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2002 31: 573Millennium - Journal of International StudiesPeter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas

InstitutionsPragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International

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© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2002. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 573-601

Pragmatic Constructivism and theStudy of International Institutions

Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas

This article provides a pragmatic constructivist approach for progressingstudy in International Relations (IR) that sidesteps the ontologicaldifferences between major IR approaches, and that is capable of influencingpractices in international relations. In particular, it looks at howinternational institutions can be studied and the possible consequencesof how they are studied. While institutions are at times, as realists andneoliberal institutionalists contend, merely the artifacts of strategicallyand rationally motivated state actors, they are viewed differently bypragmatic constructivists. Institutions may, at times, be wilful actors ontheir own, but are also the venue in which reflexive new practices andpolicies develop. Pragmatic constructivism provides the explanatory lensthrough which this may be understood, as well as the methodologicalguidelines by which such a process may be pursued.

Is cumulative knowledge and progress possible in the study and practiceof international relations? How can one develop social knowledge aboutthe world, given that claims about the nature of the world and observationof the world are both socially constructed activities? While this essayfocuses on international institutions, it may be taken as an illustration ofmuch wider issues in the field of International Relations (IR) and socialscience more generally. We focus in general on progress in the study of IRand the possible consequences for practices of international relations.

Students of IR remain divided on the implications of internationalinstitutions for the understanding of contemporary international relations.This is largely due, we believe, to the unremitting assertion made in the IRliterature that the incommensurate ontological and epistemologicalpositions that different IR scholars bring to their studies and interpretationsof international institutions fundamentally impair the ability to developcumulative knowledge about international institutions and their role ininternational relations. In this piece we present a pragmatic constructivistapproach to the study of international institutions, and of IR more generally,

This article is dedicated to the memory of Hildegarde Haas. We are grateful toM.J. Peterson and Craig Murphy for commenting on an earlier draft, to ananonymous reviewer from European Journal of International Relations, and fouranonymous reviewers at Millennium: Journal of International Studies. ChristopherMarcoux, David Claborn and Diahanna Lynch provided able editorial assistance.



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that is capable of generating useful mid-level truths without falling preyto the unresolvable philosophical, ontological and epistemological debatesposed in unnecessarily dichotomous terms that currently bedevil the studyof international relations. One such dichotomy opposes ideographic tonomothetic studies—unnecessarily. Another claims that there is a deepfissure between explanation and understanding—an overstated caricatureof systematic research. Still another rather crudely opposes positivism toreflectivism.

We believe that pragmatic constructivism provides a means tosidestep these procrustean constraints on inquiry. Pragmatic constructivismis derived from constructivism in IR and the pragmatist tradition in thephilosophy of science. In this article we hope to combine the two, bypresenting a constructivist ontology and the reasons that such an ontologyrequires a distinctive epistemology for generating a more usefulexplanation of contemporary international relations. Pragmaticconstructivism features a consensus theory of truth: we argue that it ispossible for followers of any and all approaches involved in developingknowledge about a particular puzzle to agree if and when they can alsoagree that they accept a given solution to be ‘true’, if only temporarily andfor a restricted purpose. We also argue that the means for ascertainingsuch a ‘truth’—truth tests—can also become consensual by means ofsustained dialogue among theorists and practitioners. Ontologically andepistemologically, the ‘truth’ ascertained by these operations is neither asabsolute as positivists and scientific realists demand, nor as biased, subjectto someone’s domination, or hegemonic as relativists proclaim.1 We donot aspire to a grand synthesis, but we do believe that a pragmaticengagement may contribute to stronger and more confident knowledgeclaims within delimited domains of mid-level theorising. Pragmaticconstructivism seeks to locate ideas about politics and the world withinthe social conditions from which they emerge, or are constructed. Ourapproach goes beyond an epistemological claim to develop a procedureby which social science consensus may lead to changes in the ‘real world’.

Pragmatic constructivists treat institutions as venues in whichanalysts and policy makers interact. While institutions are at times merelythe artifacts of strategically and rationally motivated state actors, as realistsand 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 PennsylvaniaPress, 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, Explainingand Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); MichaelMartin 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 constructivists. Institutions may be wilful actors on their own,at times, but are also the location in which reflexive new practices andpolicies develop. We believe that pragmatic constructivism provides theexplanatory lens through which this may be understood, as well as themethodological guidelines by which such a process may be pursued.

We begin with a brief overview of constructivism in IR. Forconvenience, we begin with its ontology. We then locate the study ofinstitutions within these ontological parameters, and proceed to developepistemological propositions about the fruitful study of institutions withinIR. We conclude with a reflexive effort to bring pragmatic constructivismto bear on the project of human betterment.

Our constructivism, while critical of positivism and the IR approachesdepending on it, nevertheless seeks to facilitate dialogue among holdersof currently competing theories. Hence, we develop a three-part map ofanalytic discourse in order to ‘place’ our approach in it; this map aims atrepresenting the three ideational domains that are fundamental to theunderstanding and operation of politics, as well as their interaction.

Having specified our version of agent-driven constructivism we thenexamine how various rival ontological traditions have treated internationalinstitutions, contrasting agent-driven approaches with those that stressstructure instead. We then show why neither a positivist epistemologynor a framework that seeks to mimic stylised research in the naturalsciences serves well for studying international institutions if agent-mediated change is to be featured.

Constructivism and Its Ontology

Constructivist scholars of IR focus on the institutional, discursive andintersubjective procedures by which international governance develops.As John Ruggie writes

Constructivists hold the view that the building blocks ofinternational reality are ideational as well as material; that the ideashave normative as well as instrumental dimensions; that theyexpress not only individual but also collective intentionality; andthat the meaning and significance of ideational factors are notindependent of time and place.2

Constructivists stress at least two major ontological forces that requireattention for a better understanding of contemporary international relationsand their study, forces which are commonly neglected by more mainstream

2. John Gerard Ruggie, ‘What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge’, International Organization52, no. 4 (1998): 879.

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approaches to IR. The consequence of this neglect, constructivists argue,is that mainstream approaches are incapable of fully appreciating therichness of contemporary international politics, including the recentchallenges to identity and the new mechanisms for self-transformation ofthe system emerging from social learning. Social learning, as is discussedlater, is the process of reflection by social scientists in conjunction withpolicy makers as they jointly develop new practices and policies intendedto improve the human condition. A constructivist ontology investsinstitutions with a political potential that is mainly overlooked by scholarsfrom other approaches. In the following sections we develop somepragmatic methodological guidelines by which constructivist ontologicalinsights about international institutions may be further theorised anddeveloped.

The first of the two historical changes or ontological developmentsunderlying the need for a pragmatic constructivist approach to the studyof institutions is the onset of globalisation and the increasingly complexnature of international politics.3 This complexity undermines states’ abilityto clearly formulate national interests and the means to pursue them andthus reveals institutions as potentially autonomous and discrete actors.While globalisation is commonly accepted as a major systemic propertyworthy of attention, constructivists focus on the uncertainty and complexitydimensions of globalisation. Globalisation implies that most goals thatstates traditionally pursue are now tightly intertwined (or non-decomposable in the systems language) and thus the calculation of self-interest is not easily done, and may not correspond to the ex anteassessments conveniently assumed by rationalist IR analysts.

