(Page 5 of 30) - Banana Splits: Nested and Competing Regimes in the Transatlantic Banana Trade Dispute authored by Alter, Karen.

Even though all nations in the world are increasingly entangled in multiple

international commitments, the issue of institutional nesting has not yet been the object of
many studies in political science. One can find references to nesting in different
literatures with a focus on two distinct issues: 1) typologizing differences in types of
institutions; 2) thinking about the choice of forum that institutional nesting creates. This
paper proposes a third focus: 3) thinking about how the existence of nesting itself
generates a distinct type of politics.

1. Literature Typologizing International Institutions and their Politics

The nesting of international institutions is itself an artifact of the different types of

international institutions that exist. The fact that there are regional institutions defined by
membership (NAFTA, EU, ASEAN, etc), encompassing institutions (UN), and
functionally-specific institutions (WTO, Lomé, WHO, etc) creates the possibility that a
country can find itself to be a member of institutions with overlapping and/or nested
jurisdictions. That some of these institutions are “emanations”—“second-order IGOs
created through actions of other Inter-governmental Institutions (IGOs) of other
institutions” (Shanks, et al., 1996:594)-- also creates the possibility of nesting. A number
of scholars have hypothesized that different types of institutions themselves generate
different politics.

Scholars have noted that these different types of institutions—encompassing,

functional, regional, and emanations-- have different attributes. For example, in a study
that tracks the creation and dissolution of IGOs from 1980-1992, Cheryl Shanks, Harold
Jacobson and Jeffrey Kaplan find that statistically speaking institutions that are
emanations are created more often than first-order institutions, and dissolved more
readily than IGOs created from scratch. They surmise that politics is different regarding
emanations compared to first-order IGOs. Because “emanations” are created by politics
within the IGO itself, emanations are perhaps easier to create than IGOs created from
scratch. Also decisions about the design and mandate of emanations are not controlled to
the same extent by the most powerful states as are IGOs created from scratch. Because
the functional role of the emanated institution can be reabsorbed into the encompassing
IGO, emanations may also be somewhat easier to eliminate (1996).

Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks create a different typology in which there are

multiple, potentially overlapping, institutions. They emphasize a crucial distinction
between “type I governance” and “type II governance.” “Type I governance systems” are
federal systems where multiple levels of governance institutions are embedded into
national systems of hierarchy. Type II governance systems lack a federal hierarchy to
resolve conflicts. While domestic systems can in theory also have Type II governance
structures, a crude cut one could take is that the difference between Type I and Type II
governance is itself, in large part, the difference between domestic and international
politics. Each type of governance has different characteristics that will affect politics
within each system. Type I governance has institutions with general purpose
jurisdictions, with non-intersecting memberships, a limited number of jurisdictional
levels, and a system-wide architecture that helps resolve conflicts across levels. A key
political difference is that type I systems are often rooted in communal identities, and
Type I politics is oriented towards voice (expressing dissent within the system rules of