International institutions vary widely in terms of key institutional features such as membership, scope, and flexibility. Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal argue that this is so because international actors are goal-seeking agents who make specific institutional design choices to solve the particular cooperation problems they face in different issue-areas. Using a Rational Design approach, they explore five important features of institutions--membership, scope, centralization, control, and flexibility--and explain their variation in terms of four independent variables that characterize different cooperation problems: distribution, number of actors, enforcement, and uncertainty. The contributors to the volume then evaluate a set of conjectures in specific issue areas. (This book is Volume 55, part 4 of International Organization.)

International Organizations as Orchestrators reveals how IOs leverage their limited authority and resources to increase their effectiveness, power, and autonomy from states. By 'orchestrating' intermediaries - including NGOs - IOs can shape and steer global governance without engaging in hard, direct regulation. This volume is organized around a theoretical model that emphasizes voluntary collaboration and support. An outstanding group of scholars investigate the significance of orchestration across key issue areas, including trade, finance, environment and labor, and in leading organizations, including the GEF, G20, WTO, EU, Kimberley Process, UNEP and ILO. The empirical studies find that orchestration is pervasive. They broadly confirm the theoretical hypotheses while providing important new insights, especially that states often welcome IO orchestration as achieving governance without creating strong institutions. This volume changes our understanding of the relationships among IOs, nonstate actors and states in global governance, using a theoretical framework applicable to domestic governance.

International Organizations as Orchestrators reveals how IOs leverage their limited authority and resources to increase their effectiveness, power, and autonomy from states. By 'orchestrating' intermediaries - including NGOs - IOs can shape and steer global governance without engaging in hard, direct regulation. This volume is organized around a theoretical model that emphasizes voluntary collaboration and support. An outstanding group of scholars investigate the significance of orchestration across key issue areas, including trade, finance, environment and labor, and in leading organizations, including the GEF, G20, WTO, EU, Kimberley Process, UNEP and ILO. The empirical studies find that orchestration is pervasive. They broadly confirm the theoretical hypotheses while providing important new insights, especially that states often welcome IO orchestration as achieving governance without creating strong institutions. This volume changes our understanding of the relationships among IOs, nonstate actors and states in global governance, using a theoretical framework applicable to domestic governance.

The Governor's Dilemma develops a general theory of indirect governance based on the tradeoff between governor control and intermediary competence; the empirical chapters apply that theory to a diverse range of cases encompassing both international relations and comparative politics. The theoretical framework paper starts from the observation that virtually all governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. But governors in indirect governance relationships face a dilemma: competent intermediaries gain power from the competencies they contribute, making them difficult to control, while efforts to control intermediary behavor limit important intermediary competencies, including expertise, credibility, and legitimacy. Thus, governors can obtain either high intermediary competence or strong control, but not both. This competence-control tradeoff is a common condition of indirect governance, whether governors are domestic or international, public or private, democratic or authoritarian; and whether governance addresses economic, security, or social issues. The empirical chapters analyze the operation and implications of the governor's dilemma in cases involving the governance of violence (e.g., secret police, support for foreign rebel groups, private security companies), the governance of markets (e.g., the Euro crisis, capital markets, EU regulation, the G20), and cross-cutting governance issues (colonial empires, "Trump's Dilemma"). Competence-control theory helps explain many features of governance that other theories cannot: why indirect governance is not limited to principal-agent delegation, but takes multiple forms; why governors create seemingly counter-productive intermediary relationships; and why indirect governance is frequently unstable over time.

The Governor's Dilemma develops a general theory of indirect governance based on the tradeoff between governor control and intermediary competence; the empirical chapters apply that theory to a diverse range of cases encompassing both international relations and comparative politics. The theoretical framework paper starts from the observation that virtually all governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. But governors in indirect governance relationships face a dilemma: competent intermediaries gain power from the competencies they contribute, making them difficult to control, while efforts to control intermediary behavor limit important intermediary competencies, including expertise, credibility, and legitimacy. Thus, governors can obtain either high intermediary competence or strong control, but not both. This competence-control tradeoff is a common condition of indirect governance, whether governors are domestic or international, public or private, democratic or authoritarian; and whether governance addresses economic, security, or social issues. The empirical chapters analyze the operation and implications of the governor's dilemma in cases involving the governance of violence (e.g., secret police, support for foreign rebel groups, private security companies), the governance of markets (e.g., the Euro crisis, capital markets, EU regulation, the G20), and cross-cutting governance issues (colonial empires, "Trump's Dilemma"). Competence-control theory helps explain many features of governance that other theories cannot: why indirect governance is not limited to principal-agent delegation, but takes multiple forms; why governors create seemingly counter-productive intermediary relationships; and why indirect governance is frequently unstable over time.

Why do institutions emerge, operate, evolve and persist? Institutional Choice and Global Commerce elaborates a theory of boundedly rational institutional choice that explains when states USE available institutions, SELECT among alternative forums, CHANGE existing rules, or CREATE new arrangements (USCC). The authors reveal the striking staying power of the institutional status quo and test their innovative theory against evidence on institutional choice in global commerce from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Cases range from the establishment in 1876 of the first truly international system of commercial dispute resolution, the Mixed Courts of Egypt, to the founding and operation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, and the International Accounting Standards Board. Analysts of institutional choice henceforth must take seriously not only the distinct demands of specific cooperation dilemmas, but also the wide array of available institutional choices.

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Arguably the most impressive collection of international relations scholars ever brought together within one volume, the Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. The Handbook takes as its central themes the interaction between empirical and normative inquiry that permeates all theorizing in the field and the way in which contending approaches have shaped one another. In doing so, the Handbook provides an authoritative and critical introduction to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations will be essential reading for all of those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.