Transforming International Institutions How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations

Transforming International Institutions illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in international institutions and organizations. Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. It highlights how early participants in a process who do not foresee the transformative potential of their acts, but nonetheless enable subsequent actors to push change in new directions to profound effect.

Graham deploys this to explain how changes in UN funding rules in the 1940s and 1960s—perceived as small and made to solve immediate political disagreements—ultimately sidelined multilateral governance at the United Nations in the twenty-first century. The perception of funding rules as marginal to fundamental principles of governance, and the friendly orientation of change-initiators toward the UN, enabled this quiet transformation.

Challenging the UN's reputation for rigidity and its status as a bastion of egalitarian multilateralism, Transforming International Institutions demonstrates that the UN system is susceptible to subtle change processes and that its egalitarian multilateralism governs only a fraction of the UN's operational work.

Erin R. Graham, Associate Professor of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame

Erin R. Graham is Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Faculty Fellow at the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame, USA. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University and held positions at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Her research focuses on international institutions and is published in International Organization, the Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, and other outlets.