International organizations, it is sometimes said, are always designed to prevent the last war. An analogous problem besets economic institutions. The inability of some existing international economic organizations to deal with the current problems in their domains is all too apparent. Two of the institutional pillars of the postwar Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. (GATT), were shaken in 1971 and are still suffering from severe malaise. The political and economic conditions that led to their formation at the end of the Second World War have changed, calling into question the political and intellectual foundation upon which they were constructed. In the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis, meetings of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and a special session of the General Assembly have been the scene of demands by poor countries for a new economic order, but the meaning of the phrase has been ambiguous and the formula has impeded rather than promoted agreement.

This essay seeks to make the following points: (1) The search for holistic intellectual constructs to legitimate the construction of international regulatory regimes is fruitless if it is based on some notion of naturalness suggested by science itself. The purposes to be served by the use and regulation of science and technologies cannot be subordinated to the scientific attributes of the activities to be regulated. (2) Darwinian evolutionary propositions concerning survival imperatives are not adequate guides for the definition of political purposes governing the international regulation of science and technology. (3) If holistic constructs are not fruitful as organizing devices entirely disaggregated and fragmented solutions to technological problems are self-defeating in terms of achieving political purposes. What kind of knowledge do we have to suggest the creation of cognitive links among parts which add up to wholes consistent with political purposes as units-to-be-regulated? The identification of links demands a closer type of cooperation among technical experts and political decision makers than practiced hitherto. Hence a notion of the public interest is advanced to suggest the identification of links through new types of institutions and procedures for combining scientific with political knowledge. (4) Wholes to be identified through such processes can be analyzed in terms of the language of complexity and decomposability, leading to various notions of interdependence. Political purposes and technological developments are discussed jointly to show how a given concern can be characterized by different kinds of interdependencies at different times. “Interdependence” then emerges as a multi-dimensional and dynamic device for identifying wholes. (5) Various types of interdependence are matched to various forms of international organizational cooperation and the evolution of organizations is examined in terms of learning to manage interdependence. (6) By combining organizational forms with changing political purposes we arrive at provisional wholes called “technology-task-environments” which permit the scientist and the politician to contribute jointly to the management of interdependence issues triggered by changing technologies and scientific ideas until the evolving mix of knowledge and purpose leads them to construction of alternative (but equally temporary) wholes.

The inherited international regimes for the ocean, outer space, and the weather-based largely on the principles of open access and free use-are inappropriate to the emerging needs in these realms for efficient and equitable allocation of resources and for conflict management. Neither a substantially greater exercise by national governments of management authority, nor a marginalist approach to increasing the authority of functionally-specific international institutions will suffice. A major commitment to expand and strengthen processes of international accountability among the users of these realms is required. Institutional targets for the mid-1980s should include a comprehensive ocean authority; an outer space projects agency; a global weather and climate organization; and an international scientific commission on global resources and ecologies. Transitional strategies, of a marginal and functionally-specific nature, however, will be required in the meantime, directed toward internationalizing information on the nonterrestrial realms, drawing the relevant actors into consultative arrangements, and limiting current unilateralist trends.

This volume is one by-product of the Travel and Maintenance Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, begun in 1969 to stimulate academic interest in the study of international organizations from a variety of perspectives involving new international issues and processes. Growing out of a long-standing Endowment concern with the United Nations and the UN system, the program has sought to create links among the scholarlycommunity in a number of disciplines to develop a focus on changes in the international system that result in apparent shifts in political allegiance away from the territorial state. The program has been supported on a matching basis by the Ford Foundation