Project Details
Projekt
VARICRIS: Crisis variations and their impact on international organizations' governance capacities
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560272666
Contemporary crises often transcend national borders and policy areas, calling for enhanced governance capacity of international organizations (IOs). Yet, only some transboundary crises lead to an increase in the authority and resources of IOs while others even diminish them. For example, the European Central Bank (ECB) gained new competences during the European sovereign debt crisis while the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was hampered in implementing its mandate during the Ukraine crisis. What explains this varia-tion in outcomes? Extant theories of international relations (IR) provide rather uniform and par-tially contradictory expectations that focus entirely on the supply-side of institutional design and member state preference constellations. This project argues that systematic attention to variation in crisis perceptions must be taken into account. It offers two key contributions to that end. First, it builds a novel mid-range theory of crisis effects on IO governance capacity by combining insights from IR theory with public administration (PA) arguments that highlight var-iation in the intensity, temporal dynamics, and transboundariness of public crisis perceptions, and refines this theory through exploratory case studies. Second, it enables comprehensive comparative analyses of crises by developing an original text-as-data technique to capture varying crisis perceptions in large news agency corpora across the globe and various policy areas between 1992 and 2024. Based on this measure, the project can test its theoretical propositions quantitively by linking crisis characteristics to measures of IO governance capaci-ty. We thus shed new light on the ability of IOs to coordinate and guide behavior in managing transboundary crises, which is crucial for both scholars conceptualizing and policymakers aim-ing to implement more resilient crisis management systems.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
