDELT codifies world events based on news sources and contains more than 150,000 sources in multiple languages. The authors aim to understand what determines the quality and intensity of interactions between the EU and formal IGOs focusing on three factors; namely the authority of the formal IGO, the policy overlap between IGOs and the EU, and the nature of involvement of the EU in the IGO.

Informal intergovernmental organizations

In addition to cooperating through formal IGOs, states and regional organizations participate in a variety of arrangements and forums for intergovernmental cooperation that are less formalized, such as the ‘G groups’ (e.g. G7 or G20) (Vabulas and Snidal 2013). This form of cooperation is a result of a shift from formal international law-making to informal international law-making (Pauwelyn, Wessel and Wouters 2014; Westerwinter, Abbott and Biersteker 2021).

These informal intergovernmental arrangements emerge from non-binding international agreements (e.g. memorandums of understanding) (Roger 2020; Vabulas and Snidal 2013) and lack the formal authority, autonomy, clear rules, and enforcement mechanisms commonly found in formal, treaty-based IGOs. In addition, these bodies generally do not have a secretariat or permanent staff, headquarters, or institutional structure (Vabulas and Snidal 2013), or if they do, their ‘bureaucratic footprint is light’ (Roger 2020, 3). While informal IGOs vary in terms of formality and function, to be considered an informal organization, there should be some degree of organization, such as a defined list of members and an explicitly shared purpose or goals (Roger 2020; Vabulas and Snidal 2013), collective outputs (Roger 2020), and/or regular meetings (Vabulas and Snidal 2013). Thus, informal IGOs are organizational entities with varying degrees of agency but they often lack the formal organizational structures that are characteristic of formal IGOs.

Despite their uncertain legal standing in international law (Roger 2020), informal organizations have a number of advantages and a unique role to play in global governance. First, they offer states a forum for dialogue and consensus-building that is less restrictive of state sovereignty or that offers a greater level of confidentiality (Wouters and Odermatt 2014). Further, informal IGOs can be more flexible and nimble in responding to crises or abrupt changes (Vabulas and Snidal 2013; Wouters and Odermatt 2014; Westerwinter, Abbott and Biersteker 2021), in addition to being able to take on a wider variety of topics that might fall outside the mandate of a formal IGO. Finally, informal organizations may be a desirable alternative to more formal agreements when governance is necessary but prevented by domestic constraints (Roger 2020).

The rate at which informal IGOs are being formed by states has grown substantially in recent decades, while the rate of establishing their more formal counterparts has leveled off (Vabulas and Snidal 2013, 2021; Roger 2020). In fact, Roger and Rowan (2021) estimate that the percentage of informal organizations has increased from about 5 to 15% of all international organizations after World War II to close to one third or even 40% of all international organizations today, putting the current total number of informal IGOs at more than 100. As a result, informal organizations are increasingly playing a prominent role in global governance and, if this trend continues, are likely to play an even greater role in the future. Informal organizations have a variety of interactions with other global governance actors.

The EU is involved in several informal IGOs. As Wouters, Kerckhoven, and Odermatt (2013) note, the EU has been one of the best students of the G20 in terms of following up on G20 decisions. However, on the aggregate, there are no studies which more systematically analyze the role of the EU in informal organizations. In his contribution to this special issue, Roger builds on his earlier work on informal IGOs and focuses on the interaction of formal IGOs and informal ones. He approaches the EU as a formal IGO which interacts with informal intergovernmental organizations and supports these organizations through providing key resources and services. His paper includes a quantitative analysis based on an expanded dataset on informal IGOs as well as two case studies.

Transnational regulatory networks

Third, some researchers identify horizontal and vertical regulatory networks, mainly consisting of administrators, as significant global governance institutions (Slaughter 2004; Kingsbury, Krisch and Stewart 2005). Slaughter and Zaring defined regulatory networks as ‘informal institutions linking actors across national boundaries and carrying on various aspects of global governance in new and informal ways’ (Slaughter and Zaring 2006, 215). These regulatory networks serve several governance functions and constitute important global governance ‘intermediaries’ (Jordana 2017). The rise of regulatory networks as global governance institutions is partially driven by the proliferation of different types of trade and economic cooperation agreements (Bull et al. 2015).

