Organizational Leadership and Collective Action in International Governance: An Introduction
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12245 |
| Author | Adrienne Héritier,Aseem Prakash,Barbara Koremenos,Eric Brousseau |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
Organizational Leadership and Collective
Action in International Governance: An
Introduction
Aseem Prakash
University of Washington
Adrienne H
eritier
European University Institute
Barbara Koremenos
University of Michigan
Eric Brousseau
Paris-Dauphine University
This symposium grew out of a workshop organized by
the European University Institute, Florence in 2013. The
main motivation of this endeavour is to think systemati-
cally about the role of agency in global governance
within the collective action perspective. Collective action
is at the core of governance and policy studies (Ostrom,
1998). Institutions, as rules of behaviour facilitating and
restricting actors’interactions, influence the initiation, the
sustenance and the success of collective action (North,
1990). However, the structural bent in the institutionalist
research program has not adequately addressed, and
sometimes even ignored, the role of leaders in the emer-
gence, working and efficacy of institutions.
Leadership can be exercised by individuals as well as
organizations. This symposium focuses on political
leadership exercised by organizational actors –state,
international organization and private authority organiza-
tion –and how this political leadership mitigates
collective action problems and thereby shapes gover-
nance outcomes.
Leaders can be viewed as political entrepreneurs who
bring together actors with different preferences and
interests with the objective to facilitate the collective
pursuit of a common agenda (Schelling, Schneider and
Teske, 1992; Moravcsik and Katzenstein, 1998; Hix and
Høyland, 1999). The other actors participating in collec-
tive action might pay heed to leaders because leaders
can supply positive or negative incentives (Burns, 1987).
Sometimes, actors placed in specific organizational roles
emerge as leaders because, unlike their predecessors,
they are willing to exercise the power and authority that
the organizational position vests in them. Leaders need
not always have dramatic persona and lead the charge
sitting on a beautiful stallion!They can be humdrum,
routine actors that seek to deploy available resources in
creative ways to facilitate collective tasks.
Our focus is on the role of organizational actors (and
sometimes individuals in these organizations) in resolv-
ing collective action problems. Much of the literature
attributes collective action problems to either structural
attributes of the problem (the nature of the game such
as cooperation or coordination problems) or the prefer-
ences/attributes of the actors involved (such as the dis-
tribution of benefits and costs). The role of specific
organizational actors in resolving collective action issues
remains underexplored (hegemonic stability theory
being a notable exception). This symposium explores
how specific organizational actors work within these
structural constraints within a specific institutional con-
text and change either the nature of the game or the
calculus of actors facing this game –that is, exert
leadership.
We focus on how organizational actors, state and non-
state, might exercise leadership at the regional and/or
global level in the context of specific problem structures,
macro-economic conditions and decision making rules.
Further, these papers examine how their effectiveness is
shaped by resources at their command and the strategies
Special Section Introduction
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12245
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 3 . September 2015
234
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