Forum Recasting: A Strategy for Institutional Change

Regime complexity provides states with more choices about where and how to govern issues. They can
select among competing institutions, create new institutions or repurpose old ones. Although forum
shopping and creation are familiar to International Relations scholars, we know less about how existing
institutions are repurposed. We elaborate one repurposing strategy here—forum recasting—a strategy
to change an institution by changing who acts within it. We develop forum recasting by examining one
case of it, the struggle to push private sector actors out and pull state officials in at the United Nations
Commission on International Trade Law. Drawing on attendance data, five years of ethnographic
observation, and interviews with participants, we explore why and how officials adopted a recasting
strategy and how other actors responded to it. We also discuss other contemporary examples of recasting
in global governance, such as growing participation by Chinese firms in standard-setting bodies.