Within the EU, these regulatory networks have developed very quickly and have become a key governance structure which has received ample academic attention (Bach et al. 2016; Coen and Thatcher 2008; Maggetti 2014). The EU and its member states have developed in the last decades several ‘regulatory agencies’ tasked with governing specific issue areas. Regulatory agencies can be defined as public entities formally separated from governmental departments and bureaucracies which are mandated with executing regulatory tasks (Bianculli, Fernandez-i-Marín, and Jordana 2013, 9–10). Within the EU, many regulatory agencies have been set up. These regulatory agencies in turn create transnational networks between member state agencies (and sometimes go beyond EU member states). The model of regulatory agencies has diffused globally through different mechanisms (Jordana, Levi-Faur, and I Marín 2011) allowing the formation of transnational networks of regulatory agencies on a range of policy issues. Besides European regulatory agencies creating transnational networks, several regulatory networks between national agencies are created on a range of policy issues (Eberlein and Newman 2008). How the EU interacts more systematically with these transnational regulatory networks has been less researched.

Expanding an existing dataset on regulatory agencies, the paper by Jordana et al. in this special issue analyzes the involvement of the EU in transnational regulatory networks (TRNs). The authors examine the establishment of TRNs composed of national regulatory agencies. They analyze under which conditions the EU is involved in the promotion and expansion of these networks. To explore these conditions, they rely on an original dataset of TRNs established by national regulatory agencies across the world in the last 40 years in 22 different policy areas. To zoom in on the role of the EU, the authors focus on whether the headquarters of regulatory networks are based in the EU and are sponsored financially by the EU. They complement their quantitative analysis with two case-studies of global regulatory networks on food safety and energy. They identify the characteristics of the EU sponsored regulatory networks and measure their global reach.

Transnational public-private governance initiatives

Finally, non-state actors have become important actors in global governance. The past three decades have seen a significant increase in private and public-private governance initiatives and private and public-private actors have become increasingly involved in global governance (Avant and Westerwinter 2016; Abbott 2012; Abbott, Levi-faur, and Snidal 2017).

Especially relevant in the context of this special issue are transnational public-private partnerships since they involve states and sometimes formal IGOs. Public-private partnerships encompass collaborative hybrid governance arrangements between private and public entities. Though the types of initiatives that may be categorized as a public-private partnerships vary widely, initiatives that are transnational in nature and focus on providing a global public good or solving a global problem are most relevant (Pattberg et al. 2012).

Though the first transnational public-private partnerships (TGIs) may have been formed more than a century ago (Westerwinter 2021), such initiatives have grown in number and prominence in recent decades, reflecting a broader trend to engage private actors in global governance (Abbott and Snidal 2009). A mapping of TGIs by Westerwinter (2021) suggests that in 2017 there were 570 such initiatives in operation as part of the global governance architecture.

Significant research has been done on how the EU uses public-private partnerships internally (Laura et al. 2019; Liebe and Howarth 2020). Less attention has been paid to how the EU interacts with transnational public-private partnerships. In his contribution to this special issue, Westerwinter provides an analysis of the EU’s participation in TGIs based on an existing dataset (Westerwinter 2021). He focuses on the frequency of EU participation in these initiatives, in which type of TGI the EU participates, and what may motivate the EU to interact with TGIs. His paper provides the first systematic mapping of EU involvement in transnational public-private governance initiatives and explores possible explanations for the observed variation.

EU interactions in global climate, investment, and trade governance

To further explore how the EU engages in global governance, our special issue also provides case studies on specific issue areas, namely trade, climate, and investment, which are currently contested at the global level and which the EU aims to steer in a certain direction. Analyzing the ways in which the EU interacts with other global governance institutions in these areas and how it seeks to steer the governance of these three domains provides insights into the EU’s inter-organizational interactions that go beyond relations with specific types of institutions.

