Global Governance Regime Research Articles

The materiality of youth representation at climate summits: navigating barriers, routes, and spaces

ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen institutionalized procedures for youth representation in global climate governance, and significant visibility for youth climate activists. Despite these improvements, young representatives continue to bear witness about tokenized forms of participation and a lack of influence. This article seeks to address this ambiguous development by focusing on the materiality of youth representation in United Nations climate conferences. Through interviews and participant observations at COP26 and COP27, as well as COY16 and COY17, we analyse the bureaucratic and socio-economic barriers to representation, the knowledge resources and competitiveness of the routes to representation, and the spatial ordering and subversive tactics on site at the summits. We show that these materialities shape youth’s discursive strategies, thus helping to explain who gets to be a representative and what forms of subjectivities, agendas, claims, and strategies that become possible in the global climate governance regime.

Traceable futures: the political temporality of forest facts in Peru’s tropical logging governance

ABSTRACT In Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazonian region, forest transport permits (or FTP) are the privileged accounting infrastructures by which the Peruvian state seeks to bring transparency to logging by making tropical timber traceable, thus securing its legality and sustainability in a context of rising national and international concern with tropical rainforests. But while FTP are often imagined as a means to secure a future where traceable forest facts can be established with certainty, they have also been enduringly suspected as artifacts prone to manipulation and deceit. In this article, I follow FTP as a way to explore the political temporality of forest facts in Peru’s tropical rainforests. I argue that foregrounding the ambivalent ontologies of FTP as both reliable accounting infrastructures and treacherous manipulable things allows us to appreciate the ways in which the past and the future are articulated in conflicting ways in the context of massive technocratic innovations in the governance of Peru’s tropical logging. By focusing on the political lives of a humble paper document, I thus examine how traceability becomes a fundamental condition of facticity as emerging regimes of global environmental governance drive the expansion of state data infrastructures onto previously untraceable terrains.

The value of the concept of discrimination in contexts of migration: the case of structural discrimination

ABSTRACT This article considers the question of the value and limits of the concept of discrimination for the ethics of migration by drawing attention to the need for a conceptualization of discrimination that can encompass forms of group-based disadvantage that are enabled and reproduced by the three central norms of our contemporary regime of global migration governance: the state’s right to unilateral control over its border regime, birthright citizenship and rights of (re)entry to one’s own state, and the individual right to leave a state. I sketch an historical account of the forging and yoking together of these norms as bound up with the history of European imperialism and argue that they function to enable the reproduction of the advantage of states of the Global North. I illustrate this argument by reference to the example of the transnational migration of medical professionals from sub-Saharan Africa and argue that this may amount to structural discrimination against the human right to health of the populations of these states of emigration before considering two responses to this condition: ‘no recruitment’ and ‘no disadvantage’.

Can de-risking avert supply chain precarity in the face of China-U.S. geopolitical tensions? From sanctions to semiconductor resilience and national security

As a main driver of geoeconomic power, technological supremacy is at stake in the current zero-sum tech war between the U.S. and China. Semiconductor chips have become an emerging geopolitical frontier in the rivalry of the two powers. Since the confrontation has intensified, the U.S. seeks to weaponise its dominant position in the global semiconductor value chain (GSVC). Some industrial policy-driven geostrategic approaches inform the race to reduce the GSVC vulnerabilities. The tit for tat nature of sanctions risks making multilateralism decline and further undermining the effectiveness of the global governance regime. Shifts in rising economic competition highlight the constraints on collective action. It remains critical as to whether the international economic and legal system can survive the current fractured geopolitics, and whether the new thinking on global governance could be viable for a non-zero-sum game.

The Limits of Enforcement in Global Financial Governance: Blacklisting in FATF as Rational Myth

Abstract How might international institutions matter? To consider this central question of International Relations, we analyze a most-likely case for the importance of materially driven enforcement: the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) use of blacklisting in the global regime targeting money laundering and terrorism financing. Scholars and practitioners often argue that fear of financial harm caused by FATF’s lists explains the near-global commitment to FATF’s standards, even if compliance lags. We search for statistical evidence of this impact across four different measures of financial flows and find that listing is not correlated with financial harm. To explain these null results, we examine bank decision-making and find that the lists’ impact is likely diminished by two overlooked factors: the existence of multiple, competing lists and banks’ access to more fine-grained, client-specific information provided by third-party companies. We interpret this contradiction—a commitment to compliance generated in part by a fear of enforcement, despite a lack of evidence for enforcement’s impact—as a “rational myth.” The results challenge a common understanding of a major global governance regime, confirm ideas about the limited ability of states or International Organizations to control governance outcomes, and advance a new research agenda on the impact of bank decision-making on global governance.

