Haas - Pragmatic Constructivism

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Pragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International Institutions

Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2002 31: 573 DOI: 10.1177/03058298020310031001 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mil.sagepub.com/content/31/3/573
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Pragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International Institutions

Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas
This article provides a pragmatic constructivist approach for progressing study in International Relations (IR) that sidesteps the ontological differences between major IR approaches, and that is capable of influencing practices in international relations. In particular, it looks at how international institutions can be studied and the possible consequences of how they are studied. While institutions are at times, as realists and neoliberal institutionalists contend, merely the artifacts of strategically and rationally motivated state actors, they are viewed differently by pragmatic constructivists. Institutions may, at times, be wilful actors on their own, but are also the venue in which reflexive new practices and policies develop. Pragmatic constructivism provides the explanatory lens through which this may be understood, as well as the methodological guidelines by which such a process may be pursued.
Is cumulative knowledge and progress possible in the study and practice of international relations? How can one develop social knowledge about the world, given that claims about the nature of the world and observation of the world are both socially constructed activities? While this essay focuses on international institutions, it may be taken as an illustration of much wider issues in the field of International Relations (IR) and social science more generally. We focus in general on progress in the study of IR and the possible consequences for practices of international relations. Students of IR remain divided on the implications of international institutions for the understanding of contemporary international relations. This is largely due, we believe, to the unremitting assertion made in the IR literature that the incommensurate ontological and epistemological positions that different IR scholars bring to their studies and interpretations of international institutions fundamentally impair the ability to develop cumulative knowledge about international institutions and their role in international relations. In this piece we present a pragmatic constructivist approach to the study of international institutions, and of IR more generally,
This article is dedicated to the memory of Hildegarde Haas. We are grateful to M.J. Peterson and Craig Murphy for commenting on an earlier draft, to an anonymous reviewer from European Journal of International Relations, and four anonymous reviewers at Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Christopher Marcoux, David Claborn and Diahanna Lynch provided able editorial assistance.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2002. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 573-601
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Millennium that is capable of generating useful mid-level truths without falling prey to the unresolvable philosophical, ontological and epistemological debates posed in unnecessarily dichotomous terms that currently bedevil the study of international relations. One such dichotomy opposes ideographic to nomothetic studiesunnecessarily. Another claims that there is a deep fissure between explanation and understandingan overstated caricature of systematic research. Still another rather crudely opposes positivism to reflectivism. We believe that pragmatic constructivism provides a means to sidestep these procrustean constraints on inquiry. Pragmatic constructivism is derived from constructivism in IR and the pragmatist tradition in the philosophy of science. In this article we hope to combine the two, by presenting a constructivist ontology and the reasons that such an ontology requires a distinctive epistemology for generating a more useful expla nation of contem porary in ternationa l relations. Pragmatic constructivism features a consensus theory of truth: we argue that it is possible for followers of any and all approaches involved in developing knowledge about a particular puzzle to agree if and when they can also agree that they accept a given solution to be true, if only temporarily and for a restricted purpose. We also argue that the means for ascertaining such a truthtruth testscan also become consensual by means of sustained dialogue among theorists and practitioners. Ontologically and epistemologically, the truth ascertained by these operations is neither as absolute as positivists and scientific realists demand, nor as biased, subject to someones domination, or hegemonic as relativists proclaim. 1 We do not aspire to a grand synthesis, but we do believe that a pragmatic engagement may contribute to stronger and more confident knowledge claims within delimited domains of mid-level theorising. Pragmatic constructivism seeks to locate ideas about politics and the world within the social conditions from which they emerge, or are constructed. Our approach goes beyond an epistemological claim to develop a procedure by which social science consensus may lead to changes in the real world. Pragmatic constructivists treat institutions as venues in which analysts and policy makers interact. While institutions are at times merely the artifacts of strategically and rationally motivated state actors, as realists and neoliberal institutionalists contend, they are viewed differently by
1. For critiques of positivism as used in the social sciences, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); David Braybrooke, Philosphy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995); and Ernest Sosa and Michael Tooley, eds., Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions

pragmatic constructivists. Institutions may be wilful actors on their own, at times, but are also the location in which reflexive new practices and policies develop. We believe that pragmatic constructivism provides the explanatory lens through which this may be understood, as well as the methodological guidelines by which such a process may be pursued. We begin with a brief overview of constructivis m in IR. For convenience, we begin with its ontology. We then locate the study of institutions within these ontological parameters, and proceed to develop epistemological propositions about the fruitful study of institutions within IR. We conclude with a reflexive effort to bring pragmatic constructivism to bear on the project of human betterment. Our constructivism, while critical of positivism and the IR approaches depending on it, nevertheless seeks to facilitate dialogue among holders of currently competing theories. Hence, we develop a three-part map of analytic discourse in order to place our approach in it; this map aims at representing the three ideational domains that are fundamental to the understanding and operation of politics, as well as their interaction. Having specified our version of agent-driven constructivism we then examine how various rival ontological traditions have treated international institutions, contrasting agent-driven approaches with those that stress structure instead. We then show why neither a positivist epistemology nor a framework that seeks to mimic stylised research in the natural sciences serves well for studying international institutions if agentmediated change is to be featured.
Constructivism and Its Ontology

Constructivist scholars of IR focus on the institutional, discursive and intersubjective procedures by which international governance develops. As John Ruggie writes Constructivists hold the view that the building blocks of international reality are ideational as well as material; that the ideas have normative as well as instrumental dimensions; that they express not only individual but also collective intentionality; and that the meaning and significance of ideational factors are not independent of time and place.2 Constructivists stress at least two major ontological forces that require attention for a better understanding of contemporary international relations and their study, forces which are commonly neglected by more mainstream
2. John Gerard Ruggie, What M akes the World Hang Together? Neoutilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 879.