The issue areas of climate, investment, and trade were selected because of the important role the EU as a unitary actor consisting of 27 members can play in the governance of these domains. It has been well documented that the EU is a unique political system since it is neither a full federal state nor a pure intergovernmental regional organization (Hix and Hoyland 2011). It has characteristics of both. The EU is the most institutionalized and integrated regional organization with a set of supranational institutions having competencies to coordinate policies in various issue areas (Lenz 2021). The level of international engagement and participation in global politics is partially determined by the issue areas since the EU has different levels of competences to make policy across different areas (Wessel and Odermatt 2019). The competences conferred upon the EU are classified into three principal categories: (1) exclusive competences, (2) shared competences, and (3) supporting competences. For some issue area, such as international trade, the EU has exclusive competence, meaning that the EU institutions are the main actors in policy-making across the national jurisdictions of its member states.

For the selected case studies, we zoom in on two issue areas in which the EU holds exclusive competence and which are part of the Common Commercial Policy (Hahn et al. 2020), namely trade and investment, and one policy area in which the EU traditionally has played a leading global role (Oberthür and Dupont 2021), namely climate change. In all three issue areas, there are debates on how to reform and organize key global governance institutions. In these debates, the EU plays a leading role. All three issue area case studies explore the EU’s interactions with different types of global governance institutions and begin to explain the drivers of these interactions as well as their implications for the governance of the respective area. In their contribution on the reform of global trade governance, Wouters and Hegde (this issue) focuses on the WTO and the existential challenges it is facing with regard to further integrating developing countries into the WTO, addressing unfair subsidies, reforming its dispute settlement system, and some other issues. On all these issues, the EU interacts with the WTO and its members to advance the reform agenda. In the area of global climate governance, the EU has for a long time positioned itself as a leader by example. Kreienkamp et al. (this issue) in their contribution note that this ambition has shaped the EU's interactions with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and propelled the development of a vast body of EU policies, laws, and regulatory instruments in response to the rules developed within the climate change regime and with an aim to steer rule-making at the international level. However, they also observe that EU climate policy has not advanced consistently over time and policy outcomes have not always matched European climate leadership aspirations. Their contribution tries to understand this outcome by focusing on how multilevel interaction processes between the EU, its member states, and the international level have shaped climate policy development in the EU and explain when, why, and how non-incremental policy change has occurred. Finally, Broude and Haftel (this issue) focus on the global investment regime which comprises thousands of international investment agreements and different global arbitration institutions. Their paper first examines the evolution of the regime and pays particular attention to the ways in which the EU and its member states engage in the investment regime and the reform proposals to create a more coherent global investment regime. Concerning the latter, the paper zooms in on the debates around state’s regulatory space and how it is potentially constrained by investment agreements. The paper also examines the EU’s initiative to form a permanent multilateral investment court through the reform process led by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law.

The EU’s interactions with global governance institutions

The EU operates in a complex institutional landscape, replete with a growing diversity of global governance institutions that are spread unevenly across issue areas. However, most existing analyses of the EU’s role in global politics focus on how the EU projects itself as a global governance actor. In comparison, how the EU interacts with different types of global governance institutions and within specific issues areas has received less attention. We still know little about the degree to which – and why – the EU interacts with different classes of institutions and how it seeks to achieve its goals with greater or lesser success within different institutional fora. The contributions to this special issue aim to begin to fill this gap. Using new data and innovative methods, they try to account for the different ways in which the EU interacts with other global governance institutions. We summarize the main insights that emerge from our contributions focusing on two topics: disentangling multilateral interactions and the EU’s involvement in global governance institutions other than formal IGOs.

Disentangling multilateral interactions

Our findings confirm the EU’s varied interactions with formal IGOs. The three issue area case studies show a strong involvement of the EU at the global level to reform and transform the climate, trade, and investment regimes in order to align them more closely with EU priorities. This confirms much of the literature on the different conceptions of the EU as a ‘power’ in world affairs. Kreienkamp et al. (this issue) note the global leadership of the EU in climate. Broude and Haftel (this issue) show that the EU is a leader in current attempts to reform the global investment regime. Wouters and Hegde (this issue) detail the engagement of the EU to reform the WTO. However, all three contributions also highlight some of the limitations with which the EU is confronted which result on the one hand from dynamics among its member states and on the other hand from the Union’s interactions with the main formal IGOs in these policy domains. Kreienkamp et al. (this issue) argue that European climate policy is an outcome of complex vertical and horizontal multi-level interactions between the EU and its member states and the EU and international institutions which might enable policy innovation but can also lead to policy stagnation, contestation, and resistance. Integrating and applying a multi-level and multiple-streams theoretical framework, they show that the current internal setup of the EU’s decision-making procedures provides ample space for well-resourced veto players and policy obstructers. As a result, the international influence of the European Commission is largely determined by power shifts within domestic political systems. Only when domestic policy preferences among its members states align and political momentum arises, the EU can really play a global leadership role.