The second development is the socialisation of knowledgedevelopment in the social sciences, which makes the development ofwarranted claims about institutions a social activity. IR research, for itspart, has grown increasingly social, akin to similar transformations in othersciences, with publications in the field being increasingly the work of jointauthors. Once people have completed dissertations, they appearincreasingly eager to engage in jointly authoring articles and chapters,and participate in team researched books.4

Constructivists see institutions as potential catalysts of political self-examination that may change states’ perception of their interests, albeit

3. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, ‘Globalization: What’s New? What’sNot? (And So What?)’, Foreign Policy 118 (2000): 104-19; Stanley Hoffmann, ‘TheClash of Globalizations’, Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 104-15; Robert K. Schaeffer,Understanding Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 1997); and DavidHeld, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, GlobalTransformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

4. Consider such a preeminent IR Journal as International Organization. From1986 to 1991, IO published 130 articles, 83 per cent of which were single-authoredand 17 per cent of which were multi-authored (2 pieces had 2 authors and 3 pieces



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under highly circumscribed conditions. Constructivists look at thecontingent factors that may allow international institutions to act asautonomous actors, and the institutional properties and contexts thatenable international institutions to influence state action. Thus, institutionsinvolve agency more than structure. More generally, constructivists stressthe circumstances under which state interests vary, and the circumstancesand means by which institutions may play a transformative role in alteringstate perceptions and behaviour.

These views lead constructivists to focus on such distinctive processesas socialisation, education, persuasion, discourse and norm inculcation.Typically, these are complex processes involving multiple interacting actorswhose influence and choices may accrue over time and contribute to shiftsin perception of national identity and interest, international agendas, andthe ways by which national interests are to be attained.5

This ontology has epistemological consequences as well. Manyconstructivists stress that concept formation and empirical observationare both social activities, and may be shaped by social context or byinstitutions. The challenge for a constructivist epistemology, which weturn to later in this article, is how to adequately separate these activities inorder to reduce the possibility for systematic bias in the formation ofconstructivist statements about social construction in a socially constructedworld. Since knowledge accumulation is not subject to the same socialpressures as the area of activity about which the knowledge is beingaccumulated, we believe that the observers can engage in a collective andconsensual approach to formulating warranted claims about the world.

Our brand of pragmatic constructivism is characterised by distinctassumptions about the nature of the world and about understanding thatnature.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 whichwere single-authored and 35 per cent of which were jointly authored (44 had 2authors, 10 had 3 authors, 6 had 4 authors, and 2 had 5 authors). There were 2special issues from 1986-1991, and 3 special issues from 1996-2001. Special issuestend to have more triple-authored pieces because of the editorial make up of thespecial issues.

5. For an elaboration of this point and its application to conference diplomacy,see Peter M. Haas, ‘UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of theEnvironment’, Global Governance 8, no. 1 (2002): 73-91.

6. For a discussion contrasting our version of constructivism with the views ofother self-declared constructivists, see Peter M. Haas, ‘Policy Knowledge: EpistemicCommunities’, 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 ofEurope, eds. Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen and Antje Wiener (London:Sage, 2001); Ernst B. Haas, ‘Reason and Change in International Life’, Journal ofInternational Affairs 44, no. 1 (1990): 209-40; and Ernst B. Haas, ‘Words Can HurtYou’, in International Regimes, ed. Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca, NJ: Cornell UniversityPress, 1983).




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discussed below, features social science and IR as part of the analyticdiscourse around politics and processes of political change.

We see three domains of study relevant to IR scholars: 1) politicalpractice, 2) social science, and 3) knowledge about the material world.The domain of political practice is occupied by politicians and providesthe traditional focus of descriptive IR studies. The domain of social scienceis the arena of analytic and interpretative efforts on the part of observers,and academic social scientists who consider themselves theorists. Socialscience involves attempts at systematic interpretation of the events andtrends undertaken by those who work in the first domain. The third islargely the domain of natural scientists and engineers and concerns thedelimitation of phenomena and laws of the material world.

The three domains of scholarly activity involve three different waysof seeing facts and connections among facts, each involving its ownhermeneutics and epistemology. The understanding of long-term politicaldynamics may be thought of as an intertwined spiral, or helix, linkingthese three domains: each develops according to its own dynamics butalso in its interactions with the other two.

Figure 1: Three ideational domains for the understanding and operation of politics

Even though each domain can be analysed in isolation, and existsindependently of the views of the analyst observer, we believe thatinterconnections exist which can be used as the constituent elements of abroader theory of political change. We propose to operate among andbetween these domains guided by our commitment to pragmaticconstructivism, thus raising the issue of a double hermeneutic between

Institutions

(a)

(d)

(b) (c)

(f) (e)

Political practice by politicians and

political actors

Social science analysis by social

scientists and reflective practitioners

Knowledge about the

material world



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the domains of social analysis and political actions, if not all three. We willdiscuss at the end of our essay how constraining—or liberating—thiscondition may turn out to be.

Figure 1 presents our constructivist view of these three ideationaldomains important for the understanding and operation of politics. Thedomain of political practice is made up of policy knowledge shared bypoliticians and various political actors. This domain includes intuitiveunderstanding, but may involve explanatory beliefs as well. Knowledgeabout political practices may involve abstract principles accepted as trueand legitimate (and self-defining), such as beliefs in human rights anddemocratisation, Wilsonian cosmopolitanism, or Cordell Hull’s faith inliberal interdependence; or of a technical form about how to achievematerial national goals in an interdependent world, such as monetarypolicy or environmental policy.

Social science understanding consists of understandings andexplanations of large-scale regularities and phenomena about humaninteractions with the physical and social milieu. Knowledge about thematerial world rests on natural science understandings of how variousaspects of the natural world behave.

To date, constructivist social science has looked at these domains,their interconnections, and the roles of international institutions withinthem in several ways. Some scholars have looked at how social scienceunderstandings can help design appropriate architectures for internationalinstitutions that were created to achieve intended goals in the domain ofpolitical practice (arrow a in diagram). They have also engaged in criticaldiscussions of the limits of existing institutions for achieving their intendedgoals. Social scientists including political scientists have looked at the roleof international institutions in promoting advances in technicalunderstandings ( arrow f in diagram), as well as on the role of improvedknowledge about the material world on political practices (arrow b indiagram). In turn, others have looked at the effect of political practices onthe formulation of material knowledge about the world as well (arrow cin diagram). While post-structuralists focus on the influence of politicalpractice on social science (arrow d in diagram), we tend to reject the notionthat this influence is a general causal phenomenon, even though individualclaims may at times be suspect. Finally, some interesting but incompleteefforts exist to apply advances in the natural science understanding andmethods 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 showhow different ontologies amongst social scientists beget differenttreatments of the nature of international institutions and how a pragmatist




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epistemology can illuminate connections and causal influences from figure1 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 frameworkof entities among which causal relations are to hold, and also anaccompanying logical and semantic framework in which these entities canbe talked about’.7 Douglass North suggests that institutions are the rulesof the game that characterise all social life.8 Yet, even though North sharplydistinguishes between the two, most IR writers treat organisations andinstitutions as synonyms. While North’s distinction is recognised by mostneoliberal institutionalists, the vast majority of their work is on formalinstitutions rather than social ones, and the two types of institutions areanalysed interchangeably.9 It makes a big difference if we are talking aboutthe United Nations, the French Foreign Ministry or Amnesty International,all of which are organisations; or about sovereignty, free trade, or deterringcrimes against humanity, all of which can be seen as heterogeneous rulesof the international game, difficult to categorise in single summarystatements.

