Ole Jacob Sending

“Ambassador, you’re really spoiling us!” Diplomatic gifts and profligate autocrats

Qatar’s “unconditional” gift of a $400 million Boeing 747-8 to Donald Trump serves as a reminder that states have long used diplomatic gifts to impress others, forge bonds, and secure favorable treatment. However, in an age where citizens and media outlets routinely scrutinize public spending, there is good reason to think that not all governments are able to justify lavishing large sums on such interactions. In this paper, we test the claim that autocracies are less constrained in their diplomatic gift giving due to an absence of domestic accountability mechanisms. To evidence this, the authors draw on a dataset of diplomatic gifts presented to U.S. presidents from 2001 to 2018. The results show that autocratic regimes systematically spend more on diplomatic gifts than do democracies. Supplementary analyses suggest that this is, in part, due to new media in democracies being able to criticize profligate diplomatic practices. Interviews with Norwegian diplomats corroborate the importance of domestic media scrutiny in shaping diplomatic gift giving. The article contributes to scholarship that probes the relationship between regime type and public spending, by showing its relevance to diplomatic interactions.

Governance by indicators and the re-politicisation of expertise

States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.

Search costs in global governance

To navigate global governance, policymakers need to adjudicate how they should allocate their scarce resources to organizations and networks that can best fulfill specific governance tasks. Given growing regime complexity, and the rise of private transnational regulatory organizations in multiple issue areas, policymakers are faced with a task that is insufficiently captured in existing research on global governance. It concerns the need to identify and assess which governance options, offered by what actors, are best suited to advance a particular set of interests. These interests are not limited to considerations of what is the most effective governance solution, but also include “political” interests in maintaining alliances and status hierarchies in terms of deciding on who to govern with. On this basis, we suggest that in addition to the conventional focus on sunk-, transaction-, and opportunity costs, what we call “search costs” are growing in importance for policymakers: Policymakers can rely less on publicly mandated intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) with control over an issue-area and must identify and assess different governance options provided by IGOs, NGOs, private regulatory actors. In so doing, both considerations of legitimacy (e.g. multilateral v minilateral models) and effectiveness (e.g. hard v soft governance models) as well as alliances and partners must be considered. We outline our search costs framework and provide examples of the hidden (search) costs of global governance and identify why it matters. For scholars, it is important to understand what increased complexity entails for states. For policy-makers it is important to strengthen awareness and develop frameworks that can aide in assessing and choosing best-fit governance arrangements that match both concerns with effectiveness and legitimacy, as well as status-concerns and alliances.

Regional organizations, global governance and the EU

The US is distancing itself from institutions it has been central in establishing, and recent crises like COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Gaza conflict have raised critical questions about the future direction of international cooperation and global governance. This report sheds light on the role of regional organizations as a key component of global governance. It offers detailed analyses of the historical evolution and contemporary functioning of key regional organizations and discuss their role in fostering multilateral decision-making.

India in the Multilateral System: UN, Bretton Woods and Club Governance