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Millennium approaches to IR. The consequence of this neglect, constructivists argue, is that mainstream approaches are incapable of fully appreciating the richness of contemporary international politics, including the recent challenges to identity and the new mechanisms for self-transformation of the system emerging from social learning. Social learning, as is discussed later, is the process of reflection by social scientists in conjunction with policy makers as they jointly develop new practices and policies intended to improve the human condition. A constructivist ontology invests institutions with a political potential that is mainly overlooked by scholars from other approaches. In the following sections we develop some pragmatic methodological guidelines by which constructivist ontological insights about international institutions may be further theorised and developed. The first of the two historical changes or ontological developments underlying the need for a pragmatic constructivist approach to the study of institutions is the onset of globalisation and the increasingly complex nature of international politics. 3 This complexity undermines states ability to clearly formulate national interests and the means to pursue them and thus reveals institutions as potentially autonomous and discrete actors. While globalisation is commonly accepted as a major systemic property worthy of attention, constructivists focus on the uncertainty and complexity dimensions of globalisation. Globalisation implies that most goals that states traditionally pursue are now tightly intertwin ed (or nondecomposable in the systems language) and thus the calculation of selfinterest is not easily done, and may not correspond to the ex ante assessments conveniently assumed by rationalist IR analysts. The second development is the so cialisation of know ledge development in the social sciences, which makes the development of warranted claims about institutions a social activity. IR research, for its part, has grown increasingly social, akin to similar transformations in other sciences, with publications in the field being increasingly the work of joint authors. Once people have completed dissertations, they appear increasingly eager to engage in jointly authoring articles and chapters, and participate in team researched books.4 Constructivists see institutions as potential catalysts of political selfexamination that may change states perception of their interests, albeit
3. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Globalization: Whats New? Whats Not? (And So What?), Foreign Policy 118 (2000): 104-19; Stanley Hoffmann, The Clash of Globalizations, Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 104-15; Robert K. Schaeffer, Understanding Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 1997); and David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton , Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 4. Consider such a preeminent IR Journal as International Organization. From 1986 to 1991, IO published 130 articles, 83 per cent of which were single-authored and 17 per cent of which were multi-authored (2 pieces had 2 authors and 3 pieces
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions under highly circumscribed conditions. Constructivists look at the contingent factors that may allow international institutions to act as autonomous actors, and the institutional properties and contexts that enable international institutions to influence state action. Thus, institutions involve agency more than structure. More generally, constructivists stress the circumstances under which state interests vary, and the circumstances and means by which institutions may play a transformative role in altering state perceptions and behaviour. These views lead constructivists to focus on such distinctive processes as socialisation, education, persuasion, discourse and norm inculcation. Typically, these are complex processes involving multiple interacting actors whose influence and choices may accrue over time and contribute to shifts in perception of national identity and interest, international agendas, and the ways by which national interests are to be attained.5 This ontology has epistemological consequences as well. Many constructivists stress that concept formation and empirical observation are both social activities, and may be shaped by social context or by institutions. The challenge for a constructivist epistemology, which we turn to later in this article, is how to adequately separate these activities in order to reduce the possibility for systematic bias in the formation of constructivist statements about social construction in a socially constructed world. Since knowledge accumulation is not subject to the same social pressures as the area of activity about which the knowledge is being accumulated, we believe that the observers can engage in a collective and consensual approach to formulating warranted claims about the world. Our brand of pragmatic constructivism is characterised by distinct assumptions about the nature of the world and about understanding that nature. 6 Our ontology, in contrast to other brands of constructivism
had 3 authors). From 1996 to 2001, IO published 175 articles, 65 per cent of which were single-authored and 35 per cent of which were jointly authored (44 had 2 authors, 10 had 3 authors, 6 had 4 authors, and 2 had 5 authors). There were 2 special issues from 1986-1991, and 3 special issues from 1996-2001. Special issues tend to have more triple-authored pieces because of the editorial make up of the special issues. 5. For an elaboration of this point and its application to conference diplomacy, see Peter M. Haas, UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of the Environment, Global Governance 8, no. 1 (2002): 73-91. 6. For a discussion contrasting our version of constructivism with the views of other self-declared constructivists, see Peter M. Haas, Policy Knowledge: Epistemic Communities, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, eds. Neil Smelser and Paul Bates (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2001); Ernst B. Haas, Does Constructivism Subsume Neofunctionalism?, in The Social Construction of Europe, eds. Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jrgensen and Antje Wiener (London: Sage, 2001); Ernst B. Haas, Reason and Change in International Life, Journal of International Affairs 44, no. 1 (1990): 209-40; and Ernst B. Haas, Words Can Hurt You, in International Regimes, ed. Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press, 1983).
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Millennium discussed below, features social science and IR as part of the analytic discourse around politics and processes of political change. We see three domains of study relevant to IR scholars: 1) political practice, 2) social science, and 3) knowledge about the material world. The domain of political practice is occupied by politicians and provides the traditional focus of descriptive IR studies. The domain of social science is the arena of analytic and interpretative efforts on the part of observers, and academic social scientists who consider themselves theorists. Social science involves attempts at systematic interpretation of the events and trends undertaken by those who work in the first domain. The third is largely the domain of natural scientists and engineers and concerns the delimitation of phenomena and laws of the material world. The three domains of scholarly activity involve three different ways of seeing facts and connections among facts, each involving its own hermeneutics and epistemology. The understanding of long-term political dynamics may be thought of as an intertwined spiral, or helix, linking these three domains: each develops according to its own dynamics but also in its interactions with the other two.
Political practice by politicians and political actors
(a) (d)
Social science analysis by social scientists and reflective practitioners
Institutions
(b) (c)
(f)
(e)
Knowledge about the material world
Figure 1: Three ideational domains for the understanding and operation of politics Even though each domain can be analysed in isolation, and exists independently of the views of the analyst observer, we believe that interconnections exist which can be used as the constituent elements of a broader theory of political change. We propose to operate among and between these domains guided by our commitment to pragmatic constructivism, thus raising the issue of a double hermeneutic between
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions the domains of social analysis and political actions, if not all three. We will discuss at the end of our essay how constrainingor liberatingthis condition may turn out to be. Figure 1 presents our constructivist view of these three ideational domains important for the understanding and operation of politics. The domain of political practice is made up of policy knowledge shared by politicians and various political actors. This domain includes intuitive understanding, but may involve explanatory beliefs as well. Knowledge about political practices may involve abstract principles accepted as true and legitimate (and self-defining), such as beliefs in human rights and democratisation, Wilsonian cosmopolitanism, or Cordell Hulls faith in liberal interdependence; or of a technical form about how to achieve material national goals in an interdependent world, such as monetary policy or environmental policy. Social science understanding consists of understandings and explanations of large-scale regularities and phenomena about human interactions with the physical and social milieu. Knowledge about the material world rests on natural science understandings of how various aspects of the natural world behave. To date, constructivist social science has looked at these domains, their interconnections, and the roles of international institutions within them in several ways. Some scholars have looked at how social science understandings can help design appropriate architectures for international institutions that were created to achieve intended goals in the domain of political practice (arrow a in diagram). They have also engaged in critical discussions of the limits of existing institutions for achieving their intended goals. Social scientists including political scientists have looked at the role of international in stitutions in promoting advances in technical understandings ( arrow f in diagram), as well as on the role of improved knowledge about the material world on political practices (arrow b in diagram). In turn, others have looked at the effect of political practices on the formulation of material knowledge about the world as well (arrow c in diagram). While post-structuralists focus on the influence of political practice on social science (arrow d in diagram), we tend to reject the notion that this influence is a general causal phenomenon, even though individual claims may at times be suspect. Finally, some interesting but incomplete efforts exist to apply advances in the natural science understanding and methods to improve social science theorising (arrow e in the diagram), through reliance on models of complexity, evolution, and the like. Before we can proceed to such bridging of positions, we need to show how different ontologies amongst social scientists beget different treatments of the nature of international institutions and how a pragmatist
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Millennium epistemology can illuminate connections and causal influences from figure 1 that a positivist epistemology neglects or obscures.
The Contested Ontology and Epistemology of Institutions

Institution remains an essentially contested concept. This is irksome since any discussion of causation must presuppose an ontological framework of entities among which causal relations are to hold, and also an accompanying logical and semantic framework in which these entities can be talked about.7 Douglass North suggests that institutions are the rules of the game that characterise all social life. 8 Yet, even though North sharply distinguishes between the two, most IR writers treat organisations and institutions as synonyms. While Norths distinction is recognised by most neoliberal institutionalists, the vast majority of their work is on formal institutions rather than social ones, and the two types of institutions are analysed interchangeably.9 It makes a big difference if we are talking about the United Nations, the French Foreign Ministry or Amnesty International, all of which are organisations; or about sovereignty, free trade, or deterring crimes against humanity, all of which can be seen as heterogeneous rules of the international game, difficult to categorise in single summary statements. It has also proven extraordinarily difficult for IR to formulate a singular theoretical way to study institutions. Our conceptions go back to the very origin of the modern state system and to our theories about it. With a little legerdemain it could even be argued that todays fissure was already present in ancient Greek thought, pitting the realism of Thucydides against the idealism of the Stoics. That fissure divides theories of anarchy from notions of contract, doctrines of competition and war from dogma about cooperation and possible peace; Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau against Grotius, Locke and Kant. The arguments have become more nuanced, the data much richer, and the methods now include statistics, gaming and modelling, but the fissure remains as deep as ever. Not only do the ontologies inspiring students of institutions differ, but the epistemological battles between constructivists, neorealists, neoliberal
7. Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 5. 8. This authoritative definition, though unhelpful in dealing with international institutions, appears in Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 9. Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Oran R. Young, Governance in World Affairs (Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Barbara Koremanos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal, The Rational Design of International Institutions, International Organization 55, no. 4 (2001): 761-99.