It has also proven extraordinarily difficult for IR to formulate asingular theoretical way to study institutions. Our conceptions go back tothe very origin of the modern state system and to our theories about it.With a little legerdemain it could even be argued that today’s fissure wasalready present in ancient Greek thought, pitting the realism of Thucydidesagainst the idealism of the Stoics. That fissure divides theories of anarchyfrom notions of contract, doctrines of competition and war from dogmaabout cooperation and possible peace; Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseauagainst Grotius, Locke and Kant. The arguments have become morenuanced, the data much richer, and the methods now include statistics,gaming and modelling, but the fissure remains as deep as ever. Not onlydo the ontologies inspiring students of institutions differ, but theepistemological 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, andEconomic 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, andDuncan Snidal, ‘The Rational Design of International Institutions’, InternationalOrganization 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 overvalues: realists and idealists preferred peace to war, life to death, wealthto poverty. They differed over the question of freedom of the will, or whatwe now call the agency-structure problem. The proponents of anarchyheld (and hold) that structure triumphs, that humankind chooses underfrighteningly tight constraints. The defenders of cooperation argued (andargue) that even with the constraints imposed by factors outside humancontrol, opportunities exist for the exercise of innovative choices. This basicdifference in the assumptions, propositions and research associated witheach side has not been bridged to this day. There are few signs of eitherside winning a decisive victory. They have varied profoundly in how theybelieve institutions are to be studied, and the potential that institutionsprovide for conferring these shared values in an international setting.

Contemporary debates, hence, feature a variety of accounts ofinstitutions 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 rationalchoice approach to an understanding of actors’ preferences. On the otherhand, those informed by a more sociological bent tend to focus moreintensively on informal institutions and actor motivations. They also tendto highlight the effect of institutions on changing the understandings,interests and preferences of their members in ways that were notanticipated at the founding of the institution.10

From another perspective, structural neorealists accord importanceto international institutions—defined as organisations and law—only tothe extent that they serve to secure the hegemon’s interests. World systemstheorists, in turn, regard institutions as stages in, and beyond, the historicalevolution of capitalism, or as tools of capitalist exploitation. Finally, peacetheorists and classical liberals equate institutions with arrangements forimproving international cooperation, especially if they have their roots insocial psychology or in law.

Constructivists advance yet another understanding of institutions.By focusing on the discursive and intersubjective procedures that governinternational institutions, constructivists highlight institutions as potentialcatalysts for political change. However, though they all agree that actorsconstruct 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: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990); James G. March and Johan Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice inOrganizations (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1983); Michael Rowlinson, Organizationsand Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1997); and Arthur Stinchcombe, Informationand Organizations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).




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behaviour, they exhibit at least three different stances with respect tointernational institutions. Constructivists who stress state identitysubordinate interest in institutions as such to the roles assumed by state-actors; constructivists who privilege norms as shapers of behaviour seethe world much as peace theorists do when it comes to internationalcooperation—they see institutions as agents of change. Finally, pragmaticconstructivists regard institutions partly as arenas for designing changeand partly as arrangements that bring about change as they alter theperceptions of their members.

The diverse positions in the study of international institutions aretroublesome for intellectual advancement because the different meaningsof core terms inhibit discourse in general, and these differences infuseand confuse the discussion of causality in particular. Put succinctly,rational-choice institutionalists believe in structural determinism whereasmany sociological institutionalisms tend to stress actor-initiated change.11

Radical constructivists, on the other hand, deem consensus as suspect andthe immediate target of questioning and deconstruction; we, as pragmaticconstructivists, regard consensus as an instrumental step to political changeand progress.

The difficulty of attaining a consensual theory of internationalinstitutions is even more overwhelming at an epistemological level.Differing notions about institutions are usually pitched at different levelsof analysis. Bridging levels in a single theory or approach is possible, butexperience has shown that one scholar’s claim of successful bridging isseldom accepted as persuasive by the entire community of scholars. NoLakatosian cumulation occurs because different approaches are embeddedin different scholarly traditions whose competing ontological andepistemological claims continue to burden our intellects.

Neorealists and neoliberals do profess to be positivists or at leastneopositivists. Their tolerance for other approaches is always conditionedby their insistence that the arguments of other schools must meet positivisttruth 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 sociologyof collective behaviour. Yet, they too remain divided over whether to favourstructural predominance, ‘structuration’, or the evolutionary logic ofchange that combines intentional causality with natural selection. Peacetheorists in the Kantian tradition disagree, though peace theorists who

11. We realise that there are exceptions to these simple categorisations. AlexanderWendt, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore are constructivists who take a morestructural view of international institutions; see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory ofInternational Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and MichaelN. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies ofInternational Organizations’, International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 699-733.



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come from social psychology do not. Increasingly, they are inspired bygeneral systems thinking of a very abstract kind, by notions of self-organising systems of ever-greater complexity. Many world systemstheorists eschew positivism, but they may subscribe to scientific realismor 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 acceptspositivism as the sole and authoritative guide to sound knowledge.12

Positivism, in particular, informed early answers in IR to the questionof how institutions can best be studied in international relations byproviding seemingly sanitised techniques for research and knowledgecumulation. This approach continues to exert a considerable influence onIR, despite the challenge mounted by post-positivist approaches. We argue,however, that positivist epistemological foundations are no longerappropriate for recognising and explaining the full array of institutionalinfluences in contemporary international relations. Before we engage in adiscussion of how pragmatic constructivism can side-step the ontologicaland epistemological confrontations that typically surround thecontemporary study of institutions, it is worthwhile to pause and reflecton the limits of positivism in understanding social inquiry and inaddressing a constructivist ontology of institutions under conditions ofglobalisation.

Social science positivism proceeds from analogies to the naturalsciences. Statistics and formal modelling are the preferred techniques fordemonstrating causal inference. Units behave independently of theobserver, and can be studied without significantly influencing the subjectof study. Meaningful concepts are developed independently of the socialcontext in which research problems emerge, and the core variables aredefined and operationalised.

Positivism, and even neopositivist efforts, do not transfer easily tostudying the social realm. Scholars in the natural sciences do not face theproblem of reconciling competing protean principles. Their units ofanalysis lack free will; at least, none has been empirically demonstrated inatoms, molecules and cells. The positivist epistemology that has provedso successful in physics is unlikely to prove equally powerful in the socialsciences because the entities studied ‘talk back’ to the scholar. It is relativelysimple to agree on what constitutes intellectual progress when there isconsensus about methods, about how we establish truth. Social scientists,on the other hand, cannot be sure that the ‘reality’ being studied is not aproduct 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 hisBeyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996) for the notion ofpragmatism as we use it.




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even physicists have not uncritically accepted positivist claims. Earlyphysicists Max Planck and Ernst Mach debated the extent to which physicsis grounded in actual reality or in intellectual constructs.13 Such debatesremind social scientists to assess carefully a positivism based on aglorification of physics as an approach for understanding the socialsciences.

