Abstract
This essay proposes Competitive Institutionalism, a theoretical framework that recalibrates neoinstitutional world-polity theory to address the fracturing of global governance. We need not abandon the phenomenological foundations of John W. Meyer’s approach; we must, however, theorize how multiple and clashing legitimacy systems operate simultaneously within a heterarchical global environment. The central innovation lies in recognizing that legitimacy pluralization, defined here as the rise of rival centers of institutional authority, signifies the fragmentation of world culture into coexisting and contradictory cultural scripts, without precipitating its outright collapse. Through the mechanism of legitimacy arbitrage, complemented by institutional field fragmentation and competitive isomorphism, the proposed framework explains how states navigate clashing institutional demands. They do so through a logic of appropriateness, preserving the „red line“ of cultural phenomenology while accounting for the fierce competition between rationalized myths of statehood.
Introduction: The Unravelling of Singular World Culture
For decades, World Polity Theory (WPT) has served as a preeminent lens for interpreting global social change (Meyer et al., 1997; Boli and Thomas, 1999). Originating with John W. Meyer and his colleagues at Stanford, this neoinstitutional perspective offered a compelling explanation for the startling convergence observed in the late twentieth century. Distinct societies and states adopted nearly identical ministries, educational curricula, and constitutional scripts. This global isomorphism was driven less by functional necessity or power politics than by the diffusion of a singular, rationalized „world culture“ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).
This culture, carried by dense networks of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and scientific bodies (epistemic communities), defined the parameters of the modern nation-state. Conformity became the prerequisite for recognition. States established environmental protection agencies or human rights commissions because these structures constituted the globally legitimated script of modern statehood; local demand was secondary to the imperative of international intelligibility.
The theory’s explanatory power, however, was deeply tethered to the post-Cold War unipolar moment, an era where a liberal-democratic, market-oriented script appeared as the sole viable model for modernity. That context has vanished. The contemporary zeitgeist is defined by organized, ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal script (Cole, Schofer, and Meyer, 2024). The surge of illiberalism, the crystallization of alternative geopolitical blocs, and the contestation of once-axiomatic norms present serious anomalies for classical WPT (Bromley, Schofer, and Longhofer, 2019). As Axford (2024) observes, the „new“ globalization is characterized by a decentred and multipolar constitution of globality, one that simultaneously feeds and is fed by populist currents. Western architectures of post-war global governance are now frequently perceived as fragile or disingenuous, a perception with far-reaching implications for tackling collective challenges.
This essay posits that our new reality demands theoretical evolution. Competitive Institutionalism theorizes a world of multiple and clashing cultural scripts. It retains WPT’s phenomenological heart: actors are motivated by legitimacy (Meyer, 2010). Yet, in a multipolar world, legitimacy is contested terrain. When rival institutional models coexist, actors do not merely conform to a single global script; they navigate a competitive field of norms. They employ what March and Olsen (1989) termed a „logic of appropriateness,“ yet they must now decide which appropriateness applies to which audience.
Part I: The Phenomenological Core and Meyer’s „Red Line“
To appreciate Competitive Institutionalism, one must first grasp the distinct commitments of the World Polity School. Unlike neorealism or neoliberalism, WPT challenges the assumption that concrete actors simply pursue predetermined power or wealth (Waltz, 1979). It is fundamentally a cultural theory: it argues that the identities and purposes of actors are constructed by the wider institutional environment (Meyer and Jepperson, 2000).
Culture as Constitutive
In this vein, nation-states are not „hard-wired“ entities driven by inherent needs for security or efficiency. Modern actorhood is a cultural construction. The „rationality“ actors display is a „rationalized myth,“ a bundle of cultural beliefs about proper behaviour that has been institutionalized globally (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).
This is Meyer’s crucial „red line“ separating phenomenological from realistic theory. Action is guided by a logic of appropriateness („What does a proper actor do here?“) and not by a logic of consequences („What maximizes my utility?“). Culture does not merely influence actors externally, it creates them. States possess interests primarily because cultural frameworks define what states are.
Isomorphism, therefore, results from a craving for legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). States signal conformity to world culture to gain recognition. This often leads to decoupling: the gap between formal adoption and actual practice at the national and subnational level. Decoupling is a structural mechanism allowing organizations to maintain legitimacy via „myth and ceremony“ while buffering their technical core from disruption. As Tallberg and colleagues have presented empirically, legitimacy dynamics are paramount in global governance, yet they have been insufficiently recognized, conceptualized, and explained in standard accounts of international cooperation (Tallberg and Zürn, 2019).
