Contextual Design: Existing Intergovernmental Organizations and New Transnational Governance

I offer a systematic account of the creation and design of transnational public-private governance
initiatives (TGIs) in which states and/or intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) cooperate with business
and civil society actors. I argue that states take into account the characteristics of the institutional
context within which a new governance initiative will be situated when deciding whether to create a
TGI and, if they decide to do so, how formal its institutional structure will be. States seek to minimize
transaction costs and institutional redundancies and leverage the benefits of the complementarities of
different institutional designs. As a consequence, TGIs are less likely when pre-existing IGOs perform
similar functions in similar issue areas. If TGIs are created, similar prior IGOs incentivize states
to choose low levels of formalization to benefit from the flexibility of informal governance. I test
these arguments using a new dataset on 636 TGIs and 534 IGOs created in the period 1815 to 2017.
The results support my expectations and have implications for the study of transnational governance,
regime complexes, and global governance.