Straus Fellow
Academic Year 2009-2010
Robert O. Keohane
Robert O. Keohane is Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University. He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984) and Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (2002). He is co-author (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr.) of Power and Interdependence (third edition 2001), and (with Gary King and Sidney Verba) of Designing Social Inquiry (1994). He has served as the editor of the journal International Organization and as president of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. He won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order in 1989 and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2005. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Research Project
The Regime Complex for Climate Change
My scholarly research has focused mostly on international regimes that regulate activity from world trade to accounting standards or arms control. I am interested in why they are created by states, how they operate, and under what conditions they are effective. More broadly, I am interested in how global governance operates – governance that increasingly involves NGOs and private firms, with increasing transparency. At the Straus Institute I intend to explore two different aspects of this ongoing research.
First, my work on institutions has led me to ask about institutional design. What does our knowledge, limited as it is, about how institutions operate and what makes them effective suggest about how designers of such institutions should structure them? I would like to be able to extract some meaningful precepts for institutional design from our existing knowledge. Specifically, I am interested in the design of climate change mitigation regimes after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol regime expires, but by 2009-10 I may have extended my empirical inquiries to other issue-areas.
Second, I have a continuing and increasing normative interest, as reflected in my work on accountability, legitimacy, and democracy in global governance. I have written a paper with two colleagues on “Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism,” and by 2009-2010 we may be turning the paper into a book. These normative and design interests clearly intersect, and also link my work to the Global Administrative Law project at NYU, directed by Benedict Kingsbury and Richard Stewart.