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institutionalists, radical political-economy perspectives, peace theorists, and postmodernists continue to rage unabated. Note that our early modern mentors in IR theory did not differ over values: realists and idealists preferred peace to war, life to death, wealth to poverty. They differed over the question of freedom of the will, or what we now call the agency-structure problem. The proponents of anarchy held (and hold) that structure triumphs, that humankind chooses under frighteningly tight constraints. The defenders of cooperation argued (and argue) that even with the constraints imposed by factors outside human control, opportunities exist for the exercise of innovative choices. This basic difference in the assumptions, propositions and research associated with each side has not been bridged to this day. There are few signs of either side winning a decisive victory. They have varied profoundly in how they believe institutions are to be studied, and the potential that institutions provide for conferring these shared values in an international setting. Contemporary debates, hence, feature a variety of accounts of institutions and their ontology. Neoliberal institutionalists, for instance, study the consequences of variation in formal arrangements of institutional (or organisational) properties in light of an often unacknowledged rational choice approach to an understanding of actors preferences. On the other hand, those informed by a more sociological bent tend to focus more intensively on informal institutions and actor motivations. They also tend to highlight the effect of institutions on changing the understandings, interests and preferences of their members in ways that were not anticipated at the founding of the institution. 10 From another perspective, structural neorealists accord importance to international institutionsdefined as organisations and lawonly to the extent that they serve to secure the hegemons interests. World systems theorists, in turn, regard institutions as stages in, and beyond, the historical evolution of capitalism, or as tools of capitalist exploitation. Finally, peace theorists and classical liberals equate institutions with arrangements for improving international cooperation, especially if they have their roots in social psychology or in law. Constructivists advance yet another understanding of institutions. By focusing on the discursive and intersubjective procedures that govern international institutions, constructivists highlight institutions as potential catalysts for political change. However, though they all agree that actors construct their own reality and that ideas are important causes of
10. Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas, Learning to Learn, Global Governance 1, no. 3 (1995): 255-84; Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); James G. March and Johan Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1983); Michael Rowlinson, Organizations and Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1997); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
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Millennium behaviour, they exhibit at least three different stances with respect to international institutions. Constructivists who stress state identity subordinate interest in institutions as such to the roles assumed by stateactors; constructivists who privilege norms as shapers of behaviour see the world much as peace theorists do when it comes to international cooperationthey see institutions as agents of change. Finally, pragmatic constructivists regard institutions partly as arenas for designing change and partly as arrangements that bring about change as they alter the perceptions of their members. The diverse positions in the study of international institutions are troublesome for intellectual advancement because the different meanings of core terms inhibit discourse in general, and these differences infuse and confuse the discussion of causality in particular. Put succinctly, rational-choice institutionalists believe in structural determinism whereas many sociological institutionalisms tend to stress actor-initiated change.11 Radical constructivists, on the other hand, deem consensus as suspect and the immediate target of questioning and deconstruction; we, as pragmatic constructivists, regard consensus as an instrumental step to political change and progress. The difficulty of attaining a consensual theory of international institutions is even more overwhelming at an epistemological level. Differing notions about institutions are usually pitched at different levels of analysis. Bridging levels in a single theory or approach is possible, but experience has shown that one scholars claim of successful bridging is seldom accepted as persuasive by the entire community of scholars. No Lakatosian cumulation occurs because different approaches are embedded in different scholarly traditions whose com peting ontological and epistemological claims continue to burden our intellects. Neorealists and neoliberals do profess to be positivists or at least neopositivists. Their tolerance for other approaches is always conditioned by their insistence that the arguments of other schools must meet positivist truth tests. World systems theory is embedded in historical materialism, neorealism and neoliberalism in microeconomics and utilitarianism. Constructivists, by and large, see themselves as the heirs of the sociology of collective behaviour. Yet, they too remain divided over whether to favour structural predominance, structuration, or the evolutionary logic of change that combines intentional causality with natural selection. Peace theorists in the Kantian tradition disagree, though peace theorists who
11. We realise that there are exceptions to these simple categorisations. Alexander Wendt, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore are constructivists who take a more structural view of international institutions; see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations, International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 699-733.
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come from social psychology do not. Increasingly, they are inspired by general systems thinking of a very abstract kind, by notions of selforganising systems of ever-greater complexity. Many world systems theorists eschew positivism, but they may subscribe to scientific realism or pragmatism. Some constructivists also claim to be scientific realists; others follow the pragmatist tradition. Scientific realism, to our minds, collapses to positivism by default or exhaustion. No constructivist accepts positivism as the sole and authoritative guide to sound knowledge.12 Positivism, in particular, informed early answers in IR to the question of how institutions can best be studied in international relations by providing seemingly sanitised techniques for research and knowledge cumulation. This approach continues to exert a considerable influence on IR, despite the challenge mounted by post-positivist approaches. We argue, however, that positivist epistemological foundations are no longer appropriate for recognising and explaining the full array of institutional influences in contemporary international relations. Before we engage in a discussion of how pragmatic constructivism can side-step the ontological and epistem ological confrontations tha t typically surround the contemporary study of institutions, it is worthwhile to pause and reflect on the limits of positivism in understanding social inquiry and in addressing a constructivist ontology of institutions under conditions of globalisation. Social science positivism proceeds from analogies to the natural sciences. Statistics and formal modelling are the preferred techniques for demonstrating causal inference. Units behave independently of the observer, and can be studied without significantly influencing the subject of study. Meaningful concepts are developed independently of the social context in which research problems emerge, and the core variables are defined and operationalised. Positivism, and even neopositivist efforts, do not transfer easily to studying the social realm. Scholars in the natural sciences do not face the problem of reconciling competing protean principles. Their units of analysis lack free will; at least, none has been empirically demonstrated in atoms, molecules and cells. The positivist epistemology that has proved so successful in physics is unlikely to prove equally powerful in the social sciences because the entities studied talk back to the scholar. It is relatively simple to agree on what constitutes intellectual progress when there is consensus about methods, about how we establish truth. Social scientists, on the other hand, cannot be sure that the reality being studied is not a product of the concepts chosen to study it. In fact, it is prudent to note that
12. We use these philosophy of science categories as explained in Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See also his Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996) for the notion of pragmatism as we use it.
