Status-quo enhancing versus status-quo challenging change in global economic governance: the case of China in finance and trade

When a state is dissatisfied with an international institution it has different strategies available to it to secure change. These strategies are increasingly well understood due to research in the areas of regime complexity and institutional selection. But while there is an understanding of how the structure of a regime can influence the chances of success of different change proposals, there is less clarity on how the content of proposed changes impacts their success. In this article we decompose proposed institutional changes into two sub-types: Status-quo challenging and status-quo enhancing. Status-quo enhancing changes promote reforms that advance the objectives of the existing regime and so serve to drive change that would otherwise be limited by the inertia of existing institutions. Conversely, status-quo challenging changes undermine the stated goals of the existing regime. We develop these sub-types by comparing China’s attempts to secure changes in the global finance and trade regimes and find that for China status-quo enhancing changes have met with more success than status-quo challenging approaches because they have created more opportunities for productive coalition building.