GDAE Working Paper No. 09-01 Resources, Rules and International Political Economy
been constructed around the problem of collective action and the challenges to achieving
international cooperation. Thus, a major strand of IPE scholarship was over the dynamics
of “international regimes,” the formal and informal arrangements established by countries
to establish order and achieve international cooperation.4
Scholars of IPE working from varying analytic perspectives offer different
solutions to the problem of cooperation. Structuralists (also called “realists”) emphasize
the role of dominant countries to either supply public goods and essentially permit others
to free-ride on their efforts or to impose order by punishing free-riders.5 Institutionalists
(also called “liberals”) emphasize the cooperation-enhancing effect of information
provided by procedures and rules and context.6 Constructivists focus on the importance
of ideas, the emergence of norms, and the role of experts in generating common causal
visions of the world.7 In this chapter I extend the first of these two perspectives,
structuralism and institutionalism, to the topic of international cooperation in “North-
South” economic relations.
In applying regime analysis to North-South relations, the first thing to emphasize
is that the metaphor of the prisoners’ dilemma - and the underlying assumption of
common interests - may not be appropriate for the task at hand. With many of the issues
of salience in a North-South context, actors’ interests and the larger context of strategic
interaction are different from in the traditional IPE approaches noted above. Different
types of economic issues have different political characteristics, and the “deep
integration” issues introduced in the UR have different implications for economic
development and thus inter-state politics than standard issues of trade.8 The sorts of rules
on IP and investment, for example, that developed countries promote on behalf of their
firms are unlikely to be embraced by developing countries, and the sorts of policy
approaches that many developing countries would prefer are likely to be resisted by their
counterparts in the “north.” In the subsequent sections I shall explain the underlying
cleavages on IP and investment; for now the key point is simply that the distributional
conflicts in these issue-areas are more accentuated and intense than in standard IPE.
Indeed, the political challenges are not so much how to achieve collective action but how
to reconcile conflicting and often incompatible interests. As many scholars have noted,
placing too much attention on how countries achieve international cooperation risks
masking the distributive implications of cooperative outcomes.9 The substantive issue-
areas analyzed in this chapter call for a focus on the more starkly distributive dimensions
of international cooperation.
Structuralists and institutionalists bring different tools and emphases to bear in
analyzing conflict resolution. The former focus on the distribution of resources as the
determinant of countries’ strategies and the underlying power differentials among
countries, while the latter focus on the constraining effects that rules and context have on
countries’ strategies and forms of behaviour. Actors have conflicting interests, and those
with the most “power” prevail, of course - but what determines which actors have more
or less “power?” To answer that question, structuralists look at the material resources that
actors have at their disposal, and institutionalists emphasize rules and procedures.