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Millennium even physicists have not uncritically accepted positivist claims. Early physicists Max Planck and Ernst Mach debated the extent to which physics is grounded in actual reality or in intellectual constructs.13 Such debates remind social scientists to assess carefully a positivism based on a glorification of physics as an approach for understanding the social sciences. Positivism, and to a lesser extent its cousin scientific realism, relies on a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. The reality to be comprehended is real in the sense that it exists independently from us, whether we perceive it correctly or not. But this is simply not so when it comes to the study of international institutions, where the reality to be comprehended is mostly dependent on a social construction in which shared perceptions establish what is real. That being the case, many truth tests valid in the natural sciences cannot work in the study of international institutions. While modelling and quantification may well add value to less formal modes of discourse, their weight in validating an explanatory argument is weaker in the social than in the natural sciences, and even feebler when it comes to prediction. Positivist procedures may still provide value in the social sciences when and where their epistemological requirements do not clash with the social construction of reality. Mathematics may not be the natural language of human interaction, unless it is a sophisticated mathematics that is capable of autopoietic and recursive calculations.14 Positivist techniques that stress human intention and perception rather than reliance on fixed conditions expressible as crisp variables, on the other hand, may still provide a stable and rigorous bridge to constructivist studies of institutions. Very often, thenand certainly for matters that are important and interestingsocial science inquiry is outside the positivist domain. It is difficult to formulate universal claims over time and across cultures because of the mutable nature of institutions and the potential role of free will (that is, of actors ability to change their minds and pursue new goals).15 Researchers may interfere with the subject of study, or find themselves subject to the same set of potentially biasing social influences that shape their very object of study. No wonder Imre Lakatos warned against applying his theory of scientific progress to the social sciences. He did not envision it to accommodate a discipline marked by competition among a number of partly incommensurable intellectual traditions, all enjoying high legitimacy in the eyes of their adherents. He thought of a single established theory undergoing degenerative or progressive evolution, a theory whose
13. Steven Toulmin, Physical Reality (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970). 14. Steve Weber, Janice Stein, Ned Lebow, and Steven Bernstein, God Gave Physics the Easy Problems, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 1 (2000): 43-76. 15. Rom Harre and Paul F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behavior (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 9-12ff.
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adherents shared basic ontological and epistemological commitments. IR hardly fits this view. But the inability of IR scholars to grasp the positivist grail of discovery is not a sufficient reason for avoiding rigour and relevance. We should continually reexamine our theories about institutions and revise them. We ought to continue to debate the significance of international institutions. We ought to know more about what these institutions can, or cannot, contribute to peace, wealth creation and distribution, human rights, and sustainable development. We ought to persist in inquiring how institutions fit into larger events and trends, such as growing (or declining) global income inequalities, stronger (or weaker) nation-states. We ought to do this even if basic differences among approaches cannot be synthesised or transcended, if consensual grand theories continue to elude us. We ought to be able to do this without worshipping physics as an exemplar and without embracing positivism as the only valid method. Many of these conclusions may seem less urgent to an audience outside the United States, where similar debates have been raging for at least a decade and the overall balance appears to be shifting towards the broad centre that we have sought to articulate in this article. 16 A number of authors have embraced the project of individually and collectively searching for intersubjective agreements across potentially compatible theoretical communities (or research programmes) in order to develop modest truth claims and insights into international politics. 17 The English School as a whole reflects this commitment to focused debates between advocates of dif ferent approaches who share some overlappin g epistemologies and substantive concerns, although the English Schools epistemology is not as rigorous (or dogmatic) as that often pursued by North American scholars of IR.18 Given positivis ms limits in addressing the complexities of a constructivist ontology, we believe that pragmatic constructivism may advance scholarly agreement on dimensions of institutions important for studyas well as improving the understanding of their influence in the world in providing rigorous methodological guidelines without falling
16. See, for instance, Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zelewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Vendulka Kubalkova, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert, eds., International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). 17. Volker Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2d ed. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); and Ole Wver, The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687-728. 18. For such debates within Europe, see Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Tim Dunne, The Social Construction of International Society, European Journal of International
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Millennium prey to the temptation of positivism. It is to this approach that we now turn.
Pragmatic Constructivism and Scientific Progress

Pragmatic constructivism derives from the philosophy of science tradition of pragmatism.19 While constructivist writing has largely been ontological 20 or critical, 21 pragmatism provides a complementary epistemology to pursue the constructivist ontology associated with institutional questions. Pragmatism rests on the following foundations. The world is not accessible to actors without the use of cognitive organising concepts. Actors behave wilfully, but do not share a common perspective or understanding; they do not all adopt the same cognitive organising concepts. Pragmatists retain the Enlightenment faith in reason. They believe that political emancipation can be attained by publicising warranted findings from social and natural science. Institutions (in the guise of international organisations) can be both cause and effect in the construction of meaning (and thus institutionalise meaning in the sociological sense of the term). Some actors may design them in order to, eventually, bring about an agreement on organising concepts. Having succeeded, the institutions effect is the production of new consensual discourse, and new intersubjectively shared meanings. Thus, institutions can be the arena in which consensus emerges as a result of shared epistemological commitments by a community of scholars. Institutions provide the receptive and supportive milieu for the conduct of
Relations 1, no. 3 (1995): 367-89; and Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998). For unsuccessful efforts at transatlantic communication, see Klauss Knorr and James Rosenau, eds., Contending Approaches to International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). For a reflective and still valid account on the limits of such efforts, see Stanley Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977). Lastly, few efforts seem to have been made to span North/ South differences. 19. For a useful introduction into this tradition, see Louis Menand, ed., Pragmatism (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). For an intellectual history of pragmatism in the U.S. from the Civil War through the 1930s, see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (London: Flamingo, 2001). Prominent pragmatists who are clustered together for the purpose of our summary include Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. 20. Emanuel Adler, Seizing the Middle Ground, European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997): 319-63. 21. Stefano Guzzini, A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 147-82 and Gerard Holden, Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary History and the Discourse about IR Discourse, Review of International Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 253-70. E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau also had critical tendencies, believing that policy would be best advanced by challenging the positivist epistemological notions underlying explanations of history.
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appropriate discourse to a much greater extent than would be the case if individuals worked in isolation. Even if no correspondence theory of truth finds acceptance, a persuasive consensus-creating process can be envisaged. Pragmatic constructivism is entwined in the bonds of the double hermeneutic. No definitely and consensually true statement is possible once we grant that not only the actors but also the observers realities are socially constructed.22 This stance implies a notion of intellectual progress tha t mus t re spect the legitimacy of competing ontologies and epistemologies. Yet, we are not being tolerant for the sake of being nice to our intellectual antagonists. Tolerance is an inevitable by-product of being part of the hermeneutic circle. Intellectual pluralism is inescapable because of our commitment to pragmatism. We must concede that in social science discourse our construction of reality cannot be proved superior to anyone elses. Warrants for claims rest on internal consistency, adherence to the broader truth tests of the research programme from which a piece of work emerges, and ultimately, empirical reproduction and confirmation, and possibly even acceptance by critics from other theoretical camps. Thus, at a minimum, the achievement of most progress depends on continuing the conversation among all of us. But we hope to do better than that in seeking to break out of the circle in the quest for consensual meanings. Following Charles Taylor, we understand the name of the game to be to arrive at agreed meanings despite the prevalence of the hermeneutic circle. True, to appreciate a good explanation, one has to agree on what makes good sense; what makes good sense is a function of ones readings; and these in turn are based on the kind of sense one understands. 23 Transcendent meanings are established by agents-in-action, not by individualistic ratiocination. Meanings result from collective action and the collective thought that precedes it. To be a living agent is to experience ones situation in terms of certain meanings; and this in a sense can be thought of as a sort of proto- interpretation. This is in turn interpreted and shaped by the language in which the agent lives these meanings. This whole
22. This conundrum is also labelled the hermeneutic circle. In the words of Charles Taylor: The circle can also be put in terms of part-whole relations: we are trying to establish a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense, where expressions can only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately on the whole. Taylor is excerpted in Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, eds., The Hermeneutic Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 156. 23. Charles Taylor, Interpretation and the Science of Man, Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 3 (1971): 164.
