While most scholars of criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro attribute its origins to the prison-based factions which formed during the military dictatorship (1964–85), this chapter argues that these arrangements emerged before, in the homes and on the streets and alleyways of the city’s favelas and housing projects. This chapter investigates these origins by focusing on the first embryonic gangs in Complexo da Maré in the 1970s. Combining archival research with oral histories of longtime residents, the chapter documents the emergence of Maré’s gangs after a variety of other non-state actors that had previously provided governance were increasingly marginalized during Brazil’s military dictatorship and as the abusive practices of police became more widespread. Maré’s incipient gang networks quickly began to compete over valuable drug-selling turf and, as the more successful ones consolidated territorial control, they expanded their organizations and governance activities. The chapter concludes with a description of the history of Rio’s prison-based factions and the marriage between these two organizational forms as the favela-based gangs integrated into these citywide networks.

This chapter focuses on the governance practices of the Comando Vermelho gang that has controlled Complexo da Maré’s most populous favela, Parque União, for more than three decades. Like their CVNH allies, CVPU has been part of the CV faction for this entire period. And yet, their governance styles have diverged considerably. CVPU evinces a less chaotic evolution as they have remained, aside from several years at the turn of the millennium, a social bandit regime. Overall, the absence of an active rival threat has produced a gang that employs far lower levels of coercion than their counterparts while active enforcement has incentivized CVPU to provide significant benefits to residents. This chapter traces the evolution of these dynamics through a combination of oral histories with residents and gang members, analysis of newspaper archives and anonymous denunciations, as well as participant observation during the author’s time living in Maré.

The third of Maré’s gangs, Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), controls an enormous territory, encompassing ten contiguous neighborhoods with an estimated population of 68,000 residents, more than twice that of Maré’s Comando Vermelho-connected gangs. Moreover, TCP’s turf has changed significantly over time as the gang has lost and won territory through violent battles with several rivals, which have had horrifying consequences for both gang members and residents. This chapter also shows how the nature of enforcement against gangs can shift radically as TCP developed highly collaborative relations with the police especially after 2009. The chapter traces these developments in TCP’s historic territories as well as the housing projects that they would control from the mid-1990s until 2002 and again after 2009. This chapter interweaves multiple types of data, including eighteen months participant observation, dozens of interviews with current and former gang members and residents, as well as journalistic accounts and denunciations to an anonymous hotline, to trace how TCP’s shifting security environment has shaped their governance practices over time.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the concept of informality as a crucial legal concept for the understanding of trilogues. It begins from a twofold observation. First, the informal nature of trilogues is stated in black and white in a significant variety of legal instruments. Secondly, the role of legal scholarship is to make sense of that unequivocal characterization. Drawing on institutional theory, this chapter argues that informality is a full-blown concept of EU law, and it sets about defining its characteristics. To that end, it compares trilogues with two other informal bodies, namely the Euro Group and the Informal Council meetings. The core idea of this chapter is that the codification of informality translates into legal terms the intention of the institutions to protect certain spaces from an excessive penetration of legal normativity. This intention, in turn, is indicative of the desire to preserve those spaces for the emergence of powerful social frameworks where genuine exchanges among actors may occur; exchanges that should be conducive to compromise.

Chapter 2 expands on economic drivers of welfare nationalism, the long-term structural trends that produced a “toxic mix of immigration and austerity,” which in turn drove exclusion of migrants in Europe and Russia after 2000. It identifies causes for the post-1990 explosion of international migration in both regions: the collapse of communist governments, rapid expansion of the European Union, and multiple crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The motivations and scale of the three major exclusionary migrations to Europe and Russia are covered. The chapter then turns to structural decline of labor markets and welfare states over recent decades. It tracks growing labor precarity s because of increases in non-standard and informal employment, growing exclusion of nationals from social insurance systems, and welfare state retrenchment. The 2008 global financial crisis, the 2011 Euro Crisis, and the recessions in Russia after 2012 are shown to further drive austerity. The chapter connects nationals’ welfare losses with grievances and appeals that are prominent in welfare nationalist discourse. . Declines in social security and welfare of nationals are shown to affect politics, alienating European electorates from mainstream parties and leaving postcommunist societies disillusioned with the West.