Characterizing Future Authoritarian Governance in the Space Domain

Traditionally, discussions of governance beyond Earth have largely been held to the purview of debates about space law and global governance regimes. Yet, the priority of space exploration among ambitious, tech-industry associated billionaires and its continued potential for militarization suggest that a more dynamic approach may be needed, given that state-sponsorship of extraterrestrial colonial projects may be more akin to partnerships between private and public actors rather than nation-states assuming traditional roles as sole sources of decision-making. Permanent settlements in space will require forms of localized government that may look distinct from contemporary models of political order. This article thus asks a provocative question associated with the empirical record of human colonization and settlement in prior eras: What sort of authoritarian governance is most likely to form in human space settlements during the medium term? Reviewing variations on political order in small-scale colonial settlements in light of recent conceptual work on authoritarian rule, the article identifies three theoretical models of governance that may emerge once beyond Earth settlements become permanent fixtures of human society.

Behind the Huawei sanction: national security, ideological prejudices or something else?

Digital supremacy is fundamental to national security and global economic competitiveness. An imperative of protecting critical information infrastructure (CII) is the theoretical basis for cybersecurity policies. The cyber competition has the potential to reshape global tech supply chains and international economic governance. The winner will make standards and rules that can take the most advantage of a first mover. The assumption that governments across jurisdictions embrace similar policies, regardless of their ideologies, is not a paradoxical proposition any more in the time of globalisation 2.0. Both the US and China use law enforcement power to advance their national strategic interests. The imposition of sanctions against Huawei is an epitome of the current US–China cyber competition game far beyond the mere economic scenario. This study seeks to explore whether the unilateral approaches would be well justified in a new normal of the decoupling era and how to establish a viable global cyber governance regime.

Article: Power and Expertise in Global Tax Governance

It is a rather broadly held misconception that the project on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) began in September 2013 when the G20 Leaders’ endorsed the OECD’s Action Plan on BEPS.1 The general acceptance of this narrative is understandable and perhaps largely trivial. However, it does tell us something important about our tendency to focus on the foreground of issues – on the immediate and obvious. When public focus is narrowed down to notable events, such as the G20 Leaders’ summits, the background work of tax experts fades out of focus. Often, the work of the expert is not even associated with the idea of public power and authority; it is reduced to something concerned with mere technicalities. Yet, it is the expert who outlines the agenda and prepares the discussion drafts and executive summaries that inform the (political) actor in the foreground of the issues that, based on objective expert knowledge, should somehow be addressed in one way or another. The more complex the issue, the less that the actor in the foreground has the technical ability to assess the merits of the experts’ proposition. Sometimes, owing to our desire to be confident in our ability to grasp difficult concepts, we may ultimately support the expert who makes the claim of superior knowledge over an issue we do not fully comprehend precisely as a result of our lack of understanding so as to deny or conceal this deficiency. Occasionally, such false confidence of the foreground actor in their ability to assess the propositions of the expert may result in a feedback loop in which the ideas of the expert appear to legitimize the power of the foreground actor, and this power subsequently appears to legitimize the expert’s ideas. This article will discuss the role of experts and the everyday power they use in the realm of global tax governance. To date, such a discussion has largely escaped the agenda of legal academic discussion.3 Yet, the importance of the discussion on expert power in tax is paramount; unawareness over this constituent element of the current paradigm results in an inability to address what is known as the legitimacy deficit of global tax governance. This will continue to reproduce global power imbalance in favour of the privileged and at the expense of the disenfranchized. The development of international tax norms into a regime of global tax governance will serve as a framework for this discussion thereby rendering the role of experts working under the auspices of the League of Nations and, subsequently, the OECD at the center of the focus. Global tax governance, technocracy, politics of taxation, experts, framing, BEPS, structural bias, legitimacy