Positivism, and to a lesser extent its cousin scientific realism, relieson a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. The reality to becomprehended 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 itcomes to the study of international institutions, where the reality to becomprehended is mostly dependent on a social construction in whichshared perceptions establish what is real. That being the case, many truthtests valid in the natural sciences cannot work in the study of internationalinstitutions. While modelling and quantification may well add value toless formal modes of discourse, their weight in validating an explanatoryargument is weaker in the social than in the natural sciences, and evenfeebler when it comes to prediction. Positivist procedures may still providevalue in the social sciences when and where their epistemologicalrequirements do not clash with the social construction of reality.Mathematics may not be the natural language of human interaction, unlessit is a sophisticated mathematics that is capable of autopoietic and recursivecalculations.14 Positivist techniques that stress human intention andperception rather than reliance on fixed conditions expressible as crispvariables, on the other hand, may still provide a stable and rigorous bridgeto constructivist studies of institutions.

Very often, then—and certainly for matters that are important andinteresting—social science inquiry is outside the positivist domain. It isdifficult to formulate universal claims over time and across cultures becauseof 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 themselvessubject to the same set of potentially biasing social influences that shapetheir very object of study. No wonder Imre Lakatos warned againstapplying his theory of scientific progress to the social sciences. He did notenvision it to accommodate a discipline marked by competition among anumber of partly incommensurable intellectual traditions, all enjoying highlegitimacy in the eyes of their adherents. He thought of a single establishedtheory 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. IRhardly fits this view.

But the inability of IR scholars to grasp the positivist grail of discoveryis not a sufficient reason for avoiding rigour and relevance. We shouldcontinually 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, andsustainable development. We ought to persist in inquiring how institutionsfit into larger events and trends, such as growing (or declining) globalincome inequalities, stronger (or weaker) nation-states. We ought to dothis even if basic differences among approaches cannot be synthesised ortranscended, if consensual grand theories continue to elude us. We oughtto be able to do this without worshipping physics as an exemplar andwithout embracing positivism as the only valid method.

Many of these conclusions may seem less urgent to an audienceoutside the United States, where similar debates have been raging for atleast a decade and the overall balance appears to be shifting towards thebroad centre that we have sought to articulate in this article.16 A number ofauthors have embraced the project of individually and collectivelysearching for intersubjective agreements across potentially compatibletheoretical communities (or research programmes) in order to developmodest truth claims and insights into international politics.17 The EnglishSchool as a whole reflects this commitment to focused debates betweenadvocates of different approaches who share some overlappingepistemologies and substantive concerns, although the English School’sepistemology is not as rigorous (or dogmatic) as that often pursued byNorth American scholars of IR.18

Given positivism’s limits in addressing the complexities of aconstructivist ontology, we believe that pragmatic constructivism mayadvance scholarly agreement on dimensions of institutions important forstudy—as well as improving the understanding of their influence in theworld in providing rigorous methodological guidelines without falling

16. See, for instance, Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism andInternational 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 Wæver, ‘The Sociology of a Not SoInternational Discipline’, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687-728.

18. For such debates within Europe, see Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, TheExpansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Tim Dunne, ‘TheSocial Construction of International Society’, European Journal of International




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prey to the temptation of positivism. It is to this approach that we nowturn.

Pragmatic Constructivism and Scientific Progress

Pragmatic constructivism derives from the philosophy of science traditionof pragmatism.19 While constructivist writing has largely been ontological20

or critical,21 pragmatism provides a complementary epistemology topursue the constructivist ontology associated with institutional questions.

Pragmatism rests on the following foundations. The world is notaccessible to actors without the use of cognitive organising concepts. Actorsbehave wilfully, but do not share a common perspective or understanding;they do not all adopt the same cognitive organising concepts. Pragmatistsretain the Enlightenment faith in reason. They believe that politicalemancipation can be attained by publicising warranted findings from socialand natural science. Institutions (in the guise of international organisations)can be both cause and effect in the construction of meaning (and thusinstitutionalise meaning in the sociological sense of the term). Some actorsmay design them in order to, eventually, bring about an agreement onorganising concepts. Having succeeded, the institution’s effect is theproduction of new consensual discourse, and new intersubjectively sharedmeanings.

Thus, institutions can be the arena in which consensus emerges as aresult 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: AHistory of the English School (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). For unsuccessfulefforts at transatlantic communication, see Klauss Knorr and James Rosenau, eds.,Contending Approaches to International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1969). For a reflective and still valid account on the limits of such efforts, seeStanley 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 theU.S. from the Civil War through the 1930s, see Louis Menand, The MetaphysicalClub (London: Flamingo, 2001). Prominent pragmatists who are clustered togetherfor 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 InternationalRelations 3, no. 3 (1997): 319-63.

21. Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in InternationalRelations’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 147-82 andGerard Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary Historyand 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, believingthat policy would be best advanced by challenging the positivist epistemologicalnotions underlying explanations of history.



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appropriate discourse to a much greater extent than would be the case ifindividuals worked in isolation. Even if no correspondence theory of truthfinds acceptance, a persuasive consensus-creating process can beenvisaged.

Pragmatic constructivism is entwined in the bonds of the doublehermeneutic. No definitely and consensually ‘true’ statement is possibleonce we grant that not only the actors’ but also the observers’ realities aresocially constructed.22 This stance implies a notion of intellectual progressthat must respect the legitimacy of competing ontologies andepistemologies. Yet, we are not being tolerant for the sake of being nice toour intellectual antagonists. Tolerance is an inevitable by-product of beingpart of the hermeneutic circle. Intellectual pluralism is inescapable becauseof our commitment to pragmatism. We must concede that in social sciencediscourse our construction of reality cannot be proved superior to anyoneelse’s. Warrants for claims rest on internal consistency, adherence to thebroader truth tests of the research programme from which a piece of workemerges, and ultimately, empirical reproduction and confirmation, andpossibly even acceptance by critics from other theoretical camps. Thus, ata minimum, the achievement of most progress depends on continuing theconversation among all of us.

But we hope to do better than that in seeking to break out of thecircle in the quest for consensual meanings. Following Charles Taylor, weunderstand the name of the game to be to arrive at agreed meanings despitethe prevalence of the hermeneutic circle. True, ‘to appreciate a goodexplanation, one has to agree on what makes good sense; what makesgood sense is a function of one’s readings; and these in turn are based onthe kind of sense one understands’.23 Transcendent meanings areestablished by agents-in-action, not by individualistic ratiocination.Meanings result from collective action and the collective thought thatprecedes it.

To be a living agent is to experience one’s situation in terms ofcertain meanings; and this in a sense can be thought of as a sort ofproto- ‘interpretation’. This is in turn interpreted and shaped bythe language in which the agent lives these meanings. This whole

22. This conundrum is also labelled the hermeneutic circle. In the words of CharlesTaylor: ‘The circle can also be put in terms of part-whole relations: we are trying toestablish a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of itspartial expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with makingsense, where expressions can only make sense or not in relation to others, thereadings of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately on thewhole’. Taylor is excerpted in Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, eds., TheHermeneutic Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 156.

23. Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Science of Man’, Review of Metaphysics25, no. 3 (1971): 164.




