Global Governance Arrangements Research Articles

Ad hoc coalitions in global governance: short-notice, task- and time-specific cooperation

Abstract Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) are an indispensable but scantly conceptualized part of global governance. In recent years, several typologies and classifications of global governance arrangements have been provided, mostly differentiating them based on their organizational design features of degree of formality and membership composition. These do not capture AHCs and the role they play in global governance. In this article, we not only provide a conceptualization of AHCs, but also propose ways in which AHCs fit within the broader global governance architecture. We argue that what sets AHCs apart is not so much their (in)formality or membership, but rather their short-notice creation, their task-specific purpose and their temporarily circumscribed existence. We therefore define AHCs as autonomous arrangements with a task-specific mandate established at short notice for a limited time frame. We then develop a research agenda on the nature and future of AHCs, including their short- and long-term relationship with other multilateral arrangements in the global governance architecture. This is important, as we do yet not know how AHCs complement, compete and impact on international organizations and international crisis response.

A Call to Draw on Existing Social Science Scholarship to Understand Professional Communities at the Science-Diplomacy Nexus Better: Using the Case of Space Governance

Global governance arrangements are produced and sustained by an array of professionals who sometimes compete and sometimes collaborate over policy construction. Where trained scientists fit into this picture and how they influence policy formation is a question of great importance for stakeholders vested in the science-diplomacy nexus, given the role of technical knowledge in complex and uncertain diplomatic challenges. However, this Op-Ed argues that understanding the social dynamics that constitute science diplomacy in practice requires the use of concepts and theory from Science and Technology Studies and practice-theoretical work in global governance scholarship that can accommodate the contingency of professional life in this field of action. Using the arena of outer space governance to illustrate this point, I contend that using this scholarship can open up conceptual space to consider inter-professional contestation and intra-professional reimagination at the science-diplomacy interface. In turn, this approach can enhance understanding for science diplomacy practitioners as to what it means to be a scientist engaging at this nexus and what cycles of professional stasis and change are taking place.

Local Experience of Global CSR in Cocoa Value Chain: Critical Perspective

This paper explores the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives aimed at community development of Ivorian cocoa growing communities from the perspective of its intended beneficiaries. While the majority of studies on CSR in developing countries focuses on the global dimension of CSR and its role within global governance arrangements, we seek to bring new empirical insights by shifting the focus to the receiving end of CSR and bringing to the fore the contextualised lived experience of local marginalised actors intended to benefit from the CSR initiatives. Drawing on unique qualitative empirical data and building on critical perspective on CSR, we reveal different types of tensions emerging at multiple levels. We contribute to the critical CSR research by developing a conceptual process model, which theorises the relationship between different types of tensions and shows how unresponded tensions lead to the abandon and failure of the CSR initiative.

Toward new guardrails for the information society

Increasing interdependencies and deepening uncertainty change how the information society can be governed sustainably. In response, policy approaches worldwide are being reconsidered and new approaches developed that are more appropriate to these conditions. This article explores the conditions under which policies that worked in the past remain appropriate and when they will likely fail. It explores the role of dynamic analytical frames and a reconsideration of the normative principles of information society policies in overcoming these weaknesses. New instruments and policy arrangements that are considered include the establishment of boundary conditions (“guardrails”) for players, reliance on adaptive forms of policy, and reliance on ethics across all layers of governance. Driven by the global heterogeneity of values and the diversity of historical, economic, political, and cultural conditions, national and global governance arrangements will likely become more multi-centric. To avoid regulatory drift and fragmentation, policy must strive to create dynamic learning systems that help to continuously improve information society governance.

Sustainable Development in Middle Powers’ Governance Arrangements


 Considering middle powers’ potential to address new demands worldwide and their propensity to contribute to new forms of institution-building in global governance, arrangements between them consist of interesting opportunities to promote sustainable development. However, some have shown to be more effective than others in this regard. When observing two of these partnerships’ outcomes between 2015 and 2018, India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) Trilateral Forum has demonstrated more effectiveness than Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and Australia (MIKTA) New Innovative Partnership. To understand why, this study analyses specialized literature, with special attention to Koenig-Archibugi’s (2002) framework on global governance arrangements’ effectiveness. Arguing that middle power arrangements that address sustainable development are more effective when benefiting from greater functional specialization and that diversified power access also plays a role, this study raises awareness about middle powers’ relevance in addressing new global demands. The study points out the nascent research on these informal partnerships and the causal relations between these arrangements’ structures and effectiveness.

