Learning to Learn: Improving International Governance

This chapter describes the features of organizations that have successfully learned to improve their programmatic activities for environmental management in order to provide a positive example of organizational design for encouraging effective governance after the Cold War. It seeks to determine to what extent lessons derived from these organizations’ experience in dealing with environmental problems may be generalized to other international issue areas. The chapter focuses on the shared beliefs that inform the practices of institutions, thus augmenting attention to the formal rules by which an exogenously determined set of values is authoritatively determined and applied. While ad hoc and disjointed responses to the challenges are likely to occur through most processes of international relations, robust and resilient responses are possible in multilateral settings characterized by well-developed processes of organizational learning. In such cases, many problems should be resolvable through existing organizations, without having to construct new superorganizations.