Chapter 7 concludes Making International Institutions Work. It opens with a brief review of the main findings and the role of each stage of the empirical investigation in establishing them. I then discuss the book’s contributions to international relations, international political economy, and political science as well as other fields of social science. The third section draws out lessons for policy and practice. I identify a variety of stakeholder-specific strategies for safeguarding policy autonomy and promoting accountability reforms, contributing to a lively ongoing debate among academics and practitioners over how to achieve an effective and accountable global institutional architecture. Finally, I reflect on the book’s implications for some notable emerging issues in global governance – including responding to international crises and challenges to the modern liberal order – outlining promising avenues for further research.

Chapter 4 begins the qualitative portion of the empirical examination. I conduct an in-depth comparative case study of the three central pillars of global food security governance: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). I begin by detailing the matching strategy used to identify these institutions, documenting their similar levels of several possible determinants of performance and policy autonomy. The bulk of the chapter traces how differences in de facto – but not de jure – policy autonomy have set the institutions on divergent performance trajectories: The WFP and IFAD are autonomous and widely recognized as effective, whereas the FAO is state-dominated and notorious for performance problems. Rather than formal design features, I locate the origin of this variation in the institutions’ distinct governance tasks and patterns of operational collaboration with non-state actors. Interviews and archival data gathered during fieldwork at the institutions’ Rome headquarters adduce key pieces of evidence in this process-tracing exercise.

This chapter elaborates the book’s theoretical framework. It proceeds in three stages. First, based on a microfoundational analysis of the incentives facing states and international bureaucrats, I make the case that the former are more liable than the latter to engage in opportunistic behavior that imperils institutional performance. Second, I flesh out the concept of policy autonomy, explaining how its different components provide the basis for gains in performance and why it cannot be reliably established and maintained through institutional design. Third, I explore the true origins of policy autonomy, elaborating the causal mechanisms by which (certain types of) operational alliances and governance tasks insulate bureaucrats against state capture. The chapter concludes by summarizing the framework’s observable implications at the macro and micro levels.

Chapter 3 subjects the theory’s macro-level hypotheses to statistical tests based on a comprehensive new dataset: the Performance of International Institutions Project (PIIP). It begins by describing the PIIP’s scope, contents, and sources. The empirical analysis is divided into four sections. The first examines the relationship between performance and policy autonomy. I find a positive association when policy autonomy is measured using a survey of international bureaucrats, a proxy for de facto policy autonomy, but no relationship when it is measured using formal rules, a proxy for de jure policy autonomy. The second section turns to the determinants of de facto policy autonomy, showing that the survey-based measure is positively predicted both by the quantity, depth, and breadth of operational alliances and by the exercise of governance tasks with high monitoring costs for states. In the third section, I employ a simultaneous equations strategy to isolate the effect of performance and de facto policy autonomy on one another. The fourth section summarizes a battery of robustness checks.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.

Chapter 5 presents the book’s second comparative case study, which examines four major global health agencies: the World Health Organization (WHO); the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). The structure of the examination is analogous to Chapter 4’s. After enumerating the characteristics on which the four institutions are matched, I chronicle how differences in their de facto policy autonomy have given rise to disparate performance outcomes: The WHO and UNAIDS have been characterized by relentlessly declining autonomy and performance over their life cycles, Gavi and GFATM by the opposite trends. I then delve into the operational origins of these differences, which, once again, defy a purely design-based explanation. Like Chapter 4, the case study draws on extensive interviews and archival material.

Why do some international institutions succeed and others fail? This opening chapter introduces the subject of Making International Institutions Work. It begins by describing the motivation behind the book, presenting striking examples of differences in the performance of international institutions, explaining why such variation is puzzling for conventional theories of international cooperation, and highlighting its growing substantive importance. I then define the book’s two central concepts – international institutions and institutional performance – clarifying the precise scope of my analysis. This is followed by a brief review and critique of relevant literature. The last three sections provide an overview of the book’s argument, research design, and structure.