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Millennium is then at a third level interpreted by the explanation we proffer for his action.24 Taylor offers the prospect for a reflective social science that can generate mid-level generalisable claims about the social realm and inform choices and practices in that realm. Pragmatic constructivism is a means by which warranted truth claims about political behaviour may be generated by observers of the political process on this third level without their fully falling under the sway of the forces which they seek to analyse.
The Commitments of a Pragmatic Constructivist Epistemology

Pragmatic constructivisms contribution to epistemology hinges on its conception of causation, consensual theories of truth, and evolutionary epistemology. 25 Pragmatic constructivists, such as ourselves, while remaining within the family of scholars who believe in the possibility of establishing the truth of propositions about the world, nevertheless differ from positivists because we eschew any crisp notion of causality. We hold that that all truth is provisional. We prefer to think in terms of complex relations among variables, not simply A is explained by B because the two are logically associated with each other. Unfortunately, some positivists mistake this statistical association for causation, and also for a direct correspondence with the natural world. Pragmatists also make their peace with the short half-life of most theories and thus few aim at finding general covering laws. While overdetermination and interactive effects between independent variables (heteroscedasticity and multiple collinearity) are problems for the positivist, for constructivists they are almost taken for granted as a consequence of complexity and globalisation. Such concerns remain methodological concerns, but constructivists accept the fact that they can only seldom be addres sed in empirical work. 26 Some constructivists, however, veer towards a commitment to scientific realist epistemology because they wish to demonstrate the reality of phenomena
24. Ibid., 167. 25. Some other constructivist epistemological techniques that do not accept our notion of causality include post-positivist studies of discourse analysis, such as those included in Michael Shapiro, ed., Language and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1984); genealogies, for instance Richard Price, A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo, International Organization 49, no. 1 (1995): 73-104; and rich studies of historical context, such as Holden, Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers?. For a sophisticated treatment of a variety of constructivist methodological approaches, see Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and especially Chapter 5 in which he presents an argument similar to our notion of how social science may improve institutional performance. 26. Constructivist research techniques have not yet been fully codified into textbooks. Some qualitative techniques such as process tracing and counterfactuals may serve to build confidence in the influence of particular variables in particular contexts.
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not amenable to direct observation, an ability most other constructivists do not claim to possess. It is simply incorrect to argue, as some do, that all branches of constructivism ought to be sharply juxtaposed to the epistemologies of hard science. Max Weber, the inventor of interpretative sociology, was more judicious in his formulatio n. He distinguished betw een observational and explanatory understanding. The former involves directly watching and then interpreting the significance of some item of actor conduct, such as joy or anger. The latter calls for the determination of the actor s reason for acting in the observed manner, the study of motivation. Weber is careful to specify that the mode of explanatory understanding is rational understanding of motivation, which consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning.27 Actors are assumed to be acting in accordance with what they see as the best way to attain their objectives; motives are rational in that sense, even if not in the perspective of microeconomics or game theory. Therefore they can be studied with systematic methods and subjected to rigorous hypotheses that may even be falsifiable. Interpretation does not have to be the equivalent of mushiness. This interplay harkens back to the interaction between the realms of political practice and social science analysis presented in figure 1. Social scientists may test politicians and policy makers self-understanding of causation in practice. While each, in fact, may be subject to social influence, through consensus theories of truth and the evolutionary epistemology discussed below, the potential biases of each may be kept independent and ultimately winnowed away through debate and consensus formation. At least analytically, it is then possible to generate concepts and to evaluate them without having to worry about the social construction and possible distortions of them. Pragmatic constructivism, then, distinguishes between three domains of knowledge, with different epistemological techniques appropriate for developing truth claims for each: brute facts, social facts, and hybrid facts.28 There is partial overlap between these domains of knowledge and the ontological divisions of social activity presented in figure 1. Brute facts are
27. Max Weber, The Interpretive Understanding of Social Action, in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Mary Brodbeck (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 25-26. For an extended argument that this mode of inquiry is consistent with positivism, albeit not in its most demanding form that insists on strict correspondence between nature and the concepts used in discovery, see Gil Friedman and Harvey Starr, Agency, Structure and International Politics (London: Routledge, 1997), especially Chapter 4. 28. For these three we draw on G.E.M. Anscombe, On Brute Facts, Analysis, no. 184 (1958): 69-73 and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Alvin Weinberg, Science and Trans-Science, Minerva, no. 10 (1972): 202-22 has a view of hybrid facts that is not quite the same as ours.
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Millennium those that are subject to ultimately consensual observation and verification. Crudely put, this is the area of the world where nature bites back, the traditional realm of natural science. Some brute facts appear on the international collective action agenda, e.g. in ecology, public health, arms control. However, because they have to ru n the gam ut of rival interpretations by political actors, they do not directly serve as guides to action. The development of consensus on brute facts, then, advances knowledge about the physical world. Social facts are statements about social life that derive largely from the thoughts of observers; they are the concepts we use routinely in offering descriptions and interpretations of political events and behaviour; they remain context-dependent and controversial and the domains of discourse in which they prevailsocial science and the study of political eventsnever achieve the status of the natural sciences even though they deal with such crucial phenomena as law, nuclear deterrence, arms control and genocide. A third class of facts, hybrid facts, features the most important constructivist variables associated with a constructivist understanding of institutions and their study. W hile close to social facts, this class nevertheless seeks to incorporate those aspects of brute facts as can be made acceptable to large and diverse audiences. Hybrid facts are often those where experts confident of their mastery of brute facts are asked to draw conclusions in the domain of social facts. For instance, an ecologist could confidently give the threshold carrying capacity of an ecosystem for a particular contaminant (assuming that it had been sufficiently studied), but would be venturing into hybrid facts when asked to formulate policy that would entail distributive social effects.29 In using hybrid facts we offer contextual interpretations employing a vocabulary which is already shared across audiences of diverse agents who, in employing it further, contribute to the creation of new social practices. In short, by cultivating hybrid facts we are able to break out of the hermeneutic circle of multiple cognitive isolation. Hybrid facts are the most likely to exercise an influence on institutional design, and to be deployed by institutions and policy makers. Evolutionary epistemology provides the dynamics by which social science cumulates knowledge about hybrid facts, providing a mechanism for possible feedback from social scientists understandings to political practices in those domains.30 The evolutionary epistemological stance, a
29. Again, here we follow Taylor, Interpretation and the Science of Man, 174-75. 30. Evolutionary epistemology is defined and explicated in Donald T. Campbell, Evolutionary Epistemology, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1974) and Kai Hallweg and C.A. Hooker, eds., Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989). For more on the application of evolutionary epistemology and consensus theories of truth, see Donald T. Campbell, Methodology and Epistemology for Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Steven Toulmin, Human Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), Appendix 1.