Preserving Phenomenology in Competitive Institutionalism
Competitive Institutionalism maintains this stance while theorizing environments where rationalized myths collide. When states engage in legitimacy arbitrage, selecting among competing scripts, they respond to divergent assumptions about appropriate behaviour.
The competition described here should not be confused with a realist clash of material interests. It is a cultural contest over the shared understandings that define a legitimate state in the twenty-first century. A state participating in Western-led institutions while simultaneously engaging with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is responding to rival phenomenological realities. Each environment offers a distinct cultural script defining „legitimate statehood“ and „proper cooperation.“ We are witnessing the fragmentation of world culture into multiple environments, each generating unique isomorphic pressures.
Part II: Empirical Foundations—The Fragmentation of Order
Recent research documents the fracturing of the liberal institutional order that once provided the foundational template for classical WPT. This fragmentation creates the structural conditions for legitimacy competition.
The Illiberal Turn Within Liberal Frameworks
Cole, Schofer, and Meyer (2024) identify a striking paradox: the simultaneous expansion of liberal institutions and the surge of illiberal practices. While human rights treaties have achieved near-universal ratification, violations have spiked. This cannot be dismissed as simple implementation failure. States are navigating conflicting legitimacy pressures; they maintain formal commitments to liberal frameworks while adopting practices that signal „appropriateness“ within alternative systems that value sovereignty and cultural distinctiveness above universal rights.
Similarly, Bromley, Schofer, and Longhofer (2019) analyse the explosion of legal restrictions on foreign NGO funding. These restrictions constitute a complex navigation of state-civil society relations. States participate in international civil society frameworks while simultaneously asserting sovereignty-based models that prioritize state control. They create hybrid arrangements to satisfy clashing legitimacy criteria.
Institutional Blocs: BRICS and SCO
The most visible evidence of legitimacy pluralization is the crystallization of alternative institutional complexes. The BRICS grouping (acronym for the founding member states Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the SCO represent institutional entrepreneurship aimed at establishing alternative governance pathways (Stuenkel, 2015).
The 2023 BRICS Johannesburg Declaration explicitly positions the bloc as a vanguard for an alternative model emphasizing mutual respect and sovereign equality, a direct challenge to liberal frameworks predicated on conditionality. With the recent expansion to include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran, and Indonesia’s announced intention to join, the bloc now represents approximately 41 percent of the world’s population and 37 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity (Carvalho, 2024). This representativeness strengthens the legitimacy of BRICS in international decisions, particularly in discussions regarding global governance reform.
The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) offer finance models that compete with the World Bank on lending terms and through fundamentally different myths about appropriate development. As Chin (2024) finds in a comprehensive assessment of the NDB’s first decade, the Bank shares some attributes, purposes, and goals with other multilateral development banks but also exhibits new or differing characteristics, norms, and values. The NDB has become, in Tabirlioğlu’s (2025) formulation, a testing ground for experiments in monetary autonomy, project financing insulated from Western political conditions, and symbolic assertions of South-South solidarity. NDB membership is increasingly functioning as a diplomatic instrument: accession and prospective-member status serve as low-cost signals of alignment with a Global South financing bloc, while still allowing pivotal middle powers to hedge.
Likewise, the SCO Charter establishes principles of mutual trust and cultural diversity, explicitly rejecting „bloc mentality“ (SCO Charter, 2002). In a phenomenological reading, these organizations embody alternative cultural scripts. They represent competing rationalized myths that generate their own isomorphic pressures on aspirant states.
Part III: Core Theoretical Mechanisms
Competitive Institutionalism relies on three mechanisms that extend neoinstitutional insights.
Mechanism 1: Legitimacy Arbitrage
Legitimacy arbitrage involves the strategic selection among competing institutional frameworks based on context-specific legitimacy calculations (Perkmann, Phillips, and Greenwood, 2022). Unlike „forum shopping,“ which implies seeking material advantage, legitimacy arbitrage involves navigating normative frameworks.
This mechanism relies on a logic of appropriateness. States do not operate purely on strategic logic; they enact the cultural scripts assigned to them. A state participating in liberal human rights bodies and sovereignty-centric regional organizations is reconciling competing phenomenological realities. Each framework offers distinct rationalized myths that states must balance.
Suchman’s (1995) typology applies here. States seek pragmatic legitimacy (resources), moral legitimacy (normative appropriateness), and cognitive legitimacy (intelligibility). Arbitrage allows states to seek moral legitimacy in international forums while pursuing cognitive legitimacy at home, where resource extraction may define „proper“ development.
