When the State is Out: Democratic Credentials of Transnational Rule-Making

Abstract

The New Transnationalism: Transnational Governance and Democratic Legitimacy. By Klaus Dingwerth. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 304 pp., $85.00 hard (ISBN: 978-0230545274). “What's the alternative?” is what one of my students exclaimed anxiously in a course on global issues, after a discussion concerning how overwhelmed the nation-states have become in the face of myriad global challenges. Klaus Dingwerth's The New Transnationalism: Transnational Governance and Democratic Legitimacy poses one set of explanations to my student's question as it examines the proliferation of transnational rule-making as an alternative to states or state-centric institutions that traditionally served as dominant pivots in global environmental politics. The New Transnationalism adds to the rapidly growing literature that is broadly centered on the generally normative concerns for finding global or local solutions to transnational problems through positive examination of the institutional architecture of global governance and multilateralism (Forman and Derk 2006). In this respect, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature on global governance and transnational politics, specifically adding to the discourse on the role of private authority in transnational rule-making. Interestingly, the book departs from this literature in one important dimension: it does not examine an institution or an institutional arrangement, local or global, as an alternative or a supplement to the nation-state. Instead, it investigates transnational rule-making as a process and a mechanism that carries out functions of global governance traditionally associated with a single institution or an organization. Specifically, the book argues that a qualitative change in transnational politics has taken place. Transnational actors, such as global unions, industry associations, and non-governmental organizations, used to consider state-centric institutions as the dominant pivot to develop and implement global regulations in issue areas ranging from human rights to global warming. Now these …