Jeff Colgan on informal governance in global energy politics

In new work, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs Jeff Colgan explores how informal governance occurs in international organizations.

In new work, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs Jeff Colgan explores how informal governance occurs in international organizations.

Colgan and co-author Thijs Van de Graaf of the Ghent Institute for International Studies state that power asymmetries alone are not enough to account for informal governance. Rather, using evidence from the International Energy Agency, they argue that informal governance occurs two ways: first, by serving as an attractive way of managing complex interactions with adjacent regimes, and second, through the coincidence of frozen formal structures and changing causal beliefs.

The paper appears in the Journal of International Relations and Development.