The global “political voice deficit matrix”

Abstract The present article illuminates something important yet undertheorized about the relationship between democracy, technology, and globalization. That is, that digital technologies are crucial for certain types of cross-boundary interactions between individuals or communities, and that these interactions are crucial for democratizing relations of power and authority established in and by regimes of global governance. The article does so by linking together two related conversations that have yet to take sufficient account of each other: those taking place between law and technology scholars on the democratizing potential of digital technologies, and those taking place amongst international lawyers on the relationship between democracy and globalization. The article undertakes this alchemy by putting forward the theoretical construct of the “political voice.” This construct offers a normative theory that outlines the democratic functions of vertical communications between individuals and public decision-makers within and across boundaries, but also, crucially, explains how these are dependent on robust horizontal, transnational exchanges between individuals or communities. This construct thus offers a lens through which to evaluate the extent to which digital technologies live up to their democratizing potential, and allows for a normative conceptualization of the possible consequences of their failure to do so as a problem of global governance.

Granting legitimacy from non‐state actor deliberation: An example of women's groups at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

AbstractNon‐state actors (NSAs) have been widely recognized as important participants in the global climate regime. Their participation is considered to have the potential to enhance the democratic legitimacy of global governance institutions such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). What is the mechanism through which NSAs grant legitimacy to the institution? This study connects NSA legitimation with their deliberation at multilateral venues. I argue that, while NSAs do not have formal voting or decision‐making power, evaluating their participation in deliberation activities, such as the Side Events at the annual Conference of Parties, can shed light on our understanding of whether there is equality in their participation and who gets to contribute to the institutional legitimacy of the UNFCCC. Drawing on the example of women's groups at the UNFCCC, I demonstrate their increasing participation in deliberation. Quantitative analysis and interviews suggest that their participation is relatively inclusive with a diverse range of actors and viewpoints. Although Global Northern NSAs enjoy some advantages in participation, the effect is balanced by NSAs' social embeddedness, especially for the Southern groups, and the robust collaborations between the North and South. These features are likely to enhance the legitimacy of UNFCCC. Future research should consider how to understand and assess legitimacy in global governance regimes and who may be left out in the legitimation process.

Ocean-based negative emissions technologies: a governance framework review

The model pathways of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) for the timely achievement of global climate targets, especially the target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels, suggest the need for safeguarding and enhancing the global carbon sink. Experts argue that the deployment of so-called negative emissions technologies for large-scale carbon dioxide removal holds potential for keeping the temperature in line with limits set by the Paris Agreement. Ocean-based negative emissions technologies (ONETs) intend to enhance carbon sequestration and storage in the ocean, e.g., by changing the ocean’s physical or biogeochemical properties. But in addition to these intended effects, ONETs may also cause unintentional impacts on the ocean’s condition and on related coastal and marine ecosystem services that are relevant for the attainment of a range of global policy goals. This article links potential direct and indirect, intentional and unintentional impacts of eight ONETs on the marine environment to the regulations and policy goals of international environmental agreements of the current global ocean governance regime. The results thereof outline a direct, implicit and indirect governance framework of ONETs. Hereby, a broader perspective of the concept of (global) ocean governance is adopted to outline a wider network that goes beyond the explicit regulation of ONETs within the realm of ocean governance. This first-order assessment derives gaps and challenges in the existing governance framework, as well as needs and opportunities for comprehensive governance of the technologies. It is determined that while the inclusion of ONETs in the global climate strategy may be deemed necessary for reaching net zero emission targets in the future, a range of potential trade-offs with other policy goals may need to be considered or dealt with when deploying ONETS for climate mitigation. Further, foresight-oriented and adaptive governance mechanisms appear imperative to bridge gaps resulting from extensive uncertainties and unknowns linked to ONET deployment in a changing ocean and. The identified ONET governance framework reiterates current challenges in ocean governance, for instance related to fragmentation, but also represents an opportunity for a synergistic and integrated approach to future governance.

