As states in the international system have increasingly come to recognize the need for cooperation in an ever-widening range of issue areas, international organizations (IOs) designed to engender such cooperation have proliferated. Even though these IOs are designed for cooperation, their spread has occasionally given rise to conflict: this is because multiple IOs may have something important to contribute to norm development in an issue area, but there are no established mechanisms for them to do so in a cooperative manner. At the same time, when such overlap of mandates leads to conflicts among these IOs, no clear set of rules exist on how such conflicts should be resolved. Consequently, IOs themselves have been developing a range of strategies to deal with such situations and to continue to shape global rules on issues where several organizations’ mandates overlap.
In Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rule of World Trade for Food Security, Matias Margulis seeks to shed light on this phenomenon by focusing on the behavior of four UN organizations that engaged with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) agricultural negotiations to shape global norms on food security. Each of these four focused on food security through the lenses of its own mandate and decided to act even in the absence of a clear, prescribed mechanism for such action. In this book, Margulis develops the concept of “intervention”: the use of strategies by IOs to shape global norms. In doing so, he provides readers with four detailed case studies to illustrate how an IO might intervene in the norm development in an issue area using strategies ranging from public shaming to the invocation of alternative legal frameworks.
Margulis makes it clear at the outset that no single international organization focuses on cooperation on all aspects of agriculture and food. However, several IOs have mandates that require them to focus on access to food; consequently, their work puts them on a path of conflict with other organizations. The WTO provides an illustration: although it has emerged as the platform for negotiations on trade in agriculture with the goal of adopting liberal norms that let markets mainly determine such access, several other organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF) have mandates that require them to focus more narrowly on the food security of poor states and of vulnerable populations within states. Trade liberalization in agriculture can lead to higher food prices and a decline in the supply of food aid, thereby increasing food insecurity, particularly in the developing world. The negotiations at the WTO are therefore antithetical to the goals of the other four nontrade IOs, which have subsequently inserted themselves into the agricultural negotiations at various points.
The author demonstrates that by intervening, these IOs have reshaped the agenda, changed the discourse, and influenced the outcome of these negotiations to reflect the priorities of the populations they each serve. Although none of these four organizations has advocated an end to trade liberalization at any point, they all have proposed and fought for carveouts that would preserve food security within the overall framework of the negotiations. Among strategies these organizations have used, the case studies highlight FAO’s actions in mobilizing states, WPF’s naming and shaming states whose success in the negotiations would reduce the availability of food aid, OHCHR’s invocation of an alternative legal framework. and the SRRTF’s role in tipping the balance in the negotiations by taking sides.
Although IOs are known to take self-directed action with respect to their own members, little is known on how they behave when they engage with other IOs. Margulis points out that the four UN IOs undertook action on their own and often at potential cost to themselves. In behaving this way, these IOs act as “shadow negotiators” behaving much like the actual ones who negotiate on behalf of their states. In highlighting this behavior, the book adds to our understanding of the actors and processes through which global norms are shaped.
Margulis’s research is carefully crafted. The four IOs he focuses on vary in the scope of their mandates, the size of their membership, their resources, and their modes of financing. Even though all four organizations focused on the issue of food security during past WTO negotiations, their basic mandates vary widely: whereas the FAO focuses on collecting and sharing information on food and agriculture, the WFP’s mandate is to deliver humanitarian assistance, and both OHCHR and SRRTF are mainly human rights organization, with the latter focused on the right to food. This variation suggests that the behavior Margulis observes is evident across a wide range of IOs. Beyond careful case selection, the research is strengthened by its reliance on nearly 90 semistructured elite interviews with key participants, as well as a range of primary documents.
Even as the book makes a clear contribution in describing a type of behavior by IOs that has not received attention in the literature, it raises a few intriguing questions for future research. First, in each of the cases, personalities—specifically, the heads of the respective IOs—played an important role in the decision to intervene. Would another officeholder have led the IO in a different direction? Would an OHCHR head other than Mary Robinson have led the organization with similar focus and determination? Second, the author argues that these organizations intervened often at great cost to themselves. Other than backlash from some powerful states, the book, however, does not present clear evidence of cost. It is also important to ask in this context whether inaction might also have been costly. For organizations such as the SRRTF and WFP that are tasked with protecting access to food and delivering humanitarian assistance, ignoring the possibility of rising food prices and reduced access to food for poor people would render them irrelevant; in the case of the WFP, it would have posed serious challenges to fulfilling its mandate. It is important to further acknowledge that the organizations’ core identity was tied to their decision to intervene in at least some cases. Third, although the author takes care to show that the actions undertaken by these organizations were self-directed, I would have liked to see the role played by developing countries in advocating for themselves. Indeed, most small developing countries lack resources to engage in research and develop strategies to protect their interests; but in the WTO, these countries form coalitions to push their preferred positions. Some discussion of the agentic role of developing countries would not have detracted from the central message of the book. Finally, it is important to at least note that, within these cases, the role of power stands out: the WFP chief was perhaps able to take the unprecedented step of publicly naming and shaming countries that opposed the American food aid regime in part because powerful American interests were as much the beneficiaries of his actions as were poor countries that needed emergency food aid.
