Global governance as public authority: An introduction

Abstract

How to make sense of global governance has been a long-standing puzzle for scholars. Work in international relations has sought to tackle it for two decades now, and more recently, lawyers, political theorists, sociologists, and anthropologists have joined the ever broader debate. Still, much of global governance remains a “mystery.”1 The multiplicity of its sites and actors, the various pathways of influence and authority, and the myriad factors driving its shape have made parsimonious accounts impossible and synthetic approaches at least difficult. Yet for long it seemed clear that these factors also rendered analogies with the domestic sphere problematic—the prevalence of informal action and of heterarchy rather than hierarchy led us to believe that we were confronted with governance “without government,” with a structure fundamentally different from national politics and law.2 Some aspects of this basic understanding, however, have been called into question by an increasing emphasis on the political character of global governance.3 In a related move, global governance has come to be understood as “public authority,” and proponents of this paradigm borrow ideas from domestic governmental settings to frame, explain, and develop it further. This “public turn,” which unites a variety of diverse approaches, is the focus of this symposium, which goes back to a workshop held in the spring of 2011 at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, convened by Eva Heidbreder, Markus Jachtenfuchs, and myself. The workshop brought together scholars of politics, law, and political theory to investigate forms, frameworks, and change processes in global governance through a public-authority lens. A number of the resulting papers have been published as working papers; a smaller, more lawfocused, set appears in this issue. In this introductory essay, I seek to place them into