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is then at a third level interpreted by the explanation we profferfor his action.24

Taylor offers the prospect for a reflective social science that can generatemid-level generalisable claims about the social realm and inform choicesand practices in that realm. Pragmatic constructivism is a means by whichwarranted truth claims about political behaviour may be generated byobservers of the political process on this third level without their fullyfalling under the sway of the forces which they seek to analyse.

The Commitments of a Pragmatic Constructivist Epistemology

Pragmatic constructivism’s contribution to epistemology hinges on itsconception of causation, consensual theories of truth, and evolutionaryepistemology.25 Pragmatic constructivists, such as ourselves, whileremaining within the family of scholars who believe in the possibility ofestablishing the truth of propositions about the world, nevertheless differfrom positivists because we eschew any crisp notion of causality. We holdthat that all truth is provisional. We prefer to think in terms of complexrelations among variables, not simply ‘A is explained by B’ because thetwo are logically associated with each other. Unfortunately, some positivistsmistake this statistical association for causation, and also for a directcorrespondence with the ‘natural world’. Pragmatists also make their peacewith the short half-life of most theories and thus few aim at finding generalcovering laws. While overdetermination and interactive effects betweenindependent variables (heteroscedasticity and multiple collinearity) areproblems for the positivist, for constructivists they are almost taken forgranted as a consequence of complexity and globalisation. Such concernsremain methodological concerns, but constructivists accept the fact thatthey can only seldom be addressed in empirical work.26 Someconstructivists, however, veer towards a commitment to scientific realistepistemology 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 asthose included in Michael Shapiro, ed., Language and Politics (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1984); genealogies, for instance Richard Price, ‘A Genealogy ofthe Chemical Weapons Taboo’, International Organization 49, no. 1 (1995): 73-104;and rich studies of historical context, such as Holden, ‘Who Contextualizes theContextualizers?’. For a sophisticated treatment of a variety of constructivistmethodological approaches, see Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and especially Chapter 5 in whichhe presents an argument similar to our notion of how social science may improveinstitutional performance.

26. Constructivist research techniques have not yet been fully codified intotextbooks. Some qualitative techniques such as process tracing and counterfactualsmay serve to build confidence in the influence of particular variables in particularcontexts.



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not amenable to direct observation, an ability most other constructivistsdo not claim to possess.

It is simply incorrect to argue, as some do, that all branches ofconstructivism ought to be sharply juxtaposed to the epistemologies of‘hard science’. Max Weber, the inventor of interpretative sociology, wasmore judicious in his formulation. He distinguished between‘observational’ and ‘explanatory’ understanding. The former involvesdirectly watching and then interpreting the significance of some item ofactor conduct, such as joy or anger. The latter calls for the determinationof the actor ’s reason for acting in the observed manner, the study ofmotivation. Weber is careful to specify that the mode of explanatoryunderstanding is ‘rational understanding of motivation, which consists inplacing 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 thebest way to attain their objectives; motives are ‘rational’ in that sense, evenif not in the perspective of microeconomics or game theory. Therefore theycan be studied with systematic methods and subjected to rigoroushypotheses that may even be falsifiable. Interpretation does not have tobe the equivalent of mushiness.

This interplay harkens back to the interaction between the realms ofpolitical practice and social science analysis presented in figure 1. Socialscientists may ‘test’ politicians’ and policy makers’ self-understanding ofcausation in practice. While each, in fact, may be subject to social influence,through consensus theories of truth and the evolutionary epistemologydiscussed below, the potential biases of each may be kept independentand ultimately winnowed away through debate and consensus formation.At least analytically, it is then possible to generate concepts and to evaluatethem without having to worry about the social construction and possibledistortions of them.

Pragmatic constructivism, then, distinguishes between three domainsof knowledge, with different epistemological techniques appropriate fordeveloping truth claims for each: brute facts, social facts, and hybrid facts.28

There is partial overlap between these domains of knowledge and theontological divisions of social activity presented in figure 1. Brute facts are

27. Max Weber, ‘The Interpretive Understanding of Social Action’, in Readings inthe 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 withpositivism, albeit not in its most demanding form that insists on strictcorrespondence between nature and the concepts used in discovery, see GilFriedman 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 theConditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and DomesticAffairs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Alvin Weinberg, ‘Scienceand Trans-Science’, Minerva, no. 10 (1972): 202-22 has a view of hybrid facts that isnot quite the same as ours.




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those that are subject to ultimately consensual observation and verification.Crudely put, this is the area of the world where ‘nature bites back’, thetraditional realm of natural science. Some brute facts appear on theinternational collective action agenda, e.g. in ecology, public health, armscontrol. However, because they have to run the gamut of rivalinterpretations by political actors, they do not directly serve as guides toaction. The development of consensus on brute facts, then, advancesknowledge about the physical world. Social facts are statements about sociallife that derive largely from the thoughts of observers; they are the conceptswe use routinely in offering descriptions and interpretations of politicalevents and behaviour; they remain context-dependent and controversialand the domains of discourse in which they prevail—social science andthe study of political events—never achieve the status of the naturalsciences 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 importantconstructivist variables associated with a constructivist understanding ofinstitutions and their study. While close to social facts, this classnevertheless seeks to incorporate those aspects of brute facts as can bemade acceptable to large and diverse audiences. Hybrid facts are oftenthose where experts confident of their mastery of brute facts are asked todraw conclusions in the domain of social facts. For instance, an ecologistcould confidently give the threshold carrying capacity of an ecosystemfor a particular contaminant (assuming that it had been sufficientlystudied), but would be venturing into hybrid facts when asked to formulatepolicy that would entail distributive social effects.29 In using hybrid factswe offer contextual interpretations employing a vocabulary which isalready shared across audiences of diverse agents who, in employing itfurther, contribute to the creation of new social practices. In short, bycultivating hybrid facts we are able to break out of the hermeneutic circleof multiple cognitive isolation. Hybrid facts are the most likely to exercisean influence on institutional design, and to be deployed by institutionsand policy makers.

Evolutionary epistemology provides the dynamics by which socialscience cumulates knowledge about hybrid facts, providing a mechanismfor possible feedback from social scientists’ understandings to politicalpractices 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 YorkPress, 1989). For more on the application of evolutionary epistemology andconsensus theories of truth, see Donald T. Campbell, Methodology and Epistemologyfor Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Steven Toulmin,Human Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), Appendix1.



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variant of pragmatic constructivism, is by no means consistently hostileto all aspects of positivism, though it is less positivistic than areconstructivists who maintain a focus on state identity because of ourassumption that the material world can be approached through consensustheories of truth. Positivism supposedly undergirds ‘rational’ ways ofstudying international institutions, accusing constructivism of relying onverstehen, on hermeneutics, on ‘reflection’, and on ‘interpretive sociology’.

Evolutionary epistemology proposes that if work is developed withinprofessional research communities (or research programmes as Lakatoswould have described them) according to the truth tests shared by thecommunity, then provisional and interim truths may result. These maythen be confirmed and tested further as the research programme advances.They may be converted to policy as the analysts provide their findings tothe political community that was being studied.

Though it does not fully depend on it, research and advocacyconducted in a democratic setting certainly favour a breach of thehermeneutic circle. The establishment of truth relevant to policy makingrequires debate among rival claimants. Moreover, proposals are more likelyseen by their audiences as impartial and disinterested if they originatefrom a non-sectarian source and are purveyed by agents presumed to beapolitical. Democracy helps, but it is not essential, as the success ofepistemic communities in the former Soviet Union attests with respect toarms control and environmental matters.

