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In December 2021, the EU member states agreed on the Global Gateway strategy to mobilize public and private funds of up to €300 billion between 2021 and 2027, to invest in digital, climate and energy, transport, health, education, and research fields. With a geographical focus on Africa, Global Gateway links infrastructure investment projects with condition principles—including democratic values, good governance, and transparency—and catalyzes private investment into EU development financing. Against this backdrop, this study explores why EU member states agreed on this new geopolitical instrument. This piece posits that the confluence of three factors enabled the creation of Global Gateway. First, the EU established this new instrument to counter China's role as a global infrastructure lender in Africa. Second, Global Gateway was possible through the shift to private investment in multilateral development financing. Equally important for the establishment of Global Gateway was the European Commission's transformational leadership as an entrepreneurial agent in designing this geopolitical strategy of the EU's power projection. The conclusion outlines future research avenues and enables readers to consider the wider prospects and caveats of the Global Gateway strategy.

During TTIP negotiations, the European Commission was severely criticized by civil society organizations and public opinion for its secrecy regarding negotiation strategies and priorities. The Commission responded by making some negotiating texts publicly available. This article explores the implications of increasing transparency in trade negotiations. Drawing on negotiation, politicization, and informal governance literature, it examines how the Commission's choice for a partial transparency approach had three paradoxical effects on negotiations. First, greater transparency did not help the public perception of TTIP. Second, greater transparency increased the EU's bargaining leverage but led to a low degree of negotiating discretion for the Commission. Finally, greater transparency transformed the nature of the negotiating process by making it more informal, allowing bargaining parties to act outside the public scrutiny. This contribution solves these transparency puzzles by showing that partial transparency is a double-edged sword. Whilst greater transparency has become an important legitimation strategy in EU trade governance, adopting a partial transparency approach fuelled public protest instead of muting it and led to the failure of the negotiations.

How can we explain the EU's policy failure during the refugee crisis? In this contribution, I argue that EU policy failure was a function of four causal mechanisms. First, a complex delegation design with partial empowerment of supranational institutions on migration and asylum policy issues hindered an effective response and strengthened disintegration dynamics. Second, a reluctant European Commission was unable to provide leadership during the refugee crisis. Third, Member States' inability to speak with a single voice negatively impacted their external and internal effectiveness and reinforced disintegration dynamics. Finally, this cacophony of voices led to unilateral action eroding the authority of the Commission and explains EU policy failure during the refugee crisis. The findings of this paper suggest that the mantra that the EU undergoes many crises but always emerges stronger has lost plausibility.

Over past decades, the World Bank has been criticized by scholars, policymakers, and civil society groups for being unaccountable and inefficient. Confronted with this wave of contestation, the Bank established several internal accountability mechanisms, including the Inspection Panel, the Independent Evaluation Group, and the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman. Against this background, this article investigates how the proliferation of accountability mechanisms in a large and complex organization such as the World Bank reduces rather than enhances transparency and lines of accountability. I argue that the establishment of a myriad of accountability mechanisms has paradoxically made the Bank even more encapsulated and less accountable to the outside world. Unpacking the differential effects of external and internal accountability mechanisms makes this contribution of significant interest to scholars working on the accountability and performance of international organizations.

Under which conditions are principals able to regain control when agency slack has occured? While existing research highlights a number of important factors related to the conditions under which agents engage in slack, scholars have to a less extent investigated which causal mechanisms affect the ability of states to regain control of their errant agents. Extending the principal–agent literature, this contribution argues that the ability of principals to regain control of their agents depends on three causal mechanisms: the type of monitoring mechanisms; the extent of fragmentation within an international organization; and the credibility of sanctions available to member states. To illustrate this argument, I compare two cases of agency slack: at the European Commission during the Eurozone crisis in 2015; and at the World Health Organization in the 1990s. The findings suggest that regaining control of runaway agents after slack has occurred is easier when there is a low level of fragmentation within an organization and states have centralized monitoring mechanisms and credible sanction mechanisms, such as budgetary contractions, at their disposal.

One key question in the study of the European Union has always been the extent of Commission discretion. We take the discretion index, typically used by principal–agent scholars to measure the Commission's designed discretion, to measure its actual discretion. Commission designed discretion can today be computationally generated with sufficient accuracy across all secondary acts. The study of designed discretion thus reaches considerable maturity. Therefore, we argue that scholars should prioritize studying Commission actual discretion. We present a systematic and transparent investigative technique based on the discretion index, which we use as a roadmap to guide our empirical investigation. The index facilitates the accumulation of knowledge across policy areas and time by providing exact values for Commission discretion. We illustrate our approach with the Development Cooperation Instrument.

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability - that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of 'epistemic communities' and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise.

AbstractRecent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability – that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of 'epistemic communities' and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise.

The international economic system that emerged after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference became the most durable international arrangement devoted to economic openness. Seventy-five years after the conference, however, global shifts in power, institutional gridlock, and populist backlash figure prominently in accounts predicting the system's demise. This article examines the legacies of the Bretton Woods conference for structures and practices of global economic governance and innovations that emerged over time to adapt the system to new political and economic circumstances. It explores how and why the Bretton Woods system became a more variegated system over time with respect to four features of governance: membership, legalization, organizational focality, and market embeddedness. It identifies sources and effects of expanding membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the emergence of new formal and informal institutions, the challenges of a more fragmented institutional landscape, and shifts in the underlying principles of economic governance. Finally, the article discusses lessons from past crises in and reforms to the Bretton Woods system, and their implications for understanding recent challenges to global economic cooperation.

The landscape of multilateral development finance has changed dramatically in the past decades. At Bretton Woods, delegates envisioned the World Bank as the focal organization mobilizing financial support for national development strategies. Today, this issue area is populated by no less than 27 multilateral development banks including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank created under Chinese leadership. This paper shows that, despite this institutional proliferation, the development finance regime remains largely coherent and core governance features designed at Bretton Woods continue to shape the emerging regime complex. We develop a historical institutionalist argument for why newly created institutions are likely to imitate extant institutions. We suggest that states add new institutions not only in response to deficiencies in extant institutions but also to increase their control and reputation. We analyze three causal pathways – path-dependence, orchestration, and independent learning – that contribute to a coherent regime complex. We show that focal international organizations can use their position to prevent incoherence.