Consider Brazil’s environmental posture under recent administrations. Under the Bolsonaro government, as detailed by Ferrante and Fearnside (2019), Brazil maintained formal adhesion to the Paris Agreement while dismantling domestic protections. Deforestation in the Amazon increased by 56 percent, and projections suggested Brazil could fail its Paris Agreement targets by 137 percent if such policies continued (UFRJ Study, 2022). This was a performance of legitimacy arbitrage: maintaining moral standing internationally while signaling to domestic bases that „sovereignty“ implies the right to exploit national resources. The subsequent Lula administration has demonstrated the reversibility of such arbitrage. By reinstating environmental governance and achieving a 36 percent reduction in primary forest loss in 2023 compared to 2022, Brazil has recalibrated its legitimacy performance to emphasize its credentials as a „global steward,“ culminating in its presidency of the G20 in 2024 and preparation to host COP30 in 2025 (Climate Action Tracker, 2024; Brazilian Government, 2024).
Mechanism 2: Institutional Field Fragmentation
We draw on the institutional logics perspective to understand how the global environment splits into fields characterized by competing scripts (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012). Western governance models prioritze individual rights and technocratic expertise, while alternative templates emphasize collective harmony and state-led development.
China’s internet governance illustrates this fragmentation. While Western frameworks view the internet through a logic of free expression and minimal state intervention, China has constructed a „cyber sovereignty“ model. This model holds that the state is the legitimate arbiter of information for the sake of social stability (Jiang, 2010; Mueller, 2017). Recent scholarship has elaborated the mechanisms by which Beijing promotes this model internationally. Qiao-Franco (2024) identifies an „emergent community of cyber sovereignty“ in which boundaries separating the Global North and South are reproduced through boundary-work undertaken by core members. Chen and Gao (2024) trace that China has diffused its cyber norms on regional and international levels through a combination of socialization and positive incentives, revolving around three core values: cyber sovereignty, multilateralism, and the balance between security and development.
This is a genuine alternative cultural script. China’s implementation within the SCO and BRICS has achieved notable successes; heads of member states at the SCO agreed to „encourage building a peaceful, secure, fair and open information space based on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of others“ (SCO Declaration, 2015). Similar norm convergence is evident within BRICS, where members have explicitly recognized the need to „advocate the establishment of internationally applicable rules for security of ICT infrastructure“ (BRICS Declaration, 2022). Other states adopt elements of this model through legitimation processes within an alternative institutional field, not simply due to coercion.
Mechanism 3: Competitive Isomorphism
Classically, isomorphism implies convergence (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Competitive isomorphism reconceptualizes this: states face pressure toward similarity within specific niches, but pressure toward differentiation across competing fields.
This explains the diversification of state portfolios. States join contradictory organizations because different contexts demand different forms of conformity. Furthermore, this competition accelerates institutional innovation. As Western institutions emphasize technocracy, alternative institutions emphasize sovereignty. The AIIB, for instance, creates a hybrid form of governance. It adopts some Western safeguards to reassure global markets while retaining a decision-making structure that appeals to the Global South’s desire for non-interference.
Empirical research on institutional overlap and survival corroborates this mechanism. As Sommerer and Tallberg (2019) note, functional overlap facilitates the identification of role models and lessons learned on which new organizations can draw to set themselves up for success. Growing institutional complexity has the potential to undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of international cooperation, but it also reduces the status quo bias of institutional arrangements (Abbott and Faude, 2020; Henning and Pratt, 2022). Smaller states, meanwhile, are demonstrating a capacity for selective engagement and multi-alignment, building friendly ties with multiple major powers and working most closely with whichever partner best suits their security and economic interests at any given moment.
Part IV: Theoretical Integration
Competitive Institutionalism engages adjacent theories while maintaining its phenomenological core.
Institutional Logics
Friedland and Alford (1991) argued that society comprises multiple orders (market, family, religion) with distinct logics. We extend this to the global level: geopolitical complexes embody distinct logics of governance. While the institutional logics perspective often foregrounds strategic manipulation, we maintain that actors genuinely respond to the normative force of these myths. Strategic navigation occurs, but it is a navigation of appropriateness.
Field Theory
Fligstein and McAdam (2012) describe fields as spaces where incumbents and challengers vie for control. Competitive Institutionalism adds nuance to this notion. States occupy different positions in different fields simultaneously. A state may be an incumbent in the SCO and a challenger in the IMF. This positional complexity drives legitimacy arbitrage. China uses its incumbency in the BRICS to construct alternative complexes, enhancing its leverage as a challenger in Western structures. The legitimation practices of international organizations themselves have become a subject of empirical study (Schmidtke et al., 2024), with IOs investing considerable resources in adapting public communication, behavior, policy output, and institutional features to secure their perceived right to rule.