Constructivist scholarship and theory offer the prospect of a recursiveforce for ‘better’ policy because the political process by which policyalternatives are chosen, i.e., democracy, favours a self-correcting dialogue.Policy making, in this perspective, is seen as a discursive practice in whichdifferent views are offered and modified in conformity with temporarilyaccepted ‘true’ knowledge. Within consistent democratic practice, policymaking is a learning process about the world and how to alter it.Authoritarian regimes, less reliably and consistently, may also allow theprocess to occur, but the fate of Soviet genetics reminds us that the absenceof dialogue can produce a caricature of knowledge.

Institutions, International Relations, and the Theory and Policyof Human Betterment

Even though IR scholars cannot claim to have made important discoveries,at more modest levels of discourse something like progress occurs. Allschools of thought in IR (except for the realists) now agree that the shapeof things has fundamentally changed because of these developments inthe real world of the last fifty years: sovereignty has become contested innew ways, global civil society is emerging, domestic civil society hasthrown open the unitary state, equality among states is becoming more




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than a legal conceit, the need for redistribution of wealth is accepted asgiven by most actors, sustainable development is a goal for almost all. IRtheory had traditionally followed diplomatic and military practice. Thearrival of these notions makes it evident that theory and practice continueto reinfect each other despite macrotheoretical commitments that spurnmore modest insights.

The same logic of transmission leads us to believe that there can befruitful 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 inepistemic communities have been able to influence the content of policy.They have succeeded in shaping collective action in fields that make useof international institutions, as in arms control and environmentalmanagement. The more dependent an issue area becomes on technicalinformation, the greater the likelihood that epistemic communities gainin influence. We must, of course, presuppose that there is also a growingdemand for such knowledge on the part of policy makers. Consensualknowledge that is not acknowledged by government remains irrelevant,though the demand can sometimes be stimulated by enterprisingknowledge brokers.

More tellingly yet, when social and natural scientists apply theirclaims to proposed collective action, their efforts are more likely to beaccepted if they can show their arguments to be ‘true’ within theepistemological framework considered appropriate by their non-scientistaudience. Clearly, if knowledge claims are made within the milieu of aculture receptive to intellectual innovation, then scientists espousing newideas for the betterment of humankind have improved prospects forshaping the political discourse. ‘Progressive audiences’ will resonate to‘progressive’ knowledge claims, particularly if the decision makersinvolved believe their careers to hinge on the improvements being urgedupon them.31

Evolutionary epistemology allows for the prospect of a modestversion of progress resulting from the institutional application of improvedknowledge. Pragmatic constructivism provides two related notions ofprogress within the constraints of the double hermeneutic. One is in termsof theory development within IR. The second is in terms of betterment ofthe world, at the very least in terms of replacing hard problems with moretractable ones.32

Pragmatic constructivism allows for the potential of long-term inter-paradigm agreement on mid-level propositions. How do these

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 InternationalRelations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).



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reconciliations fit with views from other approaches, are theycomplementary in terms of assumptions and do they qualify or challengekey beliefs? Ideally, progress should occur between paradigms via aLakatosian process of hypothesis testing and Popperian falsification, withan eye towards the value of contributions for developing new insightsrather than marginal improvements on a given tradition. However, wehave difficulty recalling the last time we saw scholars admit to error, or topublicly change their minds on the basis of these procedures.

In practice, cumulation probably occurs over a span of generationsthrough a sociological process of cohorts of trained graduate studentsreplacing a previous generation of scholars. In the shorter term, debatesare often characterised by rhetorical and polemical inter-paradigmarguments that convince no one. Still, there are pragmatic institutionaldesign lessons about how to promote consensus through cumulativeexercises that inhibit egregious bias. Conscientious debates among well-intentioned scholars should be encouraged in peer reviewed journals,including multi-authored works and edited volumes organised aroundcommon themes.33 Curriculum development is important as well. Graduatestudents should be versed in theoretical debates as well as trained inmethodological skills appropriate for their own preferred mode of inquiry.Serious departments should also recruit faculty sufficiently nimbleintellectually and multifaceted in their own work to be able to honestlypresent multiple perspectives on international institutions to the graduatestudents whom they are training for academic and policy careers.

A theoretical contribution may be considered progressive if it changesthe way most scholars think about a problem or puzzle that they considerin need of an explanation and if it offers the possibility of bridging existingtheories at a level below that of a grand synthesising theory. Progress canbe had if we lower our ambitions. Neither synthesis nor cumulation seemswithin our grasp, but even in the natural sciences consensus on basic theoryis never permanent but always subject to challenge and toreconceptualisation. Thus the grand natural science theories of today—quantum mechanics, the evolutionary synthesis, and the big bang originof the universe—may not survive unscathed.

What is to be done, then? We might focus our explorations onsubstantive areas of general concern. Instead of asking, ‘how do we explainthe origin of institutions?’ we should ask ‘which institutions are most likelyto bring about a peaceful (or egalitarian, or wealthy) world?’. Or we mightprofitably ask, ‘why have international institutions failed to deliversignificant economic development?’, or ‘under what circumstances may

33. Few works come to mind as perfect exemplars. The following multi-authoredstudies attempt what we suggest with some degree of success: Robert W. Cox andHarold Jacobson, eds., The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1973); Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Edith Brown Weiss and HaroldK. Jacobson, eds., Engaging Countries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).




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institutions with particular designs effect behaviour in a desirable way?’.It makes sense to speak of a problem-focused synthesis rather thancontinuing to pitch progress at the macro-theoretical level because differentapproaches may well illuminate different aspects of the puzzle and stillallow a comprehensive response to the question. We are comforted bythis dictum of Max Weber’s:

Meaningfulness naturally does not coincide with laws as such, andthe more general the law the less the coincidence. For the specificmeaning which a phenomenon has for us is naturally not to befound in those relationships which it shares with other phenomena.. . . In the cultural sciences the knowledge of the universal or thegeneral is never valuable in itself. 34

If the positivist strictures of neorealism or neoliberal institutionalism canbe satisfied in the conduct of this research, so much the better. If agreementis impossible, all ought to be able to make their peace with the looser notionof causality urged by pragmatists, as it is accepting of overdeterminationand interactive outcomes.35

Progress occurs, for instance, when two theories, one positivist andtied to a demonstration of causal inference relying on statistical variation,and the other constructivist and based on intentional causality, neverthelessilluminate the same puzzle, explain away the same problem, or providesynergistic explanatory accounts.36 In that case fundamentals are notreconciled, but interesting phenomena are confirmed intersubjectively. IRtrends may be fruitfully explored and the causal understanding of theinterplay between forces typically analysed by discrete schools is advanced.

Cumulative progress in creating consensual knowledge aboutinstitutions, then, rests on a number of individual steps: making rigorous

34. Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’, in Methodologyof the Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: TheFree Press, 1949), 76.

35. For us, the pioneering—and today still admirable—effort along these lines isCox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence.

