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What is the relationship between cultural difference and global cooperation, and what challenges and opportunities does this relationship pose for cooperation research? This paper examines how culture is a potential resource for global cooperation while grappling with its enigmas and ambiguities. It explores the paradoxes of culture to argue that the partly unknowable character of the concept 'culture' may be an advantage for cooperation research rather than a problem to be solved. The paper casts culture and cultures as examples of a wider class of 'relational' phenomena that arise through interaction and that rely upon this interaction for their standing. This proposition foregrounds relations over entities, becoming over being, and dynamism over fixity in line with a range of contemporary philosophical developments and the burgeoning of interest in relationality. Thinking of culture in relational terms offers a way of modulating culture; of simultaneously respecting cultural difference and allowing that difference is a shared human resource. Relationality can be deployed to help facilitate cooperation by re-opening interaction within political, social, economic, and institutional arrangements, including through processes for generating relational and cooperative effects have been developed in the field of conflict resolution. However, doing so requires that the fields most obviously related to global cooperation (political science, international relations, and global governance) engage relational approaches at the limits of the precise sciences and through philosophy, religion, and non-western cultural traditions.

What is the relationship between cultural difference and global cooperation, and what challenges and opportunities does this relationship pose for cooperation research? This paper examines how culture is a potential resource for global cooperation while grappling with its enigmas and ambiguities. It explores the paradoxes of culture to argue that the partly unknowable character of the concept 'culture' may be an advantage for cooperation research rather than a problem to be solved. The paper casts culture and cultures as examples of a wider class of 'relational' phenomena that arise through interaction and that rely upon this interaction for their standing. This proposition foregrounds relations over entities, becoming over being, and dynamism over fixity in line with a range of contemporary philosophical developments and the burgeoning of interest in relationality. Thinking of culture in relational terms offers a way of modulating culture; of simultaneously respecting cultural difference and allowing that difference is a shared human resource. Relationality can be deployed to help facilitate cooperation by re-opening interaction within political, social, economic, and institutional arrangements, including through processes for generating relational and cooperative effects have been developed in the field of conflict resolution. However, doing so requires that the fields most obviously related to global cooperation (political science, international relations, and global governance) engage relational approaches at the limits of the precise sciences and through philosophy, religion, and non-western cultural traditions.

AbstractThis article argues that recent global health cooperation has been marked by two trends. First, there has been a highly successful proliferation of vertical funds to fight specific diseases. These are characterized by narrower problem‐based mandates; multistakeholder governance; voluntary and discretionary funding; no in‐country presence for the delivery of assistance; and an output‐based legitimacy (based on effectiveness, not process). The rise of new initiatives with these characteristics has dovetailed with an increase in the funding of international organizations. However, the latter has not necessarily strengthened multilateralism. Instead, rapid increases in discretionary earmarked funding to the WHO and World Bank, which we call Trojan multilateralism, has replicated features of the vertical funds. With what consequences for international cooperation? Using principal–agent theory, we find a mixed picture. International organizations are being redirected by specific incentives. However, two constraints on bilateral control are not shifting. There is a persistent asymmetry of information between the WHO or the World Bank and individual member states, which gives the former a degree of autonomy. Equally, there are persistent obstacles to tightening bilateral monitoring of multilateral action. We conclude that the positive lessons to be drawn from vertical initiatives need to be balanced by the risks posed from a convergence of vertical initiatives and Trojan multilateralism

This paper argues that recent global health cooperation has been marked by two trends. First, there has been a highly successful proliferation of vertical funds to fight specific diseases. These are characterised by narrower problem-based mandates; multistakeholder governance; voluntary and discretionary funding; no in-country presence for the delivery of assistance; and an output-based legitimacy (based on effectiveness, not process). The rise of new initiatives with these characteristics has dovetailed with an increase in the funding of international organizations. However, the latter has not necessarily strengthened multilateralism. Instead rapid increases in discretionary earmarked funding to the WHO and World Bank, which we call Trojan multilateralism, has replicated features of the vertical funds. With what consequences for international cooperation? Using principal-agent theory, we find a mixed picture. International organizations are being redirected by specific incentives. However, two constraints on bilateral control are not shifting. There is a persistent asymmetry of information between the WHO or the World Bank and individual member states which gives the former a degree of autonomy. Equally, there are persistent obstacles to tightening bilateral monitoring of multilateral action. We conclude that the positive lessons to be drawn from vertical initiatives need to be balanced by the risks posed from a convergence of vertical initiatives and Trojan multilateralism.