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions variant of pragmatic constructivism, is by no means consistently hostile to all aspects of positivism, though it is less positivistic than are constructivists who maintain a focus on state identity because of our assumption that the material world can be approached through consensus theories of truth. Positivism supposedly undergirds rational ways of studying international institutions, accusing constructivism of relying on verstehen, on hermeneutics, on reflection, and on interpretive sociology. Evolutionary epistemology proposes that if work is developed within professional research communities (or research programmes as Lakatos would have described them) according to the truth tests shared by the community, then provisional and interim truths may result. These may then be confirmed and tested further as the research programme advances. They may be converted to policy as the analysts provide their findings to the political community that was being studied. Though it does not fully depend on it, research and advocacy conducted in a democratic setting certainly favour a breach of the hermeneutic circle. The establishment of truth relevant to policy making requires debate among rival claimants. Moreover, proposals are more likely seen by their audiences as impartial and disinterested if they originate from a non-sectarian source and are purveyed by agents presumed to be apolitical. Democracy helps, but it is not essential, as the success of epistemic communities in the former Soviet Union attests with respect to arms control and environmental matters. Constructivist scholarship and theory offer the prospect of a recursive force for better policy because the political process by which policy alternatives are chosen, i.e., democracy, favours a self-correcting dialogue. Policy making, in this perspective, is seen as a discursive practice in which different views are offered and modified in conformity with temporarily accepted true knowledge. Within consistent democratic practice, policy making is a learning process about the world and how to alter it. Authoritarian regimes, less reliably and consistently, may also allow the process to occur, but the fate of Soviet genetics reminds us that the absence of dialogue can produce a caricature of knowledge.
Institutions, International Relations, and the Theory and Policy of Human Betterment
Even though IR scholars cannot claim to have made important discoveries, at more modest levels of discourse something like progress occurs. All schools of thought in IR (except for the realists) now agree that the shape of things has fundamentally changed because of these developments in the real world of the last fifty years: sovereignty has become contested in new ways, global civil society is emerging, domestic civil society has thrown open the unitary state, equality among states is becoming more
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Millennium than a legal conceit, the need for redistribution of wealth is accepted as given by most actors, sustainable development is a goal for almost all. IR theory had traditionally followed diplomatic and military practice. The arrival of these notions makes it evident that theory and practice continue to reinfect each other despite macrotheoretical commitments that spurn more modest insights. The same logic of transmission leads us to believe that there can be fruitful interaction between social scientists and policy makers. Naturally, the cumulation of knowledge is bound to be a temporary phenomenon. Nevertheless, when dealing with hybrid facts, social scientists working in epistemic communities have been able to influence the content of policy. They have succeeded in shaping collective action in fields that make use of international institutions, as in arms control and environmental management. The more dependent an issue area becomes on technical information, the greater the likelihood that epistemic communities gain in influence. We must, of course, presuppose that there is also a growing demand for such knowledge on the part of policy makers. Consensual knowledge that is not acknowledged by government remains irrelevant, though the demand can sometim es be stimulated by enterprising knowledge brokers. More tellingly yet, when social and natural scientists apply their claims to proposed collective action, their efforts are more likely to be accepted if they can show their arguments to be true within the epistemological framework considered appropriate by their non-scientist audience. Clearly, if knowledge claims are made within the milieu of a culture receptive to intellectual innovation, then scientists espousing new ideas for the betterment of humankind have improved prospects for shaping the political discourse. Progressive audiences will resonate to progressive knowledge claims, particularly if the decision makers involved believe their careers to hinge on the improvements being urged upon them.31 Evolutionary epistemology allows for the prospect of a modest version of progress resulting from the institutional application of improved knowledge. Pragmatic constructivism provides two related notions of progress within the constraints of the double hermeneutic. One is in terms of theory development within IR. The second is in terms of betterment of the world, at the very least in terms of replacing hard problems with more tractable ones.32 Pragmatic constructivism allows for the potential of long-term interpa radig m agre ement on mid-level propositio ns. How do thes e
31. For a sustained pragmatist argument in support of what we are suggesting, see Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 32. Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
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re concilia tio ns fit with vie ws from other approaches, are they complementary in terms of assumptions and do they qualify or challenge key beliefs? Ideally, progress should occur between paradigms via a Lakatosian process of hypothesis testing and Popperian falsification, with an eye towards the value of contributions for developing new insights rather than marginal improvements on a given tradition. However, we have difficulty recalling the last time we saw scholars admit to error, or to publicly change their minds on the basis of these procedures. In practice, cumulation probably occurs over a span of generations through a sociological process of cohorts of trained graduate students replacing a previous generation of scholars. In the shorter term, debates are often characterised by rhetorical and polemical inter-paradigm arguments that convince no one. Still, there are pragmatic institutional design lessons about how to promote consensus through cumulative exercises that inhibit egregious bias. Conscientious debates among wellintentioned scholars should be encouraged in peer reviewed journals, including multi-authored works and edited volumes organised around common themes.33 Curriculum development is important as well. Graduate students should be versed in theoretical debates as well as trained in methodological skills appropriate for their own preferred mode of inquiry. Serious departments should also recruit faculty sufficiently nimble intellectually and multifaceted in their own work to be able to honestly present multiple perspectives on international institutions to the graduate students whom they are training for academic and policy careers. A theoretical contribution may be considered progressive if it changes the way most scholars think about a problem or puzzle that they consider in need of an explanation and if it offers the possibility of bridging existing theories at a level below that of a grand synthesising theory. Progress can be had if we lower our ambitions. Neither synthesis nor cumulation seems within our grasp, but even in the natural sciences consensus on basic theory is never permanent but a lw ays subject to challe nge and to reconceptualisation. Thus the grand natural science theories of today quantum mechanics, the evolutionary synthesis, and the big bang origin of the universemay not survive unscathed. What is to be done, then? We might focus our explorations on substantive areas of general concern. Instead of asking, how do we explain the origin of institutions? we should ask which institutions are most likely to bring about a peaceful (or egalitarian, or wealthy) world?. Or we might profitably ask, why have international institutions failed to deliver significant economic development?, or under what circumstances may
33. Few works come to mind as perfect exemplars. The following multi-authored studies attempt what we suggest with some degree of success: Robert W. Cox and Harold Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Edith Brown Weiss and Harold K. Jacobson, eds., Engaging Countries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
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Millennium institutions with particular designs effect behaviour in a desirable way?. It makes sense to speak of a problem-focused synthesis rather than continuing to pitch progress at the macro-theoretical level because different approaches may well illuminate different aspects of the puzzle and still allow a comprehensive response to the question. We are comforted by this dictum of Max Webers: Meaningfulness naturally does not coincide with laws as such, and the more general the law the less the coincidence. For the specific meaning which a phenomenon has for us is naturally not to be found in those relationships which it shares with other phenomena. . . . In the cultural sciences the knowledge of the universal or the general is never valuable in itself. 34 If the positivist strictures of neorealism or neoliberal institutionalism can be satisfied in the conduct of this research, so much the better. If agreement is impossible, all ought to be able to make their peace with the looser notion of causality urged by pragmatists, as it is accepting of overdetermination and interactive outcomes.35 Progress occurs, for instance, when two theories, one positivist and tied to a demonstration of causal inference relying on statistical variation, and the other constructivist and based on intentional causality, nevertheless illuminate the same puzzle, explain away the same problem, or provide synergistic explanatory accounts.36 In that case fundamentals are not reconciled, but interesting phenomena are confirmed intersubjectively. IR trends may be fruitfully explored and the causal understanding of the interplay between forces typically analysed by discrete schools is advanced. Cumulative progress in creating consensual knowledge about institutions, then, rests on a number of individual steps: making rigorous
34. Max Weber, Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, in Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), 76. 35. For us, the pioneeringand today still admirableeffort along these lines is Cox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence. 36. Such accounts include Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Janice Gross Stein and Raymond Tanter, Rational Decision-Making (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980); Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean; Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, Soviet Reform and the End of the Cold War, Review of International Studies 17, no. 3 (1991): 74-118 and Who Won the Cold War?, Foreign Policy 87 (1991): 123-38; and Richard N. Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For complementary works that include different approaches and yet address a similar question, see the following: on the Cuban Missile Crisis, James Blight, Cuba on the Brink (New York: Parthenon, 1993); for environmental stud ies from multiple perspectives, Richard Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Litfin, Ozone Discourses
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions individual claims within single works done in the constructivist style with explicit self-conscious assumptions;37 reconciling individual claims within constructivism (intra-paradigm progress); and conducting inter-paradigm mid-level discussions that try to resolve different interpretations of similar phenomena and conceptual applications that may lead, ultimately, to some degree of provisional closure and dispute resolution between paradigms. It is even possible, as such constructivist theorists as Alexander Wendt, David Dessler, Emanuel Adler and Anthony Giddens suggest, that transformations of policy may shade into new collective identities. The ideas developed by theorists and accepted into policy may have the eventual result of altering the self-perceptions and role conceptions of key political actors. In structurationist fashion, changing self-perceptions may create new agendas for collective action, and the agendas, once in place, then condition the further behaviour of agents. Thus, public policy offers another opportunity for evaluating the persuasiveness of pragmatic constructivism, if not the final truth of our beliefs. That process also offers the opportunity for breaking out of the hermeneutic circle by showing that not all approaches are equally plausible after all. Nobody finally wins or loses in this perspective. The grand theoretical stakes are low because any cumulation that may be achieved is temporally and spatially limited, and as such unlikely to challenge any deep commitments. But a few puzzles get solved along the way and the world is marginally better off.