These multi-level and multiple streams dynamics also appear in the investment regime. Broude and Haftel (this issue) focus on the role of the EU and its member states in the reform of the global investment regime with a specific focus on the issue of state regulatory space. The current investment regime created international tensions on possible constraints put on governments to develop public policy in areas, such as environment, energy, health, and human rights, constraining their state regulatory space. Following the 2009 Lisbon Treaties, policy-making on investment was included in the EU’s Common Commercial Policy which originally was conceived an exclusive competence which transformed the EU into a key player in the international investment regime. However, EU member states challenged the exclusivity of the competence creating multi-level tensions and constraints. Consequently, as in the case of climate change, the EU has to operate in a three-level game (international, EU, and domestic) as Kreienkamp et al. (this issue) identify it. Contrary to the case on climate, however, they find that EU leadership is not very much constrained and the EU is likely to put its ‘’signature’ on the regime for years to come’ (Broude and Haftel, this issue, p. **) in terms of steering the debates on the reform of the investment regime.

This strong multilateral commitment is also confirmed in the contributions analyzing the EU’s interaction with multiple formal IGOs but they add important nuances and also identify the importance of ‘opportunity structures’ for the EU’s global leadership and interaction with multilateral institutions. This is most powerfully argued in Tokhi’s paper (this issue). His contribution shows how formal IGOs determine how the EU can obtain access to them, i.e. interacts with them in formal ways. He operationalizes access in terms of membership and observer status of the EU in IGOs. To become involved, the other members of IGOs have to make a decision about whether or not to give the EU formal access. While overlapping policy mandates and EU competences are one predictor of whether or not formal IGOs interact with the EU, they are not the only one. The authority of IGOs also plays an important role. Tokhi’s analysis shows a strong link between the level of authority of an IGO and the access the EU has. In other words, the gains IGOs perceive to receive from the EU also play an important role. In this way, the EU’s interactions with other types of global governance institutions do not only depend on its own interests and strategies (as suggested by some ‘power’ based approaches). They are also determined by the opportunities offered by the formal IGOs the European Union seeks to interact with.

The contribution by Wouters and Hegde adds an additional dimension to the opportunity structure which is provided by formal IGOs to the EU in order for the EU to weigh in on global governance. They zoom in on the potential and limits of the EU to reform IGOs in the area of global trade governance. The reform of the WTO has been very high on the political agenda in the last years and the EU has aspired to play a leading role in WTO reform on issues related to the flexibility of negotiations, rules on industrial and other subsidies, reduction of trade barriers, trade-development nexus, reform of dispute settlement, and strengthening the WTO as an institution. For each of these reform issues, Wouters and Hegde detail the current discussions and show how the EU interacts with other WTO members which constrain or enable to EU to pursue its reform agenda.

The analysis of Saz-Carranza et al. in this special issue touches on another dimension of the inter-organizational interactions of the EU with formal IGOs. They focus on the quantity (number of interactions) and quality (degree of cooperation and conflict of interactions) of interactions between the EU and formal IGOs based on information from the GDELT database. Concerning the latter, they use the Goldstein conflict-cooperation scale and apply this to the dyadic relations between the EU and 36 formal IGOs. They find significant variation in how the EU interacts with formal IGOs both in terms of intensity as well as in terms of conflict and cooperation. For example, the Union interacts most frequently with NATO and much less so with the WTO and the WHO. These interactions are driven by the EU’s involvement in IGOs as member or observer, the policy overlap between the Union and IGOs, as well as the level of pooling and delegation of the organization the EU interacts with. Interestingly, they find that when there is significant policy overlap, i.e. the stakes are high for both organizations involved, the interactions tend to be more conflictual.