Humanitarian INGO governance arrangements and forms of coordination

AbstractAs international humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) continue to adapt their global governance arrangements in response to changes in the external environment, these changes are creating new challenges for internal coordination. However, we know little about the relationship between these governance arrangements and the forms of internal coordination INGOs adopt. This paper provides a comparative analysis of 40 INGO families with diverse backgrounds and approaches to humanitarian and development work. It examines the relationship between their global governance arrangements in terms of decision‐making, integration, and membership; and the forms of internal coordination they adopt. The finding is that different forms of coordination are associated with membership size and resource disparity, combined with the varying needs for group‐level capacity that comes with different forms of decision‐making and integration.

The Forest Policies of ASEAN and Montréal Process: Comparing Highly and Weakly Formalized Regional Regimes

Forests are governed by a combination of sub-national and national as well as global and regional regimes. Comparing the institutional variation of regional regimes, including their degrees of formalization, is gaining attention of studies on regionalism in International Relations. This study attempts to analyse the ways in which the selected cases of the forest-related Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and forest-focused Montréal Process (MP) regional regimes may have synergetic overlaps or disparity in their institutional design and forest policy development. For this, we combined IR’s ‘rational institutional design’ theory and a policy analysis approach. Using a qualitative data approach, we analyzed key structure-related historical regime documents (e.g., charters) issued since the inception of both regimes, and their latest forest policy initiatives for the periods 2016–2025 (Strategic Plan of Action for ASEAN Cooperation on Forestry) and 2009–2015 (Conceptual Framework for the Montréal Process Strategic Action Plan) with all relevant policy documents since the adoption of current policies. Based on that, we pose the empirical questions of how both regimes illustrate governance structure (i.e., institutional design), and on the other hand how to explain regime forest policies coherently and consistently in terms of their high versus low degree of formality. The results show that institutional design is highly explanatory based on treaty and non-treaty regime formation as well as forest-related/focused regime formation with the synergistic sustainable forest management (SFM) issue that embraces deforestation and forest degradation, biodiversity, timber certification, and greenhouse gas emission. Additionally, the results suggest that the policy goals adopted by both regimes are coherent and consistent based on the full set of policy elements. Concerning the remedy for fragmented global forest governance arrangements, both regimes would be an example of practicing SFM-focused policies with the incorporation of forest-related policy elements into a larger governance assemblage dealing with issues such as biodiversity conservation or climate change mitigation.

The Climate Change Regime Complex

Abstract In an era defined by forum shopping, institutional proliferation, and regime complexity, why do global governance arrangements remain relatively stable? This article combines the insights of regime complexity scholarship with historical institutionalism to address this question. It argues that the establishment of international regimes creates winners and losers. States dissatisfied with these arrangements push for institutional change. Regimes nonetheless tend to develop in a path-dependent manner because institutions are resistant to change and the winners under the status quo seek to protect it. Thus, existing governance arrangements exert a centripetal pull, even when states engage in forum shopping and institutional proliferation to generate regime complexity. An examination of path-dependent institutional development in the global climate regime supports the argument.

Max Weber in the tropics: How global climate politics facilitates the bureaucratization of forestry in Indonesia

AbstractReducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is one of the most advanced global climate governance arrangements and we show that it contributes to the buildup of autonomous capacities and reliable procedures in areas of rather limited statehood. These partially unintended effects can be conceptualized as an increasing rational–legal bureaucratization, which has been initiated through both external and domestic actors as we illuminate in the case of Indonesia's forestry sector in the period from 2007 until 2017. Our finding is that a bureaucratization of a new kind is increasingly strengthened in Indonesia's forest despite enduring patterns of neopatrimonialism, emerging signs of new public management approaches, and the strengthening of functional equivalents such as community‐based forest management. We thus claim that Max Weber's perspective on the prospects and problems of rational–legal bureaucratization is still valuable, even when travelling to the tropics.

Does Global Democracy Require a World State?

The question of whether global democracy requires a world state has with few exceptions been answered with an unequivocal ‘No’. A world state, it is typically argued, is neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, different forms of global governance arrangements have been suggested, involving non-hierarchical and multilayered models with dispersed authority. The overall aim of this paper is to addresses the question of whether global democracy requires a world state, adopting a so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. It is shown that such an approach is equipped to resist the predominant binary view of a world state (either accepting it or rejecting it) and offer a more differentiated and nuanced answer to this question. In brief, a basic presumption of a function-sensitive approach is that the content, justification and status of principles of democracy are dependent on the aim they are set out to achieve, what functions they are intended to regulate (e.g., decision-making, implementation, enforcement and evaluation), and the relationship between those functions. More specifically, within a function-sensitive framework, the paper sketches the contours of an account of global democracy consisting of five regulative principles and argues—utilizing the notion of ‘sufficient stateness’—that it would require supranational legislative entities and perhaps supranational judicial entities but not necessarily supranational executive entities.