Institutional Applications of Pragmatic Constructivism

How can international institutions be studied better in order to provide for the kind of progress that pragmatic constructivists intimate? In this
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Peter M. Haas, Banning Chlorofluorocarbons, in Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, ed. Peter M. Haas (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); and Edward Parson, Protecting the Ozone Layer, in Institutions for the Earth, eds. Peter M. Haas, Marc A. Levy and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 37. Constructivist work that heeds seriously the epistemological injunctions about ineffable actor beliefs is probably best performed with qualitative methods, rather than the statistical and behavioural ones typically associated with positivism. Thus, focused comparative studies, process tracing and counterfactual analysis are able to focus attention on the vital variables that constructivists believe to drive institutional politics. See Alexander L. George and Timothy J. McKeown, Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision-Making, in Advances in Information Process in Organizations, eds. R.F. Coulam and R.A. Smith (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1985), 21-58; David Collier, The Comparative Method, in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Ada W. Finifter (Washington, DC: The American Political Science Association, 1993); and Andrew Bennett and Alexander George, Case Studies and Theory Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).
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Millennium brief section we consider some exemplary works that have sought to develop new interdisciplinary mid-level insights into the performance and dynamics of institutions, and we also consider some actual occurrences in which social science research contributed to a dialogue between observerscholars and actor-politicians and to actual changes in state practices and thus even possibly human bettermentas a pragmatic constructivist programme would envisage. Few works com e to mind as perfect exemplars of pragmatic constructivism at work on institutions. Two early tre atments of international institutions, by E. H. Carr and Inis Claude, attempted nontendentiously to find the limits of classical idealism in aspects of classical realist thought.38 More recently, several multi-authored studies attempted what we suggest with some degree of success. 39 For instance, Cox and Jacobson found that major formal institutions could enjoy real, but limited and specific, autonomous powers in international relations. Goldstein and Keohane, despite the fact that they chose authors who were sympathetic to rational choice, came up with some mid-level findings for the lasting and autonomous influence of ideas and informal institutions on state practices. In a grander sense, reflexive social science research has studied largescale social phenomena associated with international institutions, developed and refined an understanding of those dynamics, and in turn contributed their own insights into the advancement of those political projects over the longue dure. The post-war European integration project can be told through the developing of an interaction between scholars and practitioners. Neofunctionalists learned from the first generation of institutional architects, leading in turn to the refinement and application of some of the hybrid social facts, andat least by De Gaullethe challenge and rejection of some of the first generation of researchers findings.40 A future European Constitution may be the next laboratory for this grand scale social science project. A larger array of work exists which was developed by teams of social scientists who closely studied political and policy activities, and then provided their results to decision makers. In turn, the decision makers converted some of the ideas to new practices. For instance, the 1970 Jackson Report on Economic Development in the United Nations System led to
38. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1948) and Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Plowshares (New York: Random House, 1956). 39. Cox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence; Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy; Weiss and Jacobson, Engaging Countries. 40. Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958) and The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1975); Kalypso Nicolaidis and Robert Howse, eds., The Federal Vision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the United States and the European Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Christiansen, Jrgensen, and Wiener, The Social Construction of Europe.
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the dramatic reorganisation of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).41 Elinor Ostroms work on the management of common property resources has led to the strengthening of national forestry management institutions, especially through the involvement of local groups.42 The United Nations Global Compact is also an effort to develop and apply within an institutional setting consensual knowledge about best corporate practices by trying to encourage participation from corporate actors, civil society, and experts.43 Thirty years of multilateral environmental protection have also reproduced such broad patterns of interaction between natural scientists, social scientists and policy makers. An increasing number and proportion of international environmental regimes came to reflect the insights of scholars about how to mobilise and utilise networks of environmental scientists in the development of sustainable national strategies for protecting transboundary and global environmental resources. Both the policy makers and the scholars learned from one another, leading to a new and robust style of multilateral environmental governance.44 The last 30 years of multilateral environmental governance can, in fact, be most productively told from a pragmatic constructivist perspective. Since 1972, an ecological epistemic community, articulating a new ecological management doctrine, has institutionalised its ideas in state policies and practices, in the programmatic activities of international institutions, and in international regimes.45 In turn, members efforts have been scrutinised by social scientists in order to identify further governance lessons for decision makers, as well as to better understand the political process of
41. United Nations Development Programme, A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations Development System, Geneva, United Nations, 1969, DP/ 5, E.70.I.10. 42. C. Dustin Becker, Protecting a Garua Forest in Ecuador , AMBIO 28, no. 2 (1999): 435-65 and Clark Gibson and C. Dustin Becker, A Lack of Institutional Demand, in People and Forests, eds. Clark Gibson, Margaret McKean, and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 43. John G. Ruggie, global_governance.net: The Global Compact as Learning Network, Global Governance 7, no. 4 (2001): 371-78. 44. For instance, Oran R. Young, Global Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and The Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Haas, Levy, and Keohane, Institutions for the Earth; Peter M. Haas, Social Constructivism and the Evolution of Multilateral Environmental Governance, in Globalization and Governance, eds. Aseem Prakash and Jeffry A. Hart (London: Routledge, 1999) and Environment: Pollution, in Managing a Globalized World, eds. P. J. Simmons and Chantal de Jonge Oudraat (Washington, DC: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 2001); and The Social Learning Group, Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 45. Peter M. Haas, Institutionalized Knowledge and International Environmental Politics, in Handbook of International Relations, eds. G. John Ikenberry and Vittorio Parsi (Rome: Laterza, 2000), 255-85; see also, Environment: Pollution and Social Constructivism.