Strong involvement in other global governance institutions

The analysis of several papers in this special issue shows that the EU interacts with a broad range of global governance institutions beyond formal IGOs and is actively promoting informal or low-cost institutions (Oliver, Abbott, and Biersteker 2021; Abbott and Faude 2020). Informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational regulatory networks, and transnational public-private governance initiatives are all part of the set of informal or low-cost institutions. These institutions are characterized by the fact that the costs of creating, managing, and exiting them are substantially lower than in the case of formal IGOs (Abbott and Faude 2020). They also provide substantial governance benefits in terms of flexibility and ease of cooperation between like-minded parties.

The EU interacts in various ways with all these types of global governance institutions and in some cases actively promotes them. The paper by Roger (this issue) shows how the EU interacts with informal IGOs, actually helping them to work better and to diffuse this model of governance to different policy areas. He shows that the EU is, by far, the most important organization which directly or indirectly provides support to informal IGOs. He argues, that well-resourced organizations like the EU can provide key resources, capacity, and services to informal organizations. This not only helps these organizations to function effectively but has also facilitates their proliferation as a global governance institution.

Likewise, the paper by Jordana et al. (this issue) shows the increasing involvement of the EU in transnational regulatory networks. Their paper shows that transnational regulatory entities are prominent forms of global governance and in some areas the dominant form of global governance institutions. They find that more than half of the regulatory networks they identified and are currently actively operating in the world have some relationship with Europe. However, the EU’s involvement is selective and often not global. The European Commission is only involved in a few of truly global TRNs. Hence, the EU is supporting directly truly global TRNs completely outside of the EU borders only sporadically. By contrast, the EU is mainly involved in regulatory networks within its borders and with its neighboring countries. Hence, in terms of participation in transnational regulatory agencies which are more regional in scope, but not limited to the EU and EU member states, Jordana et al. find that the EU interacts more frequently and intensively. These are typically networks, which include EU member states and European Free Trade Area members or which include other states, for example, in the Mediterranean area. One of the explanations the authors propose for this focuses on the contributions these networks make to the EU in terms of consolidating and expanding its regulatory standards in a vast range of policy areas.

Finally, Westerwinter in his contribution details the many transnational public-private governance initiatives in which the EU is involved and has initiated. He starts out from the observation that the EU has become significantly engaged with these TGIs for multiple reasons and tries to understand why the EU interacts with some of these institutions but not with others. Trying to unravel the different patterns of interaction, he focuses on several factors including the resources of TGIs, their organizational capacity, their geopolitical relevance, and their functional fit with EU mandates and competences. The first three factors hold most explanatory power. As a result, Westerwinter finds that the EU becomes involved in transnational governance initiatives which bring together a large number of other states and formal IGOs pointing to the importance that the EU attaches to engage in a multilateral way.

Together, these contributions show variation in the degree of interaction between the EU and other global governance institutions. There might be several explanations of the EU’s interactions with informal, low-cost institutions but probably one of the main reasons is that it allows the EU to influence global governance and bypass sovereignty sensitivities. Low-cost institutions allow flexibility on the sovereignty costs of multilateral cooperation since they imply relatively low-politics commitments. In such an environment, the EU is able to operate and initiate global initiatives without risking to collide with member states’ sensitivities. However, the EU clearly interacts more with some low-cost institutions than others. More research needs to be conducted on what explains and drives the EU’s choice of low-cost institutions. The papers in this special issue provide a fruitful empirical and theoretical basis to further pursue these research avenues.

Conclusion

In this special issue, we aim to provide a comparative perspective on the EU as a global governance actor from the perspective of the global governance institutions with which it interacts. We focus on the EU’s interactions with formal and informal intergovernmental organizations as well as transnational regulatory networks and transnational public-private initiatives. The contributions to the special issue are based on large and medium-n analyses of new and existing databases, complemented with qualitative case studies. We complement the more quantitative analyses with a focus on three key policy areas in which the EU plays a leading role. While the more quantitative parts focus on overall patterns of interactions with global governance institutions, the in-depth case studies show how internal dynamics facilitate or constrain global governance interactions of the EU. This demonstrates the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative analysis in advancing our understanding of the EU’s role in global governance.