AI and Global Governance: Modalities, Rationales, Tensions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a salient but polarizing issue of recent times. Actors around the world are engaged in building a governance regime around it. What exactly the “it” is that is being governed, how, by who, and why—these are all less clear. In this review, we attempt to shine some light on those questions, considering literature on AI, the governance of computing, and regulation and governance more broadly. We take critical stock of the different modalities of the global governance of AI that have been emerging, such as ethical councils, industry governance, contracts and licensing, standards, international agreements, and domestic legislation with extraterritorial impact. Considering these, we examine selected rationales and tensions that underpin them, drawing attention to the interests and ideas driving these different modalities. As these regimes become clearer and more stable, we urge those engaging with or studying the global governance of AI to constantly ask the important question of all global governance regimes: Who benefits?

An Analysis of the Channels for Accessing Economic Benefits in the Commons Governance Regime of Space Resources

On September 22, 2022, the world’s first transaction on space resources took place, highlighting the need for an international space mining regime. Although outer space is often considered global commons, there is a concern that the commons governance regime may hinder the commercial use of space resources. The current research does not provide an in-depth analysis of the incentive mechanism under the global commons governance regime, let alone the economic incentive mechanism. This paper explores how to construct the channels for accessing economic benefits in the commons governance regime of space resources. The channels will constitute a critical incentive mechanism for the regime, and they should conform to two principles closely related to the commons and incentives: the common benefit principle contained in international law and the 2B principle proposed by Ostrom. This paper summarizes the basic types of channels and their combinations and finds that the channels and their combinations in previous studies and the latest international instruments do not fully meet the requirements of the two principles. Based on the principles, this paper puts forward a new proposal, which integrates four existing channels and one new channel. Compared with previous research, the proposal suggested in this article has advantages in the following aspects: promoting the realization of the two principles, incentivizing diverse countries to accept commons governance of space resources, and encouraging space cooperation between spacefaring nations and non-spacefaring nations.

Trapped In The Semi-Periphery

This paper attempts to explain the middle-income trap from the lens of an amended world-systems theory, in which capitalists within the semi-periphery are taken into account. It rejects that developing countries should pursue an import-substitution industrialization strategy, and instead argues developing countries should pursue a strategy similar to South Korea’s. An export-oriented industrialization strategy, with tight limits on foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational corporations (MNCs) operating within the economy, building up state capacity in order to form a close collaborative, not corrupting relationship between private businesses and the state, and calls for heavy investments in human capital and industrial upgrading. This would ensure that surplus value does not leave the country nor does it lay idle in the hands of domestic capitalists. It also calls for changes to the global economic governance regime, such as common rules for FDI and taxes on MNCs, on the part of developing countries in order to create a more development friendly international economic system.

COVID-19 & Problematics of Global Health Security

COVID-19 illustrates our fragile and precarious global health security. Global health governance has failed miserably to ensure health security. This study examines the problematics of health security. The findings reveal that the problem lies in the conception of health security. A narrow understanding of the term "security" has been used to define and implement health security at the national and global levels, based on the Westphalian legacy of protecting countries against external public health threats through many emergency measures. Nationalistic and sovereign norms constantly stand in the way of collaboration among states. The problem is primarily interpretation, acceptability, and implementation of the concept. This study recommends that health security be redefined from a human security paradigm. As a second step, revamp the global health governance regime through de-politicization of WHO, constructing a pandemic treaty and making 'health security a priority.

Westphalian Sovereignty and the Free-Rider Conundrum in the Atmospheric Commons: Examining Global Governance Regimes for Addressing Climate Change Adaptation

While key actors at the international level have made strides in attempts to address climate change through collective action, their efforts are often limited by the Westphalian construct of the modern state which prioritizes territorial sovereignty over global governance. Thus, even though it is commonly known that the atmosphere transcends sovereign territory, creating effective institutional and policy mechanisms for collective state action to govern it remains a major challenge. Indeed, despite the crafting of various international climate change governing frameworks after the Rio Earth Conference of 1992, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with the negative impacts of climate change already being experienced in various parts of the world. In this paper, we review published literature, secondary data and international policies to gauge the performance of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement of 2015 in regulating national and global greenhouse gas emissions. Our assessment established that enforcing commitments made by various nation states at the international level is very difficult, mainly because the pursuit of national economic growth is accorded precedence over the imperative for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This inevitably results in governance failures. It is also clear that the socioeconomic development imperatives of less developed economies are particularly compromised as they have the highest incentive to cooperate with global governance due to their vulnerability to climate change impacts, and yet they have the least capacity to emit greenhouse gasses because of the nature of their economies.