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Millennium social learning and the role of ideas on how states formulate and pursue the national interest. Victor, Raustialla, and Skolnikoffs comparative work on environmental compliance contributed to the refinement of verification and compliance mechanisms in United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) administered environmental regimes. This reflected the focus and concern expressed by environmental lawyers and diplomats alike on questions of verification and effectiveness in negotiations and treaty drafting.46 A new environmental management doctrine based on ecological principles had been emerging since the 1960s. The ideas were developed outside the scope of most state interests and are generally regarded as being relatively uncompromised by political and institutional influence, since ecology was a relatively cheap research enterprise and its subject of study was far removed from most state interests. Members of the ecological epistemic community subscribed to holistic ecological beliefs about the need for policy coordination subject to ecosystemic laws. This epistemic community had very few ideational competitors. Resource management bodies had traditionally been staffed by neoclassical economists and resource managers. These, however, had been discredited by broadly publicised environmental disasters, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the limits to growth debatewhich they had been unable to predictand attendant popular fears of widespread resource depletion. Curiously, whereas other major IPE regimes of this era developed subject to free market antiregulatory overarching guidelines, environmental regimes developed based on a strongly regulatory philosophy, informed by scientific estimates of the environmental thresholds. Following the politicisation of international environmental issues in the late 1960s, galvanised by widely publicised environmental disasters occurring in the global commons, the United Nations convened the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972. As a consequence of these new domestic demands, and in order to prepare national papers to UNCHE, governments created new environmental agencies. Most state officials were unfamiliar with environmental threats and were unable to rank-order environmental threats, amounts of national emissions, what would constitute safe or dangerous concentrations of possible contaminants, and what were appropriate policies to reduce emissions. This crisis precipitated the political sense by governments that there was a shared problem demanding concerted responses, and that they required the knowledge from the nascent environmental epistemic community be put to use in addressing the hybrid fact of environmental threatsin their physical, social, and political aspects. Following a
46. David G. Victor, Kal Raustiala and Eugene B. Skolnikoff, eds., The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
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Pragmatic Constructivism and International Institutions pragmatic constructivist pattern, then, the identification of a problem led to the involvement of an epistemic community, to some social scientists participating in the epistemic community and others studying it, and to the virtuous interaction between the two groups. Many national agencies recruited epistemic community members to serve as officials or as consultants. International organisations were created as well, and they too turned to the international ecological epistemic community for expertise. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1973 and was staffed principally by young epistemic community members eager to put their scientific knowledge to work. The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) played a strong role in managing European air pollution. The UNECEs environmental unit was led by a former UNEP official who carried the ecological management ideas from UNEP to UNECE. After 1987 the World Bank also became active in international environmental matters. Part of the environmental reforms introduced at the World Bank was the recruitment of ecological epistemic community members and their assignment to key posts in evaluating the environmental consequences of development projects. Diffusion occurred principally through efforts of these major international environmental organisations and through environmental regimes. These organisations encouraged other organisations to internalise environmental concerns into their missions through joint projects, and encouraged governments to pursue more comprehensive environmental policies through public education campaigns, publicising environmental monitoring findings, resource transfers, and demonstration effects. Ecological practices have become locked in and institutionalised through a variety of mechanisms. Following ratification of international regimes, governments enforce these obligations domestically. Ecological practices get institutionalised domestically through legal precedents, bureaucratic standard operating procedures, and policy enforcement. In many countries they have acquired domestic constituenciescomposed of lawyers and civil engineers who subcontract services, firms selling pollution control technologies, and environmental NGOsthat contribute political pressure for continued state enforcement of policies grounded in these ideas. Exogenous forces have also reinforced these state commitments. A Gallup poll conducted in 1992 demonstrated new worldwide concern about the need to respond to global and transboundary environmental threats.47 In democratic societies public demands for environmental protection reinforce the influence of the epistemic communitys ideas. International
47. Riley E. Dunlap, George H. Gallup, Jr., and Alec M. Gallup, Health of the Planet Survey (Princeton, NJ: Gallup International Institute, 1992).
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markets for pollution control technology also came into existence in the 1990s. As the example of the environment shows, pragmatic constructivism can tell an institutional account of collective learning which would not be possible with neoliberal, neorealist or standard constructivist approaches. While this brief review did not engage in hypothesis testing, the key dynamic of change involved first the identification of a new puzzle, then new ideas being introduced to state decision makers from epistemic communities within the settings of supportive international institutions. The operative force was that of new ecological management ideas leading states to recognise the national interest in new ways, rather than the utilitarian logic of international institutions assisting states to find a satisfactory compromise, or of the exercise of power by one state over another.
Conclusion: Closing the Hermeneutic Circle and Promoting Better Social Science Research and Better Policy
Public policy now relies heavily on social scientists for input, even if there is no clear intentional causal connection between social science consensus and public policy outputs. Daniel Lerner observed already in 1959 that social research has become an indispensable instrument of public policy, regardless of party, in the complex urban industrial society of modern America.48 Pragmatic constructivism seeks to advance a research agenda for better cumulative knowledge in the social sciences. But it also advances a research programme for how to understand better the impact of ideas on collective behaviour. By focusing on international institutions we have looked at epistemological techniques for understanding this process, as well as trying to develop a research programme for understanding the role of institutions in advancing and acting on consensual knowledge. Thus, the hermeneutic circle of interpretation and practice is closed, briefly, only to become sundered with new developments and a renewed quest for provisional agreement. This possibility of influencing policy, in turn, raises the question of whether analysts must be recursively and indefinitely imprisoned in the double hermeneutic implied by pragmatic constructivism, or whether we are able to break out of the hermeneutic circle into an arena where consensual knowledge legitimates action. We hold that despite the tyranny of the hermeneutic circle, it is possible to establish the near-undoubted facticity of certain phenomena, provided certain procedures of dialogue and demonstration are observed.
48. Daniel Lerner, Social Science: Whence and Whither, in Human Meaning of Social Sciences, ed. Daniel Lerner (New York: Meridien Books, 1959).
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We also hold that there is no other way of marrying the search for knowledge to collective political action. More effective institutions to give us more peace, health and wealth cannot be built without this marriage. Recognising and advocating hybrid facts makes it possible to combine social science and political action with insights into the physical world. This recognition is the equivalent of establishing constitutive rules or practices for talking about collective action. We conclude with a plea for a future constructivist research agenda on how knowledge and institutions interact. Current constructivists are seeking to explain this large-scale process by which the intellectual exchange between the policy and social science community leads to new social practices. That is, constructivists are now trying to devise social science theories that can endogenise the role of social science understanding in explaining change in political practices; in particular the role of international institutions as the venues and agents of such social learning and knowledge diffusion. At a more practical level, further fruitful lines of inquiry should be possible on how to design international training institutions to promote social learning by developing useful truths, transmitting lessons and encouraging a true interplay between researchers and politicians, 49 as well as work on the conditions under which institutions enjoy autonomy or latitude from their sponsors, and the degrees of freedom within which they can exercise discretion.
Peter M. Haas is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts/ Amherst and Visiting Research Professor at the Brown University Watson Institute of International Studies, and Ernst B. Haas is the Robson Research Professor of Government at the University of California, Berkeley, Emeritus
49. For instance, one could imagine studies of various short-term mid-career training programmes for bureaucrats, what to do with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the United Nations University (UNU), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IRRD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) and how to design social science research projects so they can involve the selfreflective participation of policy makers.
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Pragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International Institutions

Millennium Publishing House, LSE

>> Version of Record - Jul 1, 2002

Pragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International Institutions

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