Person:
Peterson, M.J.

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Professor, Department of Political Science
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Peterson
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M.J.
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Political Science
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My work focuses on international institutions and modes of international cooperation. I am particularly interested in understanding what configurations of milieu conditions, shared meanings, actor attributes, and actor choices facilitate or inhibit international cooperation among states, among states and non-state actors, or among nonstate actors.
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    The Influence of Borrower Governments on World Bank Loan Conditions
    (2022-01-01) Peterson, M.J.
    Analysts regarding the World Bank as either a tool of great powers or as an autonomous bureaucracy suggest that borrower governments cannot influence the policy conditions attached to its loans. Yet examples of borrowers affecting the content of loan conditions do exist. A more systematic appreciation of when borrower governments acquire such influence can be developed by treating interactions between the World Bank and borrower member governments as occurring within an authority relationship linking the World Bank as leader with borrowers as followers operating within a set of shared expectations defining goals and how cooperating will help attain them. Borrowers can acquire influence at particular moments by pushing back against instructions they dislike, putting the World Bank in a position where its own need to maintain lending moves it towards modifying the conditions attached to particular loans. They can also gain influence whenever widespread perceptions of a need to revise the shared expectations of the authority relationship exist because successful revision requires co-creation by authority holder and addressees for the authority relation to persist.
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    After Creation: Intergovernmental Organizations and Member State Governments as Co-Participants in an Authority Relationship
    (2022-01-01) Peterson, M.J.
    This is a re-amalgamation of what started as one manuscript and became two when the length proved to be more than any publisher wanted to consider. The splitting consisted of removing what are now Parts 3, 4, and 5 so that the manuscript focused on the outcome-related shared beliefs holding an authority relationship together. Those parts were last worked on in 2018. The rest were last worked on in late 2021 but also remain incomplete. The relational approach adopted in this study treats intergovernmental organizations and the governments of member states as co-participants in an authority relationship with the governments of their member states. Authority relationships link two types of actor, defined by their authority-holder or addressee role in the relationship, through a set of shared beliefs about why the relationship exists and how the participants should fulfill their respective roles. The IGO as authority holder has a role that includes a right to instruct other actors about what they should or should not do; the governments of member states as addressees are expected to comply with the instructions. Three sets of shared beliefs provide the conceptual “glue” holding the relationship together. The first defines the goal of the collective effort, providing both the rationale for having the authority relationship and providing a lode star for assessments of the collective effort’s success or lack of success. The second set defines the shared understanding about allocation of roles and the process of interaction by establishing shared expectations about a) the selection process by which particular actors acquire authority holder roles, b) the definitions identifying one or more categories of addressees expected to follow instructions, and c) the procedures through which the authority holder issues instructions. The third set focus on the outcomes of cooperation through the relationship by defining a) the substantive areas in which the authority holder may issue instructions, b) the bases for assessing the relevance actions mandated in instructions for reaching the goal, and c) the relative efficacy of action paths chosen for reaching the goal as compared to other possible action paths. Using an authority relationship framework for analyzing cooperation through IGOs highlights the inherently bi-directional nature of IGO-member government activity by viewing their interaction as involving a three-step process in which the IGO as authority holder decides when to issue what instruction, the member state governments as followers react to the instruction with anything from prompt and full compliance through various forms of pushback to outright rejection, and the IGO as authority holder responds to how the followers react with efforts to increase individual compliance with instructions and reinforce continuing acceptance of the authority relationship. Foregrounding the dynamics produced by the interaction of these two streams of perception and action reveals more clearly how far intergovernmental organizations acquire capacity to operate as independent actors, the dynamic ways they maintain that capacity, and how much they influence member governments’ beliefs and actions at different times. The approach fosters better understanding of why, when, and for how long governments choose cooperation through an IGO even in periods of rising unilateralism.
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    UNDP and World Bank development phrases
    (2018-01-01) Peterson, M.J.
    Coding of the policy-related words or phrases used in the general policy section of each year's Annual Report of the Administrator for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank.
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    Case Study: Narmada Dams Controversy
    (2010-09-01) Peterson, M.J.; Kiratli, Osman; Ercan, Ilke
    This case study looks at one of the more famous instances of transnational involvement in stakeholder struggles over large dams: the long-running contention over dam construction on the Narmada Rover in India. Though proposals to build large dams on the Narmada inspired political controversy from the day the first proposals were made in 1947-48, only in the mid-1980s did the controversy take on the transnational aspects for which it is now famous as critics took up the cause of those who would be displaced as the reservoirs created by the dams filled up and raised environmental concerns about the project.
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    Case Study: Bhopal Plant Disaster
    (2009-03-20) Peterson, M.J.
    The Bhopal case is an in-depth study of the industrial accident at the Union Carbide factory in India that immediately killed 2,000 people, injured another 200,000 to 300,000 more, and immediately raised questions about plant safety and corporate responsibility around the world. Includes seven detailed appendices: A.) Chronology, B.) Stakeholders and Level of Responsibility, C.) Economic/industrial climate of India, D.) Union Carbide Corporation, E.) Issues in Chemical Processing, F.) Assessing Responsibility: The Legal/Regulatory System, G.) Assessing Responsibility: The Engineers and Scientists, and H.) Technical Expertise and Managerial Responsibility.
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    Understanding Intergovernmental Organizations and their Member States as Co-Participants in an Authority Relationship
    (2022-01-01) Peterson, M.J.
    The three prevailing accounts of how intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) affect world politics oversimplify significantly, providing incomplete accounts of how IGOs gain influence with member governments. The power-centered and delegation accounts focus primarily on the activities of the governments of major states, leading to significant under-estimation of how the IGO’s head and staff and the governments of other member states also matter in shaping an IGO’s impact. The autonomous bureaucracy account focuses mainly on the activities of the IGO’s head and staff, leading to over-estimation of the IGO’s ability to influence the member states. Descriptively, analyzing an IGO and the member state governments as co-participants in an authority relationship draws attention to the importance of shared procedural and substantive expectations; analytically it promotes a better understanding of how IGOs affect world politics by including all of the co-participants. This avoids the mis-estimations encouraged by prevailing accounts and, by foregrounding continuities and changes in shared expectations, provides a better starting point for comprehending changes in an IGO’s own activities and its relations with member states over time.