36. Such accounts include Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict AmongNations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Janice Gross Stein andRaymond Tanter, Rational Decision-Making (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UniversityPress, 1980); Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban MissileCrisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean; DanielDeudney 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: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1995). For complementary works that include different approachesand yet address a similar question, see the following: on the Cuban Missile Crisis,James Blight, Cuba on the Brink (New York: Parthenon, 1993); for environmentalstudies from multiple perspectives, Richard Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Litfin, Ozone Discourses



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individual claims within single works done in the constructivist style withexplicit self-conscious assumptions;37 reconciling individual claims withinconstructivism (intra-paradigm progress); and conducting inter-paradigmmid-level discussions that try to resolve different interpretations of similarphenomena and conceptual applications that may lead, ultimately, to somedegree of provisional closure and dispute resolution between paradigms.

It is even possible, as such constructivist theorists as AlexanderWendt, David Dessler, Emanuel Adler and Anthony Giddens suggest, thattransformations of policy may shade into new collective identities. Theideas developed by theorists and accepted into policy may have theeventual result of altering the self-perceptions and role conceptions of keypolitical actors. In structurationist fashion, changing self-perceptions maycreate 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 thepersuasiveness of pragmatic constructivism, if not the final truth of ourbeliefs. That process also offers the opportunity for breaking out of thehermeneutic circle by showing that not all approaches are equally plausibleafter all. Nobody finally wins or loses in this perspective. The grandtheoretical stakes are low because any cumulation that may be achieved istemporally and spatially limited, and as such unlikely to challenge anydeep commitments. But a few puzzles get solved along the way and theworld is marginally better off.

Institutional Applications of Pragmatic Constructivism

How can international institutions be studied better in order to providefor the kind of progress that pragmatic constructivists intimate? In this

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Peter M. Haas, ‘BanningChlorofluorocarbons’, in Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, ed.Peter M. Haas (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); andEdward Parson, ‘Protecting the Ozone Layer’, in Institutions for the Earth, eds. PeterM. Haas, Marc A. Levy and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

37. Constructivist work that heeds seriously the epistemological injunctions aboutineffable actor beliefs is probably best performed with qualitative methods, ratherthan the statistical and behavioural ones typically associated with positivism. Thus,focused comparative studies, process tracing and counterfactual analysis are ableto focus attention on the vital variables that constructivists believe to driveinstitutional politics. See Alexander L. George and Timothy J. McKeown, ‘CaseStudies and Theories of Organizational Decision-Making’, in Advances in InformationProcess in Organizations, eds. R.F. Coulam and R.A. Smith (Greenwich, CT: JAIPress, 1985), 21-58; David Collier, ‘The Comparative Method’, in Political Science:The State of the Discipline, ed. Ada W. Finifter (Washington, DC: The AmericanPolitical Science Association, 1993); and Andrew Bennett and Alexander George,Case Studies and Theory Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).




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brief section we consider some exemplary works that have sought todevelop new interdisciplinary mid-level insights into the performance anddynamics of institutions, and we also consider some actual occurrences inwhich social science research contributed to a dialogue between observer-scholars and actor-politicians and to actual changes in state practices andthus even possibly human betterment—as a pragmatic constructivistprogramme would envisage.

Few works come to mind as perfect exemplars of pragmaticconstructivism at work on institutions. Two early treatments ofinternational institutions, by E. H. Carr and Inis Claude, attempted non-tendentiously to find the limits of classical idealism in aspects of classicalrealist thought.38 More recently, several multi-authored studies attemptedwhat we suggest with some degree of success.39 For instance, Cox andJacobson found that major formal institutions could enjoy real, but limitedand specific, autonomous powers in international relations. Goldstein andKeohane, despite the fact that they chose authors who were sympatheticto rational choice, came up with some mid-level findings for the lastingand autonomous influence of ideas and informal institutions on statepractices.

In a grander sense, reflexive social science research has studied large-scale social phenomena associated with international institutions,developed and refined an understanding of those dynamics, and in turncontributed their own insights into the advancement of those politicalprojects over the longue durée. The post-war European integration projectcan be told through the developing of an interaction between scholarsand practitioners. Neofunctionalists learned from the first generation ofinstitutional architects, leading in turn to the refinement and applicationof some of the hybrid social facts, and—at least by De Gaulle—the challengeand rejection of some of the first generation of researchers’ findings.40 Afuture European Constitution may be the next laboratory for this grandscale social science project.

A larger array of work exists which was developed by teams of socialscientists who closely studied political and policy activities, and thenprovided their results to decision makers. In turn, the decision makersconverted some of the ideas to new practices. For instance, the 1970 JacksonReport on Economic Development in the United Nations System led to

38. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis: An Introduction to the Study ofInternational Relations (London: Macmillan, 1948) and Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swordsinto Plowshares (New York: Random House, 1956).

39. Cox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence; Goldstein and Keohane, Ideasand 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 ofInternational Studies, 1975); Kalypso Nicolaidis and Robert Howse, eds., The FederalVision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the United States and the European Union(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Christiansen, Jørgensen, andWiener, The Social Construction of Europe.



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the dramatic reorganisation of United Nations Development Programme(UNDP).41 Elinor Ostrom’s work on the management of common propertyresources has led to the strengthening of national forestry managementinstitutions, especially through the involvement of local groups.42 TheUnited Nations’ Global Compact is also an effort to develop and apply withinan institutional setting consensual knowledge about best corporatepractices by trying to encourage participation from corporate actors, civilsociety, and experts.43

Thirty years of multilateral environmental protection have alsoreproduced such broad patterns of interaction between natural scientists,social scientists and policy makers. An increasing number and proportionof international environmental regimes came to reflect the insights ofscholars about how to mobilise and utilise networks of environmentalscientists in the development of sustainable national strategies forprotecting transboundary and global environmental resources. Both thepolicy makers and the scholars learned from one another, leading to anew and robust style of multilateral environmental governance.44 The last30 years of multilateral environmental governance can, in fact, be mostproductively told from a pragmatic constructivist perspective. Since 1972,an ecological epistemic community, articulating a new ecologicalmanagement doctrine, has institutionalised its ideas in state policies andpractices, in the programmatic activities of international institutions, andin international regimes.45 In turn, members’ efforts have been scrutinisedby social scientists in order to identify further governance lessons fordecision makers, as well as to better understand the political process of

41. United Nations Development Programme, ‘A Study of the Capacity of theUnited 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 InstitutionalDemand’, in People and Forests, eds. Clark Gibson, Margaret McKean, and ElinorOstrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

43. John G. Ruggie, ‘global_governance.net: The Global Compact as LearningNetwork’, 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 EnvironmentalGovernance’, in Globalization and Governance, eds. Aseem Prakash and Jeffry A.Hart (London: Routledge, 1999) and ‘Environment: Pollution’, in Managing aGlobalized World, eds. P. J. Simmons and Chantal de Jonge Oudraat (Washington,DC: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 2001); and The Social LearningGroup, Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2001).

45. Peter M. Haas, ‘Institutionalized Knowledge and International EnvironmentalPolitics’, in Handbook of International Relations, eds. G. John Ikenberry and VittorioParsi (Rome: Laterza, 2000), 255-85; see also, ‘Environment: Pollution’ and ‘SocialConstructivism’.




