Contemporary Global Governance Research Articles

Understanding the African Group of Negotiators in the multilateral negotiations on climate change

ABSTRACT This article examines the performance of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) in global climate change negotiations. It provides theoretical insights on the priorities of the AGN, outlines how the African region self-organises in situations of regime complexity and critically analyses the inherent characteristics that create unique constraints to meaningful participation of the AGN in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The study finds that the political mandate of the AGN together with the consistent technical support from climate-focused continental institutions have strengthened the AGN in these negotiations, where the group has had a consistent set of priorities. The article also highlights areas that could enhance the performance of the AGN, including a critical examination of the effect of multiple coalition membership. The conclusion is that as subordinate actors the AGN is effectively contesting the rules and practices of contemporary global climate governance.

Poverty and Pollution

“Aren't poverty and need the biggest polluters?,” asked Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on Human Environment. Half a century later, environmentalists, journalists, politicians, and academics interpret the speech to their liking. We contextualize and juxtapose this historical speech vis-à-vis environmental policies, programs, and campaigns enacted under Gandhi’s leadership. A reassessment of these debates opens possibilities beyond the polarized arguments that pit “the environment” against “development” within contemporary global environmental governance.

The Mechanism of Identification in the External Dissemination of the Discourse of “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind”

The “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind” has emerged as a pivotal notion in contemporary international relations and global governance. Drawing from President Xi Jinping’s public speeches concerning the topic, this article explores the rhetorical strategies by using Kenneth Burke’s Identification Theory. With the help of word cloud API and the Doccano text annotation tool, the research conducts a systematic analysis to delve into the application and tangible impacts of the identification mechanism in the external dissemination of the discourse. It is founded that the strategies of identification by sympathy and inaccuracy are predominant in the discourse, with identification by antithesis as a supplementary method.

Virtues and Perils of Forum-Shopping in European Security

ABSTRACT A prominent characteristic of contemporary global governance is simultaneous involvement of multiple regional and international organisations in governing a policy issue. When these organisations overlap without established hierarchy and differentiation between them, their member states can choose those organisations that are most favourable for their interests. Existing studies often approach this forum-shopping strategy as an opportunistic behaviour that prevents international cooperation. However, using insights from international relations and law scholarships, this article argues that a broad notion of forum-shopping is insufficient to account for the multiple and complex effects of forum-shopping on international cooperation. By examining the EU and NATO member states’ strategies in these two organisations’ overlapping crisis management operations, this article shows that the implications of forum-shopping for interorganisational cooperation depend on the type of forum-shopping taking place. As the analysis suggests, multiple and overlapping venues of governance can create opportunities for international cooperation when these venues are used based on their practical rather than political aspects.

The Legitimation of International Organizations: Introducing a New Dataset

Abstract This article introduces a new dataset on how international organizations (IOs) justify their authority. For a long time, IOs were believed to derive legitimacy from member-state consent and technocratic problem-solving capacities. Over recent decades, the growing politicization of IOs, political polarization within Western democracies, and power shifts in the international system have spurred IOs’ efforts to justify their right to rule, using a variety of legitimation practices. While research on the theory and practice of IO legitimation has grown considerably over the past decade, much of this work builds on case studies of prominent global and regional IOs. As a result, we lack data suitable for systematic comparative analyses across time, IOs, and world regions. The Legitimation Strategies of Regional Organizations (LegRO) dataset aims to narrow this gap, providing data on the standards, intensity, and modes of legitimation for twenty eight regional IOs from 1980 to 2019. These variables inform theoretical and policy-relevant research on contemporary global governance by providing the first systematic overview of IOs’ legitimation practices.

Between nation and empire: how the state matters in global health

Abstract The role of the state has been underplayed in scholarship on global health. Taking a historical view, this paper argues that state institutions, practices and ideologies have in fact been crucial to the realisation of contemporary global health governance and to its predecessor regimes. Drawing on state theory, work on governmentality, and Third World approaches to international law, it traces the origins of the ‘health state’ in late colonial developmentalism, which held out the prospect of conditional independence for the subjects of European empires. Progress in health was also a key goal for nationalist governments in the Global South, one which they sought to realise autonomously as part of a New International Economic Order. The defeat of that challenge to the dominance of the Global North in the 1980s led to the rise of ‘global governance’ in health. Far from rendering the state redundant, the latter was realised through the co-option and disciplining of institutions at national level. To that extent, the current order has an unmistakably imperial character, one which undercuts its declared cosmopolitan aspirations, as evidenced in the approach to vaccine distribution and travel bans during the Covid-19 pandemic.