Based on these quantitative and qualitative studies, we provide a comparative analysis of EU inter-organizational interactions with different global governance institutions both within and across specific issue areas. The analysis of interactions in particular issue areas shows that the EU is selective in its engagement with global governance institutions and that this selectiveness is not only a result of the EU’s preferences or strategies but also the opportunity structures these global governance institutions offer. The analysis with regard to formal IGOs also shows that the possibilities for the EU’s interactions with these organizations are determined by three dimensions, access provided by the organization, opportunities offered by other member states within the formal organization, and leverage provided by EU member states. These three dimensions determine the opportunity structure for the EU’s engagement with formal intergovernmental organizations.

The comparative analysis across global governance institutions shows that the EU is actively involved in setting up and pursuing global governance through informal, low-cost institutions but that this engagement differs between types of institutions. This approach diversifies the ways in which the EU interacts with the different constituent parts of the contemporary global governance architecture. This analysis suggests that the EU favors interacting with global informal, low-cost institutions which also bring together other international actors in global governance.

The goal of this special issue is not to provide or test a single theory of inter-organizational interactions in global governance, but rather to provide a set of analyses that speak to a common set of questions. More broadly, the goal is to advance the emerging research agenda on the EU’s role in world affairs and its inter-organizational interactions in global governance. The articles in this special issue suggest multiple avenues for future research. We conclude by highlighting three.

First, we suggested to focus on the EU’s inter-organizational interactions with other global governance institutions and began to differentiate interactions in terms of their intensity and formality. However, more research is needed to arrive at more nuanced conceptualizations of the EU’s global governance interactions. Importantly, future research may try to generate a typology of inter-organizational interactions in global governance which can serve as a starting point for more systematic theorizing of both the drivers and consequences of variation in patterns of interactions between the EU and other types of global governance institutions.

Second, we started to identify factors that shape variation in the EU’s interactions with other global governance institutions. We found that dyadic as well as unit level features of the EU and other institutions are important explanatory factors for differences in the intensity and formality of interactions. However, other factors are likely to be part of the picture. For example, at the system level of analysis, trends in the overall populations of global governance institutions may shape both the supply and demand for inter-organizational interactions between the EU and other institutions. Combining these factors into more nuanced multi-level theories of the EU’s global governance involvement is an important task for future research.

Third, while our analysis centers on mapping the EU’s inter-organizational interactions and its drivers, the consequences of these interactions for the EU’s role in global governance are an important avenue for future research. Do inter-organizational interactions help or constrain the EU in achieving its goals? Do these interactions provide the EU with an additional strategic tool to influence global governance and contribute to the provision of global goods? Is a more institutionally entangled Union a better Union? Future research that pursues these questions can draw on our empirical mappings and initial conceptualizations of inter-organizational interactions and combine them with literature on institutional complexity and performance in global governance to begin to generate answers to these questions. Equally important, future research may consider how these interactions shape the EU as an institution and actor. Similar to second image reverse studies in international relations (Gourevitch 1978), studies may research how different types of interactions empower some part of the EU institutional system over others or allow EU institutions to enhance their position vis-à-vis member states. Implications for EU policies may also be explored more systematically.

Taken together, this research agenda promises to bring about a more sophisticated understanding of the EU as an actor in world affairs and a central piece of the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance. Such research will also inform theories of inter-organizational relations in global politics more generally as these currently focus disproportionately on formal organizations. Finally, this research agenda can lead to a better understanding of the complex interdependencies among the EU and other global governance institutions and the effects of these interdependencies on the creation, design, and consequences of contemporary global governance arrangements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission, Horizon 2020 Project GLOBE: ‘Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios ’ [grant number 822654].

Notes

1. Different contributions to the special issue conceptualize the EU in different ways, depending on their analytical focus. While some papers treat the EU as a formal IGO and compare it to other IGOs, others consider it a supranational organization given its institutional structure and varying degrees of agency.