ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to improve our understanding of international order, and international cooperation, through an interpretation of international regime-formation that relies heavily on rational-choice analysis in the utilitarian social contract tradition. It focuses on the demand for international regimes in order to provide the basis for a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation. International regimes therefore seem often to facilitate side-payments among actors within issue-areas covered by comprehensive regimes, since they bring together negotiators to consider a whole complex of issues. International regimes, and the institutions and procedures that develop in conjunction with them, perform the function of reducing uncertainty and risk by linking discrete issues to one another and by improving the quantity and quality of information available to participants. Creating international regimes hardly disposes of risks or uncertainty. Indeed, participating in schemes for international cooperation entails risk for the cooperating state. International regimes help to make governments' expectations consistent with one another.