Failures of Legitimacy and Efficiency

International organizations (IOs) often expand the scope of their missions or increase their institutionalization over time. But occasionally those expansions stem from the priorities of external funders, not from the member-states themselves. What explains the varying levels of implementation of those expansions when originated by those different actors? Power-based theories would argue that externally funded reforms would be most likely to take hold and become integral parts of the organization’s mandate, since these external actors are often dominant states (such as the US, China, and Japan) or larger and more prominent IOs (the EU, the World Bank, and the United Nations). However, I argue that such reforms are actually less likely to take hold, either because of a lack of legitimacy of the donor or a lack of efficiency in the endeavors. These expansions are often infrequently implemented, and they may be more reflective of donor interests than of member-state initiatives. The paper presents broad empirical evidence showing that across a set of trade organizations, donor funding is associated with not only expansions in an organization’s scope and institutionalization; it is also associated with an inability to implement those expansions. To isolate the mechanisms and trace causality, the paper offers two sets of case illustrations, one involving courts in Latin America and Africa, and the other concerning security provisions adopted by trade organizations in Africa. These cases demonstrate that when the court or security force was initially conceived and funded by external donors, it proved ineffective and collapsed. This illustrates the argu-ment that externally funded initiatives often fail through illegitimacy and inefficiency. Word count: 11,083