Global Governance Arrangements Research Articles

Playing the politics of scale: Oxfam’s intervention in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

Development NGOs have become important partners in global private governance arrangements that aim to make agricultural commodity sectors more sustainable. Many of such NGOs endorse a rights-based approach to development. However, little is known about the different contributions of NGOs to the creation of private sustainability standards and the manner in which such contributions are realized. Based on the ‘politics of scale’ concept, this paper defines three dimensions at which NGO interventions in private governance arrangements may occur; namely, the creation of spaces of engagement, connecting spaces, and spaces of formal interdependence. In an in-depth case study, the paper discusses the opportunities, challenges, and limitations that Oxfam, an international development NGO, met in the process of institutionalizing human rights principles in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a global multi-stakeholder governance arrangement. Based on the empirical research, the paper formulates some conclusions regarding the extent to which development NGOs can regard private governance arrangements as vehicles for the practical deployment of rights-based approaches to development.

Regulating the Internet infrastructure: A comparative appraisal of the legitimacy of ICANN, ITU, and the WSIS

AbstractHow to generate legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state is often considered a central question in contemporary world politics. To proceed in theory‐building, scholars need to systematically assign the theory‐driven assumptions on legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state with the various, already observable, forms of global governance. This article aims to conduct a comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance by applying a framework of indicators for their assessment. The indicators are selected from the scholarly debate within International Relations on the legitimacy of global governance arrangements and structured by a multidimensional concept of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output dimensions). This framework is then applied to international, transnational, and private forms of global governance in the field of Internet regulation in order to show how each of them tries to produce and maintain legitimacy, which strategies it applies, and in how it interacts with its stakeholders.

Introduction to Special Issue: Toward Greater Interdisciplinarity in Research on the Legitimacy of Global Governance

Abstract: The legitimacy of global governance arrangements remains a major focus of scholarly interest across the social sciences. To maximize the potential insights of such research, a closer cooperation of scholars across the relevant disciplines and the creation of a genuinely interdisciplinary research program promises significant rewards. The normative blueprints for more democratically legitimate forms of global governance developed by political theorists in particular would benefit, I argue, from a closer linkage with political science, with the latter providing critical insights into the causal factors and mechanisms that determine outcomes in international politics, insights that are indispensable for studying and assessing the feasibility of implementing abstractly attractive normative designs. The contributions in this Special Issue begin to cross the “normative‐positive divide” each in its own way and collectively point the way toward more integrated future research.

Legitimacy in Global Governance: International, Transnational and Private Institutions Compared

Abstract: How to generate legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation state is often considered a central question in contemporary world politics (Moravcsik 2004: 336). To proceed in theory‐building, scholars need to systematically assign the theory‐driven assumptions on legitimate forms of governance beyond the nation‐state with the various, already observable, forms of global governance. This article aims to conduct a comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance by applying a framework of indicators for their assessment. The indicators are selected from the scholarly debate within International Relations on the legitimacy of global governance arrangements and structured by a multi‐dimensional concept of legitimacy (input‐, throughput‐ and output‐dimension). This framework is then applied to international, transnational and private forms of global governance in three policy fields in order to show how each of them try to produce and maintain legitimacy, which strategies they apply and in how they interact with their stakeholders.

Infectious Disease Surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom: From Public Goods to the Challenges of New Technologies

Infectious diseases are a long-standing and continuing threat to health and welfare, with their containment dependent on national disease surveillance and response capacities. This article discusses infectious disease surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining historical national traditions for identifying and controlling infectious disease risks and how globalization and technical advances have influenced the evolution of their respective approaches. The two systems developed in different but parallel ways. In the United States, surveillance remained quite localized at the state level until the early twentieth century and still retains many of those features. The U.K. approach became centralized from the latter part of the nineteenth century and has principally remained so. In both cases, disease surveillance was traditionally conceived as a public good, where national or local authorities held sovereign rights and power to protect public health. With the increasing globalized nature of infectious disease, such notions shifted toward surveillance as a global public good, with countries responding in turn by creating new global health governance arrangements and regulations. However, the limitations of current surveillance systems and the strong hold of national interests place into question the provision of surveillance as a global public good. These issues are further highlighted with the introduction of new surveillance technologies, which offer opportunities for improved disease detection and identification but also create potential tensions between individual rights, corporate profit, equitable access to technology, and national and global public goods.

Global Governance: Some concerns about authentic democracy addressed

In this paper I take up a commonly voiced concern about the viability of global governance in general, and cosmopolitan democracy in particular, namely, whether genuine democracy can be achieved at the international level. Some (such as, Will Kymlicka) argue that genuine democracy is only possible within nation-states, because authentic deliberation requires common nationality or identity, which generates the trust and solidarity necessary to sustain deliberation and democracy. Through analysis of the argument and consideration of the requirements of genuine democracy, we can see that these concerns can be addressed. I go on to suggest that the major challenge facing models of global governance is not one concerning lack of common identity, solidarity, or opportunities for authentic deliberation, rather, it lies elsewhere. We can assess global governance arrangements in terms of two main variables, which are sometimes in tension: effectiveness and accountability. We want systems of global governance to incorporate both considerations. Accountability can take the form of democratic procedures but alternative forms of accountability are also possible. Furthermore, a system of governance that both effectively attends to people�s interests and is suitably accountable can certainly claim to have adequate democratic credentials on the �Responsive Democracy� view I discuss.

