Abbott, Genschel, Snidal & Zangl – International Organizations as Orchestrators

What Is an International Organisation For When It Cannot Command?

Abbott and colleagues start from an institutional reality that is easy to overlook: international organisations are often expected to influence outcomes while possessing limited authority, resources and direct control. Their concept of orchestration describes how such organisations can work through intermediaries and networks to achieve goals that they cannot deliver hierarchically themselves. This provides a useful lens for international development organisations whose comparative advantage may increasingly lie less in owning implementation and more in connecting actors, knowledge and capability across systems. An organisation working on climate resilience might generate frontline evidence, connect it to government decisions, help form coalitions, support project preparation and bring appropriate capital into the system without needing to control every intervention that follows. The danger is that “orchestration” can become a flattering description for organisations that merely convene others while avoiding accountability for outcomes. Its value therefore depends on whether intermediaries actually acquire greater capacity, decisions change and the system can perform something it previously could not. Perhaps the future test of an international development organisation is not how much activity it directly controls, but what becomes possible among other actors because it was present.

Source: Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal & Bernhard Zangl, eds., International Organizations as Orchestrators, Cambridge University Press, 2015. View the book