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What Rationality, Whose Design and Governance How?

This article reviews two edited volumes, The Rational Design of International Institutions (hereafter Rational Design) and Power in Global Governance (hereafter Global Governance), published by Cambridge University Press. Both volumes represent important landmarks in the scholarship on international institutions and global governance. Within the time that has passed since their publication, they have become key texts on the reading lists of students of International Relations and are widely cited in scholarly papers. The two volumes together provide useful and even reassuring indicators of progress within our discipline. While they represent the two ends of an analytic spectrum, with papers clustering at the rationalist end in one case and the constructivist end in the other, none of the authors in these volumes resort to crude caricaturing of the other side, nor do they replay a great debate of paradigms. The Rational Design volume is tighter and more focused than the Global Governance collection. But while remaining committed to the central assumptions and questions driving the project, the editors of the former commendably invite Alexander Wendt to engage with the project from an ‘external’ perspective. Their tone in a subsequent response that they present to a critique by John Duffield is constructive and open-minded: ‘We hope that the project will stimulate researchers in competing traditions to engage the important institutional questions that arise from their perspectives. We expect these results will both complement and challenge our Rational Design perspective.’