Hard choices in global deliberative system reform: functional fragmentation, social integration, and cosmopolitan republicanism

Abstract

The ‘systems turn’ amongst deliberative democrats advocates incremental institutional reform guided by deliberative democratic ideals. Whilst ideal global democracy is beyond our reach, incremental reforms can improve the quality and inclusiveness of global deliberation. However, incremental reform in non-ideal circumstances involves trade-offs between competing normative goals. The paper highlights a neglected purpose of democratic deliberation: the integration of highly fragmented technocratic deliberation on isolated issues with more holistic social perspectives emerging from the public sphere. As global governance has shifted beyond the nation state, jurisdictions have become functionally fragmented encouraging issue-specific technical framings of problems (trade policy is institutionally separated from labour, the environment and development). Fragmentation across the domestic executive is mitigated by the legislature’s role in bringing isolated technical perspectives together and subjecting them to wider public scrutiny. No analogous institution exists internationally. Highlighting functional fragmentation is important because dominant concerns with cosmopolitanism (unsettling state-centric issue framing) and republicanism (the need for institutional variety to combat the potential domination of a world state) in global governance lead to an active enthusiasm for overlapping functional jurisdictions in much of the literature, obscuring important trade-offs with the need for social integration.