Fragmentation or Convergence? Institutional Overlap in Global Governance and the Design of Intergovernmental Organizations

In many issue areas of world politics, international cooperation is governed by a dense
network of overlapping institutions. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are at the core of this
networked global governance architecture. Yet, we know little about how this environment of
institutional overlap affects the design of IGOs. The dominating narrative conceives overlap as
giving rise to fragmentation which, fueled by state and IGO behavior, intensifies over time. The
result, an ever-increasing fragmentation of global governance. However, this view is incomplete.
Drawing on theories of inter-organizational relations and networks, we argue that overlap can
provide the basis for isomorphic dynamics in global governance whereby states design new IGOs
using the design profiles of existing organizations that engage in the same issue areas and perform
the same functions for the same member states as templates, leading to the convergence of
institutional designs. We identify two pathways through which design convergence may emerge
among overlapping IGOs: Emulation and institutional learning. To test our argument, we introduce
a new measure of institutional overlap in global governance and new data on the institutional design
and governance tasks of the 534 IGOs contained in the Correlates of War Project’s IGO data.
Contrary to most qualitative assessments of institutional overlap in global governance, we establish
descriptively that overlap among IGOs has been declining over the past decades. We then conduct
statistical analyses which support our argument and emphasize the importance of developing more
nuanced theories about the consequences of institutional overlap in global governance.