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social learning and the role of ideas on how states formulate and pursuethe national interest. Victor, Raustialla, and Skolnikoff’s comparative workon environmental compliance contributed to the refinement of verificationand compliance mechanisms in United Nations Environmental Programme(UNEP) administered environmental regimes. This reflected the focus andconcern expressed by environmental lawyers and diplomats alike onquestions of verification and effectiveness in negotiations and treatydrafting.46

A new environmental management doctrine based on ecologicalprinciples had been emerging since the 1960s. The ideas were developedoutside the scope of most state interests and are generally regarded asbeing relatively uncompromised by political and institutional influence,since ecology was a relatively cheap research enterprise and its subject ofstudy was far removed from most state interests. Members of the ecologicalepistemic community subscribed to holistic ecological beliefs about theneed for policy coordination subject to ecosystemic laws. This epistemiccommunity had very few ideational competitors. Resource managementbodies had traditionally been staffed by neoclassical economists andresource managers. These, however, had been discredited by broadlypublicised environmental disasters, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the limitsto growth debate—which they had been unable to predict—and attendantpopular fears of widespread resource depletion. Curiously, whereas othermajor IPE regimes of this era developed subject to free market anti-regulatory overarching guidelines, environmental regimes developedbased on a strongly regulatory philosophy, informed by scientific estimatesof the environmental thresholds.

Following the politicisation of international environmental issues inthe late 1960s, galvanised by widely publicised environmental disastersoccurring in the global commons, the United Nations convened the UnitedNations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972. As aconsequence of these new domestic demands, and in order to preparenational papers to UNCHE, governments created new environmentalagencies. Most state officials were unfamiliar with environmental threatsand were unable to rank-order environmental threats, amounts of nationalemissions, what would constitute safe or dangerous concentrations ofpossible contaminants, and what were appropriate policies to reduceemissions. This crisis precipitated the political sense by governments thatthere was a shared problem demanding concerted responses, and thatthey required the knowledge from the nascent environmental epistemiccommunity be put to use in addressing the hybrid fact of environmentalthreats—in their physical, social, and political aspects. Following a

46. David G. Victor, Kal Raustiala and Eugene B. Skolnikoff, eds., TheImplementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).



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pragmatic constructivist pattern, then, the identification of a problem ledto the involvement of an epistemic community, to some social scientistsparticipating in the epistemic community and others studying it, and tothe virtuous interaction between the two groups.

Many national agencies recruited epistemic community members toserve as officials or as consultants. International organisations were createdas well, and they too turned to the international ecological epistemiccommunity for expertise. The United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP) was established in 1973 and was staffed principally by youngepistemic community members eager to put their scientific knowledge towork. The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) played a strongrole in managing European air pollution. The UNECE’s environmentalunit was led by a former UNEP official who carried the ecologicalmanagement ideas from UNEP to UNECE. After 1987 the World Bankalso became active in international environmental matters. Part of theenvironmental reforms introduced at the World Bank was the recruitmentof ecological epistemic community members and their assignment to keyposts in evaluating the environmental consequences of developmentprojects.

Diffusion occurred principally through efforts of these majorinternational environmental organisations and through environmentalregimes. These organisations encouraged other organisations to internaliseenvironmental concerns into their missions through joint projects, andencouraged governments to pursue more comprehensive environmentalpolicies through public education campaigns, publicising environmentalmonitoring findings, resource transfers, and demonstration effects.

Ecological practices have become locked in and institutionalisedthrough a variety of mechanisms. Following ratification of internationalregimes, governments enforce these obligations domestically. Ecologicalpractices get institutionalised domestically through legal precedents,bureaucratic standard operating procedures, and policy enforcement. Inmany countries they have acquired domestic constituencies—composedof lawyers and civil engineers who subcontract services, firms sellingpollution control technologies, and environmental NGOs—that contributepolitical pressure for continued state enforcement of policies grounded inthese ideas.

Exogenous forces have also reinforced these state commitments. AGallup poll conducted in 1992 demonstrated new worldwide concern aboutthe need to respond to global and transboundary environmental threats.47

In democratic societies public demands for environmental protectionreinforce the influence of the epistemic community’s ideas. International


47. Riley E. Dunlap, George H. Gallup, Jr., and Alec M. Gallup, Health of thePlanet Survey (Princeton, NJ: Gallup International Institute, 1992).



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markets for pollution control technology also came into existence in the1990s.

As the example of the environment shows, pragmatic constructivismcan tell an institutional account of collective learning which would not bepossible with neoliberal, neorealist or standard constructivist approaches.While this brief review did not engage in hypothesis testing, the keydynamic of change involved first the identification of a new puzzle, thennew ideas being introduced to state decision makers from epistemiccommunities within the settings of supportive international institutions.The operative force was that of new ecological management ideas leadingstates to recognise the national interest in new ways, rather than theutilitarian logic of international institutions assisting states to find asatisfactory compromise, or of the exercise of power by one state overanother.

Conclusion: Closing the Hermeneutic Circle and PromotingBetter Social Science Research and Better Policy

Public policy now relies heavily on social scientists for input, even if thereis no clear intentional causal connection between social science consensusand 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 modernAmerica’.48

Pragmatic constructivism seeks to advance a research agenda forbetter cumulative knowledge in the social sciences. But it also advances aresearch programme for how to understand better the impact of ideas oncollective behaviour. By focusing on international institutions we havelooked at epistemological techniques for understanding this process, aswell as trying to develop a research programme for understanding therole of institutions in advancing and acting on consensual knowledge. Thus,the hermeneutic circle of interpretation and practice is closed, briefly, onlyto become sundered with new developments and a renewed quest forprovisional agreement.

This possibility of influencing policy, in turn, raises the question ofwhether analysts must be recursively and indefinitely imprisoned in thedouble hermeneutic implied by pragmatic constructivism, or whether weare able to break out of the hermeneutic circle into an arena whereconsensual knowledge legitimates action.

We hold that despite the tyranny of the hermeneutic circle, it ispossible 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 ofSocial 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 forknowledge to collective political action. More effective institutions to giveus more peace, health and wealth cannot be built without this marriage.Recognising and advocating hybrid facts makes it possible to combinesocial 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 agendaon how knowledge and institutions interact. Current constructivists areseeking to explain this large-scale process by which the intellectualexchange between the policy and social science community leads to newsocial practices. That is, constructivists are now trying to devise socialscience theories that can endogenise the role of social science understandingin explaining change in political practices; in particular the role ofinternational institutions as the venues and agents of such social learningand knowledge diffusion.

At a more practical level, further fruitful lines of inquiry should bepossible on how to design international training institutions to promotesocial learning by developing useful truths, transmitting lessons andencouraging a true interplay between researchers and politicians,49 as wellas work on the conditions under which institutions enjoy autonomy orlatitude from their sponsors, and the degrees of freedom within whichthey can exercise discretion.

Peter M. Haas is Professor of Political Science at the University ofMassachusetts/Amherst and Visiting Research Professor at the Brown

University Watson Institute of International Studies, and Ernst B. Haas isthe Robson Research Professor of Government at the University of

California, Berkeley, Emeritus


49. For instance, one could imagine studies of various short-term mid-careertraining programmes for bureaucrats, what to do with the United Nations Institutefor Training and Research (UNITAR), the United Nations Research Institute forSocial Development (UNRISD), the United Nations University (UNU), theInternational Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IRRD), the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP) and the International Labour Organization (ILO)and how to design social science research projects so they can involve the self-reflective participation of policy makers.



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