Globalization and the governance of education in Viet Nam

In a globalizing world, local and global governance arrangements are increasingly interdependent, which produces harmonization in some instances and new tensions and contradictions in others. Analysis shows that successive waves of globalization have affected the governance of education in Viet Nam differently. It shows that the globalization of Viet Nam's social and political economy has not diminished the centrality of Viet Nam's state in the governance of education, but that the character of the state's governance roles has changed significantly. Even in the context of the current global turbulence, it seems clear that Viet Nam's economy will continue to grow. But it is equally clear that what transpires in the field of the governance of education will profoundly influence the sustainability of that growth, its distribution, and its qualitative impacts on social life in Viet Nam.

Transformations of Vietnamese Shrimp Aquaculture Policy: Empirical Evidence from the Mekong Delta

International environmental and social concerns about tropical shrimp production have led to the emergence of private transnational governance and regulation. Using cases from Ca Mau we investigate how the shift to private transnational regulatory networks has changed the role of the government from a regulator to a facilitator of global private governance interests and arrangements. The rise of these various schemes has also been part of a shift from quantitative to qualitative policy goals within the Vietnamese aquaculture sector. In turn, this has led to new internal relationships, most notably the repositioning of private interests and community-based management within the Vietnamese state framework. We conclude that the ongoing transformation of the government's role in environmental shrimp governance requires mechanisms that foster improved participation and compliance between the state and private actors. To achieve this efforts are needed to better include local government at both communal and village levels and to use existing global market incentives more strategically.

Deliberative Equality and the Transgovernmental Politics of the Global Financial Architecture

Revisiting the concept of transgovernmentalism, originally developed by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, can shed considerable light on the nature of interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance. Transgovernmentalism highlights how certain technocratic policy communities, composed of finance ministries, central banks, and regulators, dominate the global financial architecture. It also provides insights into the political and social basis of these actors' interactions and deliberations. Most importantly, renovating the concept of brings the participatory deficits in the current global financial architecture into sharp focus and points us in the direction of a workable reform agenda that would expand inclusion and participation. This article advocates basing future reform on efforts to achieve a closer realization of the principle of Unfortunately, transgovernmentalism is incompatible with deliberative equality, meaning that it is precisely the transgovernmental characteristics of the current global financial architecture that have to be challenged and overturned if we are to arrive at anything approximating deliberative equality. KEYWORDS: global financial architecture, transgovernmental politics, G7, G-20, deliberation. ********** Over thirty years ago, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye published a seminal article in the journal World Politics that outlined the concept of transgovernmental relations. (1) In the intervening period, political scientists have rarely applied the concept in empirical research, fewer still sought to revise it for the contemporary era. In this article, I make the argument that a renovated version of the concept of can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political dynamics of the current global financial architecture (GFA). (2) As a concept, not only reveals much about the nature of interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance, but also brings the participatory deficits in the current GFA into sharp focus and points in the direction of a modest, workable reform agenda that would increase inclusion and participation. The review of the GFA undertaken after the Asian financial crisis involved three distinct trends. There was both a partial privatization of financial governance evident in the creation of twelve codes and standards that were designed to enhance market scrutiny of national policies and practices (3) and a limited shift away from the club model of diplomacy evident in the creation of the G-20, which challenged the monopoly of leading developed countries. Most significantly, the architectural exercise consolidated and deepened the transgovemmental characteristics of the GFA. The transgovernmental nature of the GFA restricts participation in key deliberative spaces to a limited number of regulators and central state agencies (almost exclusively finance ministries, central banks, and specialist regulatory agencies), which dominate and control the deliberations that determine the terms and content of global financial governance, resulting in a narrow, technocratic, closed insider policy process that remains largely impenetrable to a wider range of concerned societal interests. While there is some evidence of a shift in global governance arrangements toward a more polycentric form of complex multilateralism in which various civil society groupings, nonstate actors, and developing countries participate alongside more traditional advanced capitalist state bureaucracies in the form of trisectoral networks, (4) I argue in this article that the principal defect of the global financial architecture is that it remains insufficiently pluralist and that this is a direct result of its overriding transgovernmental character. I begin with a brief discussion of the growing significance of the concept of deliberation for the study of global governance, including some consideration of the importance of the issues of participation and representation in the act of deliberation. …

Reconsidering institutional cosmopolitanism: global poverty and the importance of the state in international political theory

Cosmopolitan scholarship has been at the forefront of efforts to consider political structures capable of realising justice in a more robust manner than prevailing global governance arrangements. In particular, the arguments of Thomas Pogge have contributed significantly to scholarly thinking about global poverty and his scheme of ‘institutional cosmopolitanism’ aspires to institutionalise human rights in the structures of global governance. This essay critiques the capacity of Pogge's cosmopolitan approach to productively guide political action in relation to global poverty by questioning whether global institutions generated by human rights are sufficient to address global poverty. The argument in this essay is that a viable guide to political action which alleviates global poverty must also take account of the potential utility of the state. This essays draws upon republican ideas to contend that cosmopolitanism needs to encompass a robust account of local institutions such as the state.

North-South Parity in Global Governance: The Affirmative Procedures of the Forest Stewardship Council

As a pioneer among global governance arrangements, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) bases its decisionmaking on an explicit parity of Northern and Southern stakeholders. This article examines the organizational procedures of the Forest Stewardship Council as well as the practical implementation of those procedures. It concludes that, contrary to common assumptions, affirmative procedures alone are insufficient to guarantee that the representation of Southern interests is strengthened. Moreover, the analysis of the FSC reveals significant disparities in the quality of representation of stakeholders from different geographical regions. In the end, it is therefore not so much the affirmative procedures themselves that make the FSC an interesting model for other global decisionmaking processes, but rather their combination with a multilevel system of standard setting in which national and regional standards are used to specify the meaning of globally developed principles and criteria.