Legitimating global governance: publicisation, affectedness, and the Committee on World Food Security

ABSTRACTThough global governance theorists disagree on the standard by which the legitimacy of global governance arrangements might be assessed, they do exhibit a degree of consensus on the need for more civil society participation to bridge legitimacy deficits therein. One important sub-stream of this discussion has involved assessing, therefore, the relative strengths and weaknesses of two key principles through which legitimate participants within global governance might be recognised: the ‘all-affected principle’ and the ‘all-subjected principle’. In this paper, I shift the focus of this debate to a case study with two elements. The first involves the invocation of affectedness by civil society actors as part of their attempt to reconfigure or ‘publicise’ the relationship between food system actors and global governance. The second element of the case study focusses on the principles, practices, and mechanisms that have been adopted by civil society to facilitate the participation of the affected in a global governance body that is an important site for the publicisation struggle: the Committee on World Food Security. This case study reveals both what is at issue in the choice of principles of inclusion and a methodology through which the all-affected principle can be applied.

Multilayered Governance and the International Financial Architecture: The Erosion of Multilateralism in International Liquidity Provision

AbstractWe analyze the ‘plurilateralization’ of global financial governance, defined as the proliferation of bilateral, regional and global governance arrangements, exploring how these have shaped international monetary and financial relations. We argue that the added layers of governance are the outgrowth of four factors: the demand for an international lender of last resort, the need to manage cross‐border financial and monetary policy spillovers, the desire for policy ownership and flexibility in an increasingly globalized world, and the confluence of bilateral liquidity provision policies with countries’ strategic foreign economic policy goals. Despite the desire to rationalize and streamline an increasingly complex international financial architecture, we argue that plurilateral governance is here to stay. We therefore offer some guidelines for living with this complexity.

State responses to reputational concerns: the case of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in Kazakhstan

ABSTRACTThis article examines how reputational concerns drove the adoption of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Kazakhstan. The article argues that Kazakhstan's decision to join EITI was largely driven by the government’s intention to use EITI as a rational governance tool to manipulate its political agenda to protect the regime’s legitimacy. However, norm adherence does not reflect effective compliance. The findings of EITI in Kazakhstan show that the adoption of EITI standardized requirements followed a specific internal logic that disconnects from the initiative’s initial purpose. The case of Kazakhstan further illustrates the limitations of external remedies to the ‘resource curse’ and emphasises the significance of vertical accountability in political regimes. The article urges scholars and policy advisers to further investigate how global governance arrangements are implemented at domestic levels, particularly in autocratic regimes.

A multi-level, multi-jurisdictional strategy: Transnational tobacco companies’ attempts to obstruct tobacco packaging restrictions

ABSTRACTDespite the extensive literature on the tobacco industry, there has been little attempt to study how transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) coordinate their political activities globally, or to theorise TTC strategies within the context of global governance structures and policy processes. This article draws on three concepts from political science – policy transfer, multi-level governance and venue shifting – to analyse TTCs’ integrated, global strategies to oppose augmented packaging requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Following Uruguay's introduction of extended labelling requirements, Australia became the first country in the world to require tobacco products to be sold in standardised (‘plain’) packaging in 2012. Governments in the European Union, including in the United Kingdom and Ireland, adopted similar laws, with other member states due to follow. TTCs vehemently opposed these measures and developed coordinated, global strategies to oppose their implementation, exploiting the complexity of contemporary global governance arrangements. These included a series of legal challenges in various jurisdictions, alongside political lobbying and public relations campaigns. This article draws on analysis of public documents and 32 semi-structured interviews with key policy actors. It finds that TTCs developed coordinated and highly integrated strategies to oppose packaging restrictions across multiple jurisdictions and levels of governance.

Contested Global Governance

AbstractThis article aims to contribute to the third generation of global governance research by unfolding the concept of a global governance system consisting of normative principles and patterns of authority relationships and legitimation. The goal is to formulate a positive theory that goes beyond the negative descriptions of global governance as post‐internationalist and helps to move global governance beyond its embryonic state. The major theoretical claim is that the features of the current global governance system have endogenously produced the politicization and counter‐institutionalization of international authorities. Internal tensions of the system fuel legitimation problems and demands for change, which in the end lead – in some cases – to the decline of global governance arrangements or – in other cases – to its deepening via appropriate institutional responses.

