New Organizational Leadership: Nonstate Actors in Global Economic Governance
| Author | Jack Seddon,Walter Mattli |
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12242 |
New Organizational Leadership: Nonstate
Actors in Global Economic Governance
Walter Mattli and Jack Seddon
Oxford University
Abstract
States and international organizations have found irresistible cause in a globalizing world to coopt nonstate actors
(NGOs, private standard setters and so forth) to manage the manifold problems arising under their stretched man-
dates and resources. The pooling of capacities in the pursuit of common goals seems perfectly sensible. Yet
although the strategy of cooptation has become a policy of choice, policy makers often lack full knowledge of its
implications. As Philip Selznick first showed, cooptation can have unintended consequences, shifting leadership from
one organization to another. We place this fertile insight in a better specified analytical framework. That is, one
capable of explaining when and how leadership shifts occur and where the status quo leaders will remain at the
helm. Using original interview data and structured focused comparisons to test the framework, we reveal dramatic
variation in leadership changes following the cooptation of outside actors in global financial and environmental
governance.
Leadership in international governance has long been
associated with the ability of hegemonic or dominant
states to define or shape the ‘rules of the game’in a
wide range of issue areas and make critical contribu-
tions to resolving collective action problems to the satis-
faction of most. Leading states, for instance, have
sponsored intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that
possess regulatory competence, operational capacity
and legitimacy to tackle cooperation challenges –and
many of these IGOs have emerged as powerful organi-
zational leaders in their own right. Increasingly, how-
ever, these international organizational leaders have
come to realize that they often lack the technical exper-
tise and resources to expeditiously deal with ever more
complex and urgent collective action challenges in the
global economy. In response, IGOs –frequently with
state support –have coopted a wide range of nonstate
actors to help achieve their goals. Such cooptation has
become a strategy of choice, enabling IGOs to efficiently
and effectively deliver regional or global public goods
and services. The significance and pervasiveness of such
cooptation in transnational governance has been little
recognized; the distributional consequences of coopta-
tion are even less understood. While cooptation benefits
all participating organizations, some will benefit more
than others. Crucially, cooptation may have unintended
consequences, shifting leadership from one organization
to another. We explain when such shifts are likely to
occur and why.
1
The origins of the concept of cooptation
The concept of cooptation was coined by organizational
sociologist Philip Selznick in his landmark study on the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) (Selznick, 1949). He
developed certain themes from this book further almost
a decade later in Leadership in Administration (Selznick,
1957). An important common thread in these works is an
effort to identify the true locus of power and decision
when institutional alliances and partnerships are created.
The TVA was created by US Congress in 1933 and
charged with the duty of planning for the use, conserva-
tion and development of the natural resources of the
Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining terri-
tory. When Selznik studied the TVA in 1942–43, he
observed an organization that operated in ways and
areas quite different from those envisaged by its foun-
ders. He attributed these deviations to a series of unin-
tended consequences that resulted from the leadership’s
decision to enter into cooptation arrangements.
Selznik defines cooptation as ‘the process of absorbing
new elements into the leadership or policy-determining
structure of an organization’as a means of maintaining
relevance and effectiveness in providing public goods
and services (Selznick, 1949, p. 13). He distinguishes two
types of cooptation, depending on the nature of the
problem to be solved: formal and informal cooptation.
Formal cooptation occurs when the legitimacy of the
authority of a governing group or agency is called into
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12242
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 3 . September 2015
266
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