Transnational Governance

Abstract

Abstract This chapter introduces transnational governance as a cross-disciplinary institutionalist perspective that highlights the multiplicity of private, civil society and public actors involved in governing, as well as the blurred boundaries between local, national, regional, and worldwide scales of governing collective global problems. The chapter argues that, at a time of gridlock and crisis in multilateral governance, transnational governance offers an innovative and productive alternative approach. The perspective provides a conceptual framework for the study of global cooperation as emerging from multiple joined-up pathways rather than from an a priori universal approach. The approach also enables an encompassing analysis of recursive interactions between overlapping, competing, or complementary parts of governance arrangements. Particularly with respect to standard-setting and governance by indicators, the analysis of transnational governance enriches our understanding of contemporary instruments or techniques through which power operates in dispersed and distributed ways. The approach also highlights how transnational communities, movements, and activist networks form around the use of such governance modes and how these actors support and resist this regulation. While international regime complexity theory takes the legitimacy of state-delegated authority largely for granted, the transnational governance perspective considers legitimacy as contested and needing to be constituted on a recurrent basis. This process presents both a challenge and a force of innovation in the development of transnational governance.