Promoting Sustainable Food Provision; the Role of Networks in Global Food Governance

Food provision in contemporary societies is transforming due to challenges of globalization, sustainability and equity. The interactions between civil society organizations, governments, the food industry, consumers and producers constitute dynamic fields of environmental change in global food provision. Promoting equitable and sustainable food provision in a globalizing world requires well-informed insights in these social dynamics involved because global food governance involves a complex array of different public and private actors. Today we are faced with a fragmented, differentiated, hybrid and contested constellation of global food governance arrangements and therefore we need a network rather than a formalized perspective on food governance. Such a network perspective can serve as the start of a new research agenda for the study of global sustainable food governance.

Multistakeholder approach and human rights in Internet Governance

Andrey A. Shcherbovich - Lecturer, Department of the Constitutional and Administrative Law, National Research University Higher School of EconomicsAddress: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian FederationE-mail: ashcherbovich@hse.ru The decision-making system in international organizations is still very conservative. The composition of international forums that can generate significant international instruments has not changed for centuries. Only diplomats and representatives of international organizations whose credentials have been confirmed in a certain way are admitted to international decision-making. The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), under the auspices of the UN, UNESCO and the International Telecommunication Union, was established in 2006 on the basis of the World Summit on the Information Society, which is today the world’s most authoritative international discussion forum on Internet governance, though its potential to achieve the best regulation of international Internet governance processes is not fully used. The basis for this regulation is the multistakeholder approach, which consists in a multiplicity of categories of the decision-making mechanism, including, in addition to the traditional representatives of states and international organizations, civil society, business, the academic and technical community, the media, and other interested stakeholders. This research is expected to provide guidance for improving the global Internet governance arrangements, taking into account the interests of all categories of participants, as well as to establish procedural rules for decision-making based on the multistakeholder approach in Internet governance to give the Internet Governance Forum the opportunity to adopt international “soft law” instruments. An example of this is the Draft Charter of Rights and Principles on the Internet, developed by the Dynamic Coalition on Human Rights and the principles of the Internet Governance Forum - something comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with regard to the Internet. The need to bring human rights instruments to the Internet determines the direction of the development of programs and policies in global Internet governance and the role of the Internet Governance Forum in these processes.

Towards a donut regime? Domestic actors, climatization, and the hollowing-out of the international forests regime in the Anthropocene

Political responses to global deforestation, as a defining characteristic of the so-called Anthropocene, are a key field for scholarship and policy analysis. In the past decade, research has proliferated on global forest governance and the international forest regime (IFR), yet the academic literature on the IFR is just as dispersed and fragmented as the IFR itself. An emerging body of literature now suggests the key role of domestic actors in international forest governance, questioning an implicit top-down logic of global arrangements. In spite of all the resources at its disposal, the IFR is characterised by complexity, fragmentation and ineffectiveness regarding its main objective of reducing global deforestation.Based on an extensive literature review, the authors’ long-standing observations and selected own empirical findings, this review article aims to provide an updated historical account of the IFR and proposes a from-below approach for analysing the IFR from the viewpoint of domestic actors. In this bottom-up perspective the IFR is conceptualised as a set of resources that key domestic actors can pick and choose from according to their interests and in the light of domestic politics.Using illustrative empirical examples from recent research and own observations, the article finds that the IFR is being hollowed-out by (i) the growing policy links between forests and climate change - a process referred to as “climatization”- and (ii) domestic influences. We conclude that our from-below approach is instrumental in further explaining why deforestation has largely continued, despite the emergence of the IFR some three decades ago. Our findings about the importance of domestic actors illustrate that global governance arrangements cannot operate effectively, relative to their ambitious mandate and for tackling policy issues relating to the Anthropocene, unless they are granted adequate resources and support by key domestic actors.

“Inter-National” Habermas: Contestation and Understanding under Conditions of Diversity

“Inter-National” Habermas: Contestation and Understanding under Conditions of Diversity

The fourth face of legitimacy: Constituent power and the constitutional legitimacy of international institutions

AbstractScholars of international organisation commonly differentiate among three dimensions when studying the legitimacy of international institutions: input, throughput, and output legitimacy. I argue that the study of global governance needs to consider a fourth ‘face’ of legitimacy: constitutional legitimacy. This dimension addresses the normative and practical questions related to the constitutive justification for an institutional order – such as in whose name it is founded, whose interests it should serve, and how authority should be distributed within that institutional order. These questions are distinct from the procedural features of institutions emphasised by other dimensions and concern the constituent power that should ground the authority of governance institutions. In this article, I develop this fourth dimension of legitimacy, explore its varied expressions in world politics, and show how it has implications for the constitutional structure of global governance arrangements. I argue that different representations of constituent power shape the legitimacy of different authority relations within international institutions and illustrate these claims with an analysis of the politics of legitimacy in three cases: the ongoing effort to reform the UN Security Council, the negotiations over the founding of the International Criminal Court, and the debates over the Responsibility to Protect at the UN.