An ever more entangled Union? The European Union’s interactions with global governance institutions

ABSTRACT Contemporary global governance is characterized by a diversity of institutions. The European Union (EU) interacts with these institutions in multiple ways. Despite their importance, the interactions of the EU with different types of global governance institutions have remained underexplored in EU scholarship. The papers in this special issue address this research gap. They map the EU’s interactions with different types of global governance institutions. They also explore the factors that explain patterns of interactions. In this introduction, we develop a common analytical lens that unites the contributions to the special issue and identify our main research questions. We map different types of global governance institutions and discuss the ways in which the EU interacts with them. We also bring together the main insights from the individual contributions and discuss avenues for future research.

A Brief History of the G20 Institutional Dynamics (2008-2021)

The Group of 20 (G20) brought together leaders of the key advanced and emerging market countries to manage the 2007–08 financial and economic crises, reform the international architecture, devise a new global consensus, ensure recovery, and promote strong, sustainable, and balanced growth. Established as an anti-crisis mechanism and designated by its members as a premier forum for international economic cooperation, the G20 transformed into a global governance hub. Since its first summit, the G20 has generated high expectations and has become a subject of research and assessment for analysts, mass media, and the general public. Each summit’s deliberations, decisions, and engagements have been scrutinized. Critics of the G20 claim it has lost relevance and was not capable of responding to the degradation of multilateralism, or the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis it induced. In this article, the logic of historical institutionalism is applied to explore the confluence of dynamics in the G20’s evolution: demand for G20 leadership; agenda expansion and institutionalization; and legitimation, accountability, and engagements. It is concluded that the G20 changed global governance trends, creating a more inclusive global governance that integrates the G20’s own extensive and diverse cooperation networks with the networks of the other international institutions and engagement groups involved in G20 policy processes. The networked governance, alongside the rotating presidency, the Troika, and various outreach mechanisms, augment the G20’s authority and reduce the legitimacy gap perception. The benefits from the early decisions, established and expanding agenda, patterns of engagement, cognitive scripts, embedded ideas, and internalized norms became strong endogenous sources of stability, reinforced in positive feedback loops. Despite tensions between members, the value that the G20 provides and the global public goods it generates, real and expected returns, constitute significant incentives for the G20’s continued engagement, sustain its evolving dynamics, and consolidate its path-dependency. The downside of the G20’s resilience is its inability to undertake innovative initiatives in the wake of COVID-19 or to provide the powerful leadership the world needed to overcome the pandemic and the related economic and social crises. Notwithstanding these failures, the G20 remains the crucial hub of contemporary global economic governance. However, the lock-in may entail the risk of losing relevance to other institutions.

Transnational Justice: Unveiling the Dynamics of International Administrative Tribunals and Administrative Law

This research article explores the realm of international administrative law, focusing on the pivotal role of international administrative tribunals in adjudicating disputes and ensuring accountability across transnational contexts. Beginning with a post-World War II historical overview, it underscores the tribunals' significance in safeguarding individuals' rights within international organisations. Through an examination of the evolution of international administrative law, including the proliferation of specialised tribunals and refinement of norms, it navigates the tension between autonomy and accountability. Drawing on legal scholarship and practical considerations, it addresses challenges such as defining administrative authority and diverse adjudication approaches. The exploration of the Law of International Civil Service is central to the discussion, providing a framework for understanding applicable legal norms. This research contributes to a clearer understanding and effective implementation of international administrative law in contemporary global governance, offering insights crucial for legal scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

The “Missing Middle”

Abstract This article focuses on the vast number of people who make global governance happen. It probes the role of the unknown people in the “middle” who are largely absent from scholarly gaze: professionals, service teams, and others who act behind the scenes. They are not at the top of public and private organizations (“global governors” in the literature), but they keep the lights on. They accomplish the policy, operational, and support work to move the needle of global governance institutions of all varieties from the local to global. These largely invisible and unheard populations—at least in the scholarly and policy literatures—make global governance work. The “missing middle” is not confined to the everyday contributions of professionals in intergovernmental secretariats because contemporary global governance is not synonymous with international organization, but concerns networked forms of public authority that may or may not include secretariats or states.

Everyday Migrant Accompaniment: Humanitarian Border Diplomacy

Summary This article advances the notion of humanitarian border diplomacy, contributing to current academic discussions on humanitarian diplomacy and on the practice-theory nexus by conceptualising NGOs’ migrant accompaniment at borders as a form of everyday humanitarian diplomacy. The contention is that humanitarian diplomacy is similar to other diplomatic practices. Starting by rethinking humanitarian diplomacy, it discusses the emergence of humanitarian border diplomacy as a key component of everyday migrant accompaniment. Humanitarian border diplomacy focuses on advancing migrants’ rights, seeking to make helpful, empowering and transformational interventions in an attempt to resist and change the contemporary global governance of migration. The article presents the everyday diplomatic practices of the Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes in Melilla, on Spain’s southern border, as an example of humanitarian border diplomacy. At the border, as an alternative space for resistance, difference and otherness, the need for diplomatic culture as the symbolic mediation of estrangement is revealed.

