The Design of International Institutions: the Organizational-Cybernetics Approach

Abstract

My target in the present text is to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of the
study of international institutions’ design. To achieve this goal I critically
review the existing literature on the topic and outline three key reasons for
which I believe much of the work on institutional design to be theoretically
problematic, and for which any meaningful progress of the study of design
as a research programme is unlikely. I argue that we can overcome these
problems by returning and sticking to the original concept of institutions as
mechanisms for transmission of information that was formulated in the
institutional theory in international relations. On the basis of this concept
we can develop a research programme on institutional design that takes
seriously the basic realist findings about the power nature of international
politics. Besides this, by focusing on the information transmission function
of institutions we open the space for application of the potentially highly
relevant findings from the area of the so-called organizational cybernetics
to the study of international relations. With their help new methods for
diagnosis of the institutions’ functions can be developed and important new
empirical and theoretical findings can be achieved.