Part V: Empirical Applications
Internet Governance: The Clash of Sovereignties
The internet governance battle exemplifies legitimacy pluralization. Western bodies like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) operate on a logic of decentralized, multi-stakeholder governance. In contrast, the concept of „cyber sovereignty“ posits that states possess the ultimate authority to regulate their digital borders (Mueller, 2017).
This is a clash of rationalized myths. One defines the internet as a global commons; the other defines it as sovereign territory. States engage in arbitrage by formally attending global forums while implementing national firewalls. They demonstrate „appropriate“ behaviour to Western investors (openness) and domestic audiences (security/control). The Digital Silk Road has become a key vehicle for spreading China’s outlook on cybersecurity and philosophy on global cyberspace governance through trade and investment policies (Karmazin, 2023). At the 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the Action Plan explicitly referenced the Initiative on Jointly Building a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace, pledging cooperation on capacity-building relating to AI and governance of cross-border data flows (Article 19, 2024).
Development Finance: The AIIB Challenge
The AIIB represents institutional entrepreneurship par excellence. Western institutions link development to conditionality and liberal reform. The AIIB, conversely, promotes a logic of infrastructure-led growth decoupled from political interference.
States engage in arbitrage by borrowing from both. They signal fiscal discipline to the World Bank and „sovereign development“ to the AIIB. This competition drives the World Bank to adapt, softening conditionality to remain relevant, a clear case of competitive isomorphism. The planned BRICS Multilateral Guarantee mechanism, backed by the NDB and modelled in part on the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), represents perhaps the most overtly „hegemonic“ innovation now on the table. If implemented at scale under Brazil’s 2025 BRICS presidency, such a platform could anchor a parallel pipeline of infrastructure and climate deals whose gatekeeping happens in Shanghai, Brasília, or Johannesburg rather than Washington (Tabirlioğlu, 2025).
Environmental Governance: Divergent Development Myths
Environmental governance brings into view the intersection of material interests and cultural scripts. Under the Bolsonaro administration, Brazil exemplified the friction between the „global steward“ script and the „sovereign developer“ script (Ferrante and Fearnside, 2019).
International frameworks define legitimate development as sustainable and rights-respecting. Domestic political scripts in many resource-rich nations define it as extraction and territorial mastery. The Bolsonaro administration engaged in arbitrage, paying lip service to international agreements to avoid sanctions (pragmatic legitimacy) while framing deforestation as an assertion of national sovereignty (cognitive legitimacy). Brazil even received the „Fossil of the Day“ award at COP28 for joining OPEC+, pointing to the tensions inherent in its arbitrage strategy.
The Lula government’s reversal serves as evidence that arbitrage strategies are not static. By reinstating the Plans for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm) and the Cerrado (PPCerrado), submitting a new NDC committing to 59-67 percent emissions reductions by 2035 relative to 2005 levels, and signing the Pact for Ecological Transformation between the Three Branches of Government in August 2024, Brazil has recalibrated its legitimacy performance toward the global steward script (Brazilian Government, 2024). This shift has been rewarded with enhanced international standing: the G20 presidency and COP30 hosting. Yet elements of arbitrage persist. The new growth acceleration program, Novo PAC, still earmarks substantial budget allocations for oil and fossil gas industries, revealing the continuing pull of the sovereign developer script (Climate Action Tracker, 2024).
Conclusion: Neoinstitutionalism for a Fragmented World
Competitive Institutionalism offers a necessary evolution of the World Polity School. It allows us to interpret a global order defined by contention. By introducing legitimacy arbitrage, the framework elucidates how states strategically navigate a fractured normative landscape while preserving the insight that they are driven by cultural scripts, and not just material calculus.
This framework remains purely phenomenological. The „competition“ is a struggle over the myths that define modern statehood. As Borrell (2023) has observed, we are witnessing „multipolarity without multilateralism,“ a condition in which multiple centers of power coexist without shared rules of the game. Whether one agrees with Brooks and Wohlforth (2023) that the current moment is best characterized as „partial unipolarity,“ or with those who see genuine multipolarity emerging, the fragmentation of legitimacy systems is undeniable. As recent research confirms, from the rise of illiberalism (Cole et al., 2024) to the emergence of heterogeneous institutions (Lerch et al., 2024), these shifts are the predictable outcomes of a system where the definition of a „legitimate actor“ is up for grabs.
Future research must map these arbitrage patterns. Which states can successfully inhabit contradictory scripts? How exactly do „institutional entrepreneurs“ like China or the BRICS bloc construct new myths? If legitimacy pluralization is structural, we are entering an era where the primary axis of global competition is ontological: a struggle over what it means to be a state.
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