The Design of International Organizations.Fostering Diplomatic Deliberation?

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Whether we look at constitutions, founding treaties, or the rules of procedure of states and International Organizations (IO), it is striking that many rules on interaction between actors create room for deliberation, whilst simultaneously limiting the time available for discussion. While the latter might speed up decision making, it could risk reducing its quality and legitimacy. The initial project answered two research questions: How strongly does the institutional design of IOs seek to induce diplomatic deliberation and why do IOs differ in this respect? How extensively do diplomats engage in deliberation in practice and why does diplomatic deliberation vary between IOs and over stages of a policy-cycle? In the first stage the project answered these two questions thereby providing novel and important insights into IO institutional design and the actual usage of institutional rules. The project extension zooms into the nexus between design, actor practices and IO performance. It will shed light on the effects of deliberative institutional design and deliberative diplomatic practices on four different components of IO performance, namely on IO output performance (number of policy decisions taken in a given period of time), on the speed of IO decision-making (efficiency), on IO problem-solving ability, and on IO legitimacy. Thus, unlike in the initial project that examined how and why IOs differ with respect to their deliberative institutional design and the diplomatic deliberative practices, the research design of the one-year project extension is x-centered. It examines the following core research question: How and under what conditions do institutional design provisions and deliberative practices impact IO performance? Based on this core question, the project will answer subsequent questions. These encompass the following ones: Which institutional design elements and which diplomatic practices have strong positive impacts on IO performance and under what conditions do they reinforce each other? How are IOs ideally institutionally configured in order to foster high levels of performance? Is there a tradeoff between some of the components of IO performance, so that deliberative design and practices can only increase one component (e.g. legitimacy) at the expense of others (e.g. speed of decision-making)?