The Assault on Civil Society: Explaining State Crackdown on NGOs

AbstractNongovernmental organizations are central to contemporary global governance, and their numbers and influence have grown dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century. However, in the last three decades more than 130 states have repressed these groups, suggesting that a broad range of states perceive them as costly. When they choose to repress NGOs, under what conditions do states use violent strategies versus administrative means? The choice depends on two main factors: the nature of the threat posed by these groups, and the consequences of cracking down on them. Violent crackdown is useful in the face of immediate domestic threats, such as protests. However, violence may increase the state's criminal liability, reduce its legitimacy, violate human rights treaties, and further intensify mobilization against the regime. Therefore, states are more likely to use administrative crackdown, especially in dealing with long-term threats, such as when NGOs influence electoral politics. I test this theory using an original data set of administrative crackdowns on NGOs, as well as violent crackdown on NGO activists, across all countries from 1990 to 2013. To shed light on the strategic decision between violent or administrative crackdown, and how states may perceive threats from domestic and international NGOs differently, I provide a case study from India. I conclude by discussing the implications of this crackdown for the use of civil society actors by the international community, as well as donors and citizens in the global South.

Theorizing the globally engaged city in world politics

Cities both large and small, more and less economically advanced, are deeply involved in efforts to address the most challenging and complex issues of contemporary global governance, ranging from climate change and conditions of insecurity to human migration and public health. Yet this puzzling phenomenon is largely ignored within International Relations (IR) scholarship, and only partially theorized by scholars working in other fields of inquiry. Our premise in this article is that attempts to understand and assess city participation in world politics are augmented by focusing on the global identity of the city, since understanding what cities do in world politics is shaped by who cities (think they) are on the global stage. In proposing a subtle shift, from the passively labeled global city to what we call the globally engaged city, we direct analysis to the political and discursive forces shaping, delimiting, and informing this novel role for the city as a world-political actor. We propose that city identity is now fractured into local and global dimensions and set out two analytically distinct contexts in which the global identity of the city is forged through a process of differentiation from the nation-state. Our framework highlights in particular the politics of recognition shaping how the globally engaged city is defined and diffused. Through two empirical vignettes we illustrate the value of our framework as a means for IR scholarship to bring cities in from the analytic hinterlands and better understand their (potential) impact on the world stage.

Top-Down Climate Control for Global Environmental Stability

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations is a wide-scale action plan for people, planet, and prosperity that strengthens universal peace. Sustainable development is only possible through large-scale stakeholder engagement. In the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with their 169 widespread targets, climate justice plays a fundamental role. In particular the Sustainable Development Goal 13 addresses climate action to combat climate change and its impacts. Climate justice has a history of being discussed in the focal point of law, economics, and governance (Puaschunder 2016c). The implementation of climate stability accounts for the most challenging contemporary global governance predicament that seems to open an abyss of world inequality regarding differing times and degrees to enjoy benefits of a warming earth around the globe. As a novel angle toward climate justice, this entry proposes a global governance solution for a well-balanced climate gains distribution based on micro-, meso-, and macroeconomic analyses results. Overall the entry investigates the nature of climate justice imbalances from an economic and a legal perspective in order to ensure economic justice solutions for advancing global climate stability. The structure of increasingly fragile environmental conditions will be captured in order to derive real-world relevant implications how to improve the overall global environmental conditions for humankind on a global scale but also over time. Through the understanding of climate change gains and losses, climate gain redistribution strategies will be presented. Shedding light on fair global warming gains distribution is meant to aid market economies to be brought to a path consistent with prosperity and sustainability.