Can the Sick Speak? Global Health Governance and Health Subalternity

Global Health Governance (GHG) uses a set of financial, normative, and epistemic arguments to retain and amplify its influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the GHG regime used its own successes and failures to prescribe more of itself while demanding further resources. However, the consistent failures of this form governance and its appeasement to a dominant neoliberal ideology lead to the following question: Is the global health governance regime failing at its goal of improving health or succeeding at other political and ideological goals that necessitate such failures? Using concepts and ideas from social theory and post-colonial studies; I examine the definitions, epistemic basis, and drivers of GHG and propose certain conditions for the legitimacy of a global health governance system. Examining historical and current cases, I find that the GHG regime currently fails to fulfil such conditions of legitimacy and instead creates spaces that limit rather than help many populations it purports to serve. Those spaces of sickness confine people and reduce them into a state of health subalternity. In being health subalterns, people’s voices are neither sought nor heard in formulating the policies that determine their health. Finally, I argue that research and policymaking on global health should not be confined to the current accepted frameworks that assumes legitimacy and benevolence of GHG, and propose steps to establish an alternative, emancipatory model of understanding and governing global health.

Shaping AI’s Future? China in Global AI Governance

ABSTRACT With the growing challenges brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI)’s rapid development, multiple global AI governance initiatives have been developed to set up AI norms and standards. With China’s open ambition to be an AI superpower in 2030, China is keen to play a leadership role in nascent global AI governance regimes. This article argues that China’s search for AI leadership is driven by not only domestic regulatory needs but also the desire to gain norm and agenda setting power. China’s leadership ambition in global AI governance lies in the wider context of its aspiration to shift from a norm-taker towards a norm-shaper, if not maker. Despite considerable efforts taken so far, however, this article suggests that China is facing enormous challenges to realize its leadership ambition. The current geopolitical landscapes have allowed China limited room in nascent global AI governance regimes to demonstrate its leadership credentials. It remains to be seen how China’s role may evolve with the development of global AI governance architecture.

After compliance in India and beyond: a theory of implementation dilemmas and comparative institutional analysis

ABSTRACT Using India as a theory building case, this paper puts forward a theoretical framework for understanding countries’ responses to global rules and implementation effects across diverse global governance regimes and contexts. The initial premise for this paper is that the strategic structure of implementation dilemmas faced by states and actors within countries need to be understood in addition to design dilemmas. Successful global regimes must not only solve cooperation and uncertainty problems at the initial stages in choosing the right institutional matrix, but also ‘require changes in domestic institutions.’ The need to change domestic institutions creates certain implementation dilemmas. These dilemmas are a joint product of the institutional design, specific policy issue and the domestic logic of responses after international agreements have been signed. This broader idea helps understand a wide variety of India’s interactions across global governance institutions. I also suggest a novel empirical strategy of cross-institutional analysis to assess implementation dilemmas. While we have numerous cross-national studies of how compliance occurs in a wide variety of countries, we lack theory-driven, empirically grounded, comparative studies of a single country or a group of countries across diverse global regimes. Such a framework can help us better understand how countries interact with a variety of global institutions and the reciprocal effects. This framework is then used to understand India’s interactions with diverse global regimes in an illustrative manner in this article, and in greater detail by other authors in the section published in this issue of Contemporary South Asia.

Unpacking the heterogeneity of climate city networks

In recent decades, climate city networks, understood as formalized subnational governance networks that have climate change as their focus, have emerged, linking cities to the global climate governance regime and helping them to take climate action locally. Such city networks are considered an essential aspect of urban climate policy and governance. Scholarship on climate city networks has illustrated that such networks can no longer be understood as homogenous groups of organizations; rather, they show heterogeneity in how they seek to attract and engage with member cities. In this article, we unpack this heterogeneity and interrogate the various ways in which climate city networks attract and engage with their members. We are particularly interested in understanding what typifies climate city networks with an active member base. In studying 22 real-world climate city networks, we uncover five distinct types of networks with an active member base. The typology illustrates the rich, but bounded, variety of climate city networks, and helps to clarify how climate city networks can be effective in encouraging their member cities to take local climate action.