The Consequences of Legitimacy Crises in Global Governance

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter deepens the quantitative analysis of the previous chapter and completes the qualitative analysis from Chapter 4. It shows that, in the case of the WTO, the legitimacy crises concerned the organizational rules. This included enhancing collaboration with nonstate actors and gearing up statistical capacities and media outreach. For the UNFCCC, by contrast, legitimacy crises had a crucial impact on essential milestones of the organization’s decision-making, e.g., with the de facto failure of the 2009 summit in Copenhagen, and with essential power shifts towards member states that paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement. The chapter also shows that the WTO and the UNFCCC witnessed a proliferation of a multitude of new plurilateral initiatives in their respective fields. For the UNFCCC, this change can partly be attributed to the legitimacy crises. Hence, the effects of legitimacy crises are sometimes visible only beyond the organizational borders. With this wider perspective, the chapter broadly confirms the results of the quantitative analysis, that legitimacy crises do not automatically entail disadvantages for the IO in question.