On the meaning(s) of norms: Ambiguity and global governance in a post-hegemonic world

AbstractThis article offers a new conceptualisation of the meaning of norms in world politics. It starts from the observation that existing norm scholarship in International Relations has underestimated the role of ambiguity in the constitution of norm meaning. To address this shortcoming, we advance a conceptualisation that sees norm polysemy – the empirically observable plurality of norm meanings-in-use – as resulting from the enactment of inherently ambiguous norms in different contexts. By foregrounding norm ambiguity, this view offers a radically non-essentialist understanding of norm meaning, one that eschews any attempt to salvage final or ‘true’ meanings behind the polysemy of norms. Using empirical illustrations from different fields of contemporary global governance, we identify four mechanisms through which actors practically cope with the multiplicity of norm meanings that arises from norm ambiguity (deliberation, adjudication, uni- or multilateral fixation attempts, and ad hoc enactment) and outline their varying effects on the legitimacy and effectiveness of global governance. Based on this discussion, the article points to the normative implications of a radically non-essentialist conception of norms and suggests harnessing the positive potential of norm ambiguity as an ethically desirable condition that promotes human diversity and the plurality of global life.

Hybrid institutional complexes in global governance

Most issue areas in world politics today are governed neither by individual institutions nor by regime complexes composed of formal interstate institutions. Rather, they are governed by “hybrid institutional complexes” (HICs) comprising heterogeneous interstate, infra-state, public–private and private transnational institutions, formal and informal. We develop the concept of the HIC as a novel descriptive and analytical lens for the study of contemporary global governance. The core structural difference between HICs and regime complexes is the greater diversity of institutional forms within HICs. Because of that diversity, HICs operate differently than regime complexes in two significant ways: (1) HICs exhibit relatively greater functional differentiation among their component institutions, and hence suffer from relatively fewer overlapping claims to authority; and (2) HICs exhibit greater informal hierarchy among their component institutions, and hence benefit from greater ordering. Both are systemic features. HICs have characteristic governance benefits: they offer good “substantive fit” for multi-faceted governance problems and good “political fit” for the preferences of diverse constituents; constrain conflictive cross-institutional strategies; and are conducive to mechanisms of coordination, which enhance substantive coherence. Yet HICs also pose characteristic governance risks: individual institutions may take on aspects of problems for which they are ill-suited; multiple institutions may create confusion; HICs can amplify conflict and contestation rather than constraining them; and the “soft” institutions within HICs can reduce the focality of incumbent treaties and intergovernmental organizations and forestall the establishment of new ones. We outline a continuing research agenda for exploring the structures, operations and governance implications of HICs.

International Institutions in Hard Times: How Complexity Increases Resilience

This paper asks how institutional complexity affects the resilience of global governance. By drawing on sociological differentiation theory, it interprets growing levels of institutional complexity as a process of institutional differentiation which allows the “political system of world society” to mirror the increasing complexity of its social environment. More precisely, the paper suggests that growing levels of institutional complexity enhance the resilience of global governance by providing states with a more diverse set of governance tools and by making backup governance tools available. Against this backdrop, it makes two interrelated contributions to the literature on global governance. First, by applying the concept of resilience to global governance, the paper provides the conceptual basis for a novel research agenda on the ability of contemporary global governance to operate under stress. So far, the analytical toolbox of global governance researchers does not contain a concept that enables a theory-driven analysis of international institutions’ ability to facilitate cooperation when confronted with high levels of stress. Second, it offers a sense of how the central structural feature of contemporary global governance—institutional complexity—affects its resilience. With these two interrelated contributions, the paper seeks to start a scholarly conversation on the resilience of contemporary global governance.

The 'Third' UN: Imagining Post-COVID-19 Multilateralism.

If the United Nations system is to remain relevant, or even survive, the thinking to re‐imagine and redesign contemporary global governance will come from the Third UN. This article focuses on the ecology of supportive non‐state actors – intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for‐profit private sector, and the media – that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN and international civil servants of the Second UN to formulate and refine ideas and decision‐making in policy processes. Despite the growth in analyses of non‐state actors in global governance, the ‘other’ or ‘Third’ UN is poorly understood, often ignored, and normally discounted. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; in any case, many help the UN ‘think’ and have an impact on how we think about the United Nations.

Global governance in the age of epistemic authority

AbstractToday's global governance is qualitatively different from the past, according to Michael Zürn's penetrating analysis. With the rise of epistemic authority, reflexivity, service, and request have come to surpass command and control as key modes of global governance, leading to new forms of legitimation and contestation. I engage with this rich and thought-provoking argument on three counts. First, it remains doubtful that states defer to international organizations because the latter ‘know better’. There exist many gaps in epistemic authority and politics often trump rationality in global governance. Second, it is not clear how global hierarchy, which Zürn equates with ‘pockets of authority’, could emerge out of demands and requests, precisely because epistemic authority is so fluid and prone to contestation. Third, as historically young and increasingly based on service authority as it may be, contemporary global governance still rests on a body of inherited practices whose legitimation principles seem closer to tradition than to reflexive justification.

From meditation to action – a research agenda for studying informal global rule-making: remarks on ‘Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”’

AbstractFriedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.