By Tobias Lenz, Mona Saleh, and Yoram Haftel
How does organizational overlap interact with the delegation of authority to international organizations (IOs)? This paper argues that delegation decisions cannot be understood in isolation from the increasingly dense organizational environments in which IOs operate. While existing delegation theory emphasizes IO-internal or member state characteristics, we introduce a systemic perspective that highlights how overlapping memberships and policy competences constrain states’ collective willingness to empower multiple IOs simultaneously. Delegation entails sovereignty costs that accumulate across overlapping organizations, creating what we term an allocation problem: states have a finite tolerance for delegation and must collectively decide how to distribute authority across functionally similar IOs. Building on insights from functionalist theories of cooperation, we derive two expectations. First, organizational overlap induces a capping dynamic, whereby IOs embedded in dense webs of overlap exhibit lower or stagnating levels of delegation over time, while relatively isolated IOs can accumulate greater authority. Second, overlap may incentivize a differentiation dynamic, in which states allocate higher delegation to some IOs while limiting others, leading to divergence in authority among overlapping organizations. We evaluate these arguments empirically using a novel dataset covering nearly all African economic IOs from 1970 to 2020, coded on delegation and overlap. Controlling for alternative explanations and using a variety of model specifications, the results strongly support the capping dynamic: greater overlap is associated with stagnating delegation. Evidence for systematic delegation divergence across overlapping pairs is more limited, suggesting that overlap operates primarily as a systemic property of organizational complexes rather than dyadic relationships.
Published:
2026
DOI:
doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2026.2695006
Online available:
www.tandfonline.com
PDF:
Lenz_Saleh_Haftel26_IO Overlap and the Allocation of Delegation
(1.33 MB)