Book:
Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Description: Transforming International Institutions illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in international institutions and organizations. Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. It highlights how early participants in a process who do not foresee the transformative potential of their acts, nonetheless enable subsequent actors to push change in new directions to profound effect. Graham deploys the framework to explain how changes in UN funding rules in the 1940s and 1960s—perceived as small and made to solve immediate political disagreements—ultimately sidelined multilateral governance at the United Nations in the twenty-first century. The perception of funding rules as marginal to fundamental principles of governance, and the friendly orientation of change-initiators toward the UN, enabled this quiet transformation. Challenging the UN's reputation for rigidity and its status as a bastion of egalitarian multilateralism, Transforming International Institutions demonstrates that the UN system is susceptible to subtle change processes and that its egalitarian multilateralism governs only a fraction of the UN's operational work.
The book is available for purchase in paperback, hardback and e-book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and directly from OUP.
A review in The Review of International Organizations by Ronny Patz is here.
For an overview of the book's empirical scope and its policy implications, see my book launch event hosted by the Stimson Center.
For a summary of the book's policy takeaways, here is a post at Columbia SIPA's Multilateralism in Action blog.
You can find a discussion of the book on the New Books Network hosted by Dr. Miranda Melcher here.
Refereed articles & chapters:
2022. "Knowing How to Give: IO Funding Knowledge and Public Preferences for Aid Delivery Channels" (with A. Burcu Bayram). Journal of Politics 84(4): 1885-1898.
2021. Climate Crisis. In The Oxford Handbook of International Political Economy. Edited by Jon Pevehouse and Leonard Seabrooke.
2020. Emergent Flexibility in Institutional Development: How International Rules Really Change. (with Zoltan Buzas). International Studies Quarterly. 64(4): 821-833.
2020. Power, Control, and the Logic of Substitution in Institutional Design: The Case of International Climate Finance.* (with Alexandria Serdaru) International Organization. 74(4): 671-706.
Co-winner of the APSA International Collaboration Section's Best Paper Award for 2020.
2017. Follow the Money: How Trends in Financing are Changing Governance at International Organizations. Global Policy. 8(S5): 15-25. Special Issue: Resourcing International Organizations.
2017. The Institutional Design of Funding Rules at International Organizations: Explaining the Transformation in Financing the United Nations. European Journal of International Relations. 23(2): 365-390.
2017. Financing the United Nations: Explaining Variation in How Donors Provide Funding to the UN."(with A. Burcu Bayram) The Review of International Organizations. 12(3): 421-459.
2017. The Promise and Pitfalls of Assembled Institutions: Lessons from the Global Environment Facility and UNAIDS. Global Policy. 8(1): 52-61.
2015. Money and Multilateralism: How Funding Rules Constitute IO Governance. International Theory. 7(1): 162-194.
2015. Efficient Orchestration? The Global Environment Facility in the Governance of Climate Adaptation (chapter with Alex Thompson) in Kenneth Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal and Bernhard Zangl, eds. International Organizations as Orchestrators. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2014. International Organizations as Collective Agents: Fragmentation and the Limits of Principal Control at the World Health Organization. European Journal of International Relations. 20(2): 366-390.
2014. The Communication of Ideas Across Subfields in Political Science (with Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden). PS: Political Science and Politics. 47(2):468-476.
2013. The Diffusion of Policy Diffusion Research in Political Science (with Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden). British Journal of Political Science. 43(3):673-701.
Working papers (selected)
"Making Peacekeeping Possible" (presented TWIIGG, Philly, fall 2023)
"Climate Governance before Climate Change" (circulated for Complexity in Time workshop, Geneva, spring 2024)
"The Role of International Organizations in De-Risking Climate Investments" (with Sonia Zhang)(to be presented at APSA 2024)
"Scaling IO Performance" (with Eleonor Jones, Imara Salas, and Paul Winters), presented ISA 2022.
Bike Lanes as Threats to Sovereignty: Explaining the Origins of the Anti-Agenda 21 Movement in the United States* (with Gwen Ljung-Baruth)