Does the US administration exercise more informal influence over the World Bank when it has less control over US bilateral aid because of opposition from Congress? Replicating four studies of the World Bank, we show that years with a divided US government account for earlier findings of informal influence. This link between donor domestic politics and the exercise of influence in multilateral settings is important for understanding informality in international organizations and provides an alternate explanation to persistent questions about the role of international organizations in the international political economy.

Complex global and regional governance includes both the informality of governance institutions and informality around those institutions. National governments are only one category of actor, though an important one, among a more heterogeneous group of governors. The dynamics and evolution of globalization over time explain the emergence of complex governance in recent decades, an explanation that is complementary to those based on functionalism or domestic politics. Globalization alters actor incentive structures and reduces border effects, allowing nonstate and subnational actors to collaborate and reducing costs of participation in governance. Globalization has empowered actors: Emerging economies, INGOs, and MNCs. Globalization's future will continue to shape the prospects of complex governance.

Why do states choose informal organizations to govern global challenges? Using the global development regime as a piloting case, this article argues that different informal organizations serve different purposes. Informal intergovernmental organizations generate “club benefits” for member states, which arise from executive policy coordination behind closed doors. In contrast, transnational governance initiatives allow states to reap “risk-sharing benefits” in the production of global public goods by involving stakeholders. Using regression analysis for a set of development-related institutions, the analysis demonstrates that the two types of organizations are driven by different motivations. Complementary evidence is provided through case studies of two institutions: The IBSA Dialogue Forum (an informal intergovernmental organization) and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (a transnational public-private partnership). The findings inform conceptual discussions of the informality of institutions while contributing to a better understanding of the design determinants of informal organizations.

We assess the development of informality in international climate policy on two levels: Whether informal organizations meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation, and what role informality plays under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Proliferation of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) has enabled the move from a rigid list of countries with and without commitments, to the Paris Agreement, under which each country contributes to mitigation. Within the UNFCCC process, we find a “formality-informality cycle,” in which actors sometimes render rules and procedures more flexible and hence more efficient, only to suddenly reverse this trend at other times. Such a high-profile reversal occurred in Copenhagen in 2009. Subsequently, through the use of highly transparent negotiation procedures, trust in informality increased again, allowing negotiators to successfully override Nicaragua’s opposition in Paris in 2015. Similar formality-informality cycles can be observed on specific topics within the UNFCCC negotiations, such as international market mechanisms.

Understanding contemporary global governance requires a focus on informality. States increasingly govern through informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational public–private governance initiatives, and other informal institutions. Even within formal institutions, informal practices complement or override formal rules. And diverse informal groupings operate in the orbit of governance institutions, framing novel issues and placing them on policy agendas. We address these three aspects of informality – of, inside, and around global governance institutions. We first trace the nature and extent of the shift toward informal governance. We then consider a range of factors that may be driving the shift, drawing on major streams of International Relations (IR) theory; we treat these as candidate explanatory variables. Finally, we summarize the findings on those variables, and other theoretical insights, from the empirical chapters of this volume.

Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.

Although states of most types receive distinct advantages when they formalize their cooperation through public, legally binding agreements, we argue that absolute monarchs are uniquely able to capture personal benefits from secret, cartel-like cooperation. Domestic decision-making in absolute monarchies is unchecked, nontransparent, and highly personal, and these norms reproduce themselves at the international level when absolute monarchs cooperate with each other. We assess the explanatory strength of our theory through two in-depth case studies. First, we examine how the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian monarchs used informal agreements strategically during the Concert of Europe to suppress domestic unrest. Second, we explore how the Iraqi, Jordanian, and Saudi monarchs used secret agreements to counter domestic pro-republican sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Irrespective of geography, religion, and time period, the nontransparent and unilateral manner with which absolute monarchs implement domestic policies facilitates and encourages this type of informal cooperation.