1/ 🧵 How do IOs govern transnational challenges when formal authority is lacking? My latest work in EJIR conceptualizes governance through practice on the ground—a vital, yet overlooked mode of global governance.
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2/ Traditional theories argue IOs govern by exercising authority—setting standards, making laws, or providing expertise. But what happens in issue areas where formal authority is absent or unsettled?
3/ Drawing on practice theory and fieldwork during the 2015–16 “migration and refugee crisis”, I show how IO staff govern through street-level decision-making—daily, ad hoc activities that effectively define global policy responses.
4/ The empirical analysis shows that at the European external border, IO staff—border guards, asylum caseworkers, and humanitarian workers—organized collective action despite lacking mandates for “mixed migration,” the joint, irregular movement of migrants and asylum-seekers.
5/ These frontline workers improvised asylum procedures, organized search-and-rescue missions, and provided shelter—practices that coordinated behavior, reduced uncertainty, and concretized “mixed migration” as a global policy issue.
6/ Unlike “authority,” this form of governance stems from competence—personal expertise and professional know-how of staff confronting real-time situational challenges, not from formal mandates.
7/ This challenges IR theories that equate governance with institutional authority. By shifting focus to governing effects rather than authority sources, we see how IOs operate in emerging, contested, or crisis-ridden areas—provisional, informal, but impactful.
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