Very informative, thanks! The “tribalism” section does leave some unanswered questions, which only grow when you look at the actual (very complicated) org chart of the EU. Designing an international organization that doesn’t fall prey to gridlock, doesn’t fall apart, doesn’t get pushed aside, doesn’t gain too much power and so on seems like a fascinating problem. Do you have any thoughts about this?
If I knew. Different international organizations exhibit different kind of failures. For example, for UN it may be the failure to agree, but for EU, as the recent vaccination story shows, agreement can be achieved, but execution may lack. The problem is compounded by the fact that institutions evolve in lockstep with the common knowledge (trust in the institutions and such) and thus exactly the same institutional design may produce vastly different results when applied to different countries or organizations. In the end, the only way to approach this, in my opinion, is to take a concrete organization, choose a specific malfunction and dive deep into nitty-gritty details to find out what’s wrong and how it can be solved. Not very enlightening, I know.
All that being said, there’s one thing in the article that seems to generalize, namely, the “two layer approach”, that is agreeing on the solution to the coordination problem first (on political level), solving concrete issues afterwards (on technical level). The approach is so simple that it can be even expressed in game theoretical language. At the same time it nicely takes into account human psychology (the tendency to use everything at hand as a bargaining chip) and aligns with existing institutional designs (politicians are involved in step 1, bureaucrats in step 2). What’s interesting to think about is whether this approach of solving inadequate eqilibria can be somehow built into our existing institutions.
Very informative, thanks! The “tribalism” section does leave some unanswered questions, which only grow when you look at the actual (very complicated) org chart of the EU. Designing an international organization that doesn’t fall prey to gridlock, doesn’t fall apart, doesn’t get pushed aside, doesn’t gain too much power and so on seems like a fascinating problem. Do you have any thoughts about this?
If I knew. Different international organizations exhibit different kind of failures. For example, for UN it may be the failure to agree, but for EU, as the recent vaccination story shows, agreement can be achieved, but execution may lack. The problem is compounded by the fact that institutions evolve in lockstep with the common knowledge (trust in the institutions and such) and thus exactly the same institutional design may produce vastly different results when applied to different countries or organizations. In the end, the only way to approach this, in my opinion, is to take a concrete organization, choose a specific malfunction and dive deep into nitty-gritty details to find out what’s wrong and how it can be solved. Not very enlightening, I know.
All that being said, there’s one thing in the article that seems to generalize, namely, the “two layer approach”, that is agreeing on the solution to the coordination problem first (on political level), solving concrete issues afterwards (on technical level). The approach is so simple that it can be even expressed in game theoretical language. At the same time it nicely takes into account human psychology (the tendency to use everything at hand as a bargaining chip) and aligns with existing institutional designs (politicians are involved in step 1, bureaucrats in step 2). What’s interesting to think about is whether this approach of solving inadequate eqilibria can be somehow built into our existing institutions.