With Great Power Comes Great Dispersion. How Policy-Cycle Competences Drive Power Dispersion in Regional Organizations

Do member states concentrate competences within organs when they delegate tasks to an international or regional organization, or do they disperse them? How do we best understand the authority of international organizations – as hierarchically organized (vertical structure), with one organ holding central decision-making competence and all others having limited ones, or rather as horizontally organized, with power distributed across organs with comparable competences?

This question is of both political and academic relevance. Governments regularly express concerns about the growing authority of regional organisations (ROs). The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU began as a campaign to ‘take back control’ – a clear indication of sovereignty concerns about excessive authority. While the EU is the primary target of such criticism owing to its deep integration, concerns are by no means confined to it. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger left the Economic Community of the West African States (ECOWAS) on January 29, 2025, citing the sanctions imposed upon them as one of the reasons.Footnote1 The perceived growth in the authority of international and regional organizations is clearly on the public agenda.

The academic debate offers a more nuanced picture of international organisations’ (IO) authority, and an emerging consensus holds that it has grown over time. A number of influential studies further argue that this growth fuels the politicization of major IOs and ROs (De Wilde and Zürn Citation2012; Hooghe and Marks Citation2009). The literature on IO institutional design is divided, however.