Global Institutional Arrangements Research Articles

Polycentricity and Regional Ocean Governance: Implications for the Emerging UN Agreement on Marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction

The governance of the two-thirds of the world’s ocean in areas beyond national jurisdiction (the high seas and deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction or ABNJ) is currently fragmented into diverse institutions addressing specific activities, issues or regions. This has hampered the international community’s ability to redress critical issues including biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change, ecosystem degradation and declining fisheries in an integrated and ecosystem-based manner. Our analysis of polycentricity theory and associated enabling conditions shows that the current polycentric approach to marine biodiversity in ABNJ is not yet fully functional: it is missing the two key attributes of: (1) generally applicable rules and norms structuring actions and behaviors, and (2) processes to enhance cooperation, coordination, and conflict resolution. Based on the enabling conditions conducive for achieving “a functional polycentric governance system” identified in Carlisle and Gruby (2019), combined with a prior analysis applying resilience principles for socio-ecological systems to ABNJ (Yadav and Gjerde, 2020), this article suggests seven ways the emerging United Nations agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity of ABNJ (BBNJ Agreement) could stimulate coordinated and integrated action at both global and regional levels in ABNJ. These include: (1) overarching rules, goals and objectives; (2) formal and informal conflict resolution mechanisms; (3) robust global institutional arrangements; (4) strengthened global, regional and sectoral bodies with shared and overlapping responsibility for biodiversity conservation; (5) strengthened cooperation through integrated ecosystem assessments and strategic action programmes at ecologically meaningful scales that could include areas within and beyond national jurisdiction; (6) learning exchange mechanisms within and across regions; and (7) strengthened regional and national capacities for ecosystem-based management in ABNJ. Taken together, these tools could enhance the resilience of ocean institutions, ecosystems and biodiversity to cope with growing pressures, uncertainty and rapid change in ABNJ.

Competing interests, clashing ideas and institutionalizing influence: insights into the political economy of malaria control from seven African countries.

This article explores how malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa is shaped in important ways by political and economic considerations within the contexts of aid-recipient nations and the global health community. Malaria control is often assumed to be a technically driven exercise: the remit of public health experts and epidemiologists who utilize available data to select the most effective package of activities given available resources. Yet research conducted with national and international stakeholders shows how the realities of malaria control decision-making are often more nuanced. Hegemonic ideas and interests of global actors, as well as the national and global institutional arrangements through which malaria control is funded and implemented, can all influence how national actors respond to malaria. Results from qualitative interviews in seven malaria-endemic countries indicate that malaria decision-making is constrained or directed by multiple competing objectives, including a need to balance overarching global goals with local realities, as well as a need for National Malaria Control Programmes to manage and coordinate a range of non-state stakeholders who may divide up regions and tasks within countries. Finally, beyond the influence that political and economic concerns have over programmatic decisions and action, our analysis further finds that malaria control efforts have institutionalized systems, structures and processes that may have implications for local capacity development.

Designing Global Governance for Agricultural Development and Food and Nutrition Security

AbstractWe point to deficits in current global institutional arrangements in support of agricultural development and food and nutrition security. A framework for global institutional arrangements proposed here is the set of essential international public goods for a well‐functioning world food system. These public goods include international natural resource management; trade and transboundary competition policy; research and innovation; handling large scale food emergencies; and transboundary food safety. Based on the framework, and institutional economics considerations, causes of current malfunctioning of global food governance are analyzed. It is proposed to redesign global food governance by establishing an international platform with policy clusters mapped along the set of global public goods. To support the platform with needed research‐based evidence an International Panel on Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (IPFNA) is suggested, partly following the design of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Existing organizations and mechanisms would form building blocks of the strengthened and redesigned governance system. A gradual approach toward redesign is proposed. Some redesign in the suggested direction was triggered by the food crisis of 2008, as demonstrated by the reform of the Committee on Food Security (CFS) with its high level panel of experts, but more is needed.

What is Wrong with Virtual Water Trading? On the Limitations of the Virtual Water Concept

Virtual water, the amount of water used along a good's value chain, has come under discussion. Fairness and efficiency problems are seen to arise in the reallocation of access to water resources through the means of international trade. Moral issues are attached to both imports and exports, and even to a country's own consumption of virtual water. Global institutional arrangements have therefore been suggested to regulate virtual water trade both efficiently and ‘fairly’. With this paper we will provide a short overview of the concept's history and findings, and an analysis from the perspective of economic trade theory, bringing up the old debate about the economic and environmental merits of free trade. The contribution of this paper will be to examine the performance of virtual water concepts in advising business or policy decisions in the form of global governance arrangements. It must be concluded that the virtual water concept is limited in terms of its usefulness in providing policy advice. The usually applied normative criteria are inconsistent, implying governance schemes that improve neither efficiency nor sustainability Water-related problems should be solved in the respective arenas and not by global governance schemes or trade barriers.

An Emancipatory Interpretation of Property-Owning Democracy:

An Emancipatory Interpretation of Property-Owning Democracy:

Globalising justice within coffee supply chains? Fair Trade, Starbucks and the transformation of supply chain governance

This paper reviews a range of initiatives that attempt to transform the global institutional arrangements through which production and trade of coffee is organised and governed. Specifically, it examines the Fair Trade system, Starbucks' CAFÉ Practices Program, and a range of wider campaigning activities around issues of ‘trade justice’. These initiatives are shown to have contributed to the empowerment of marginalised workers and producers in the global coffee industry, to the extent that they have complied with the following three conditions: promoting the acceptance of expanded responsibility for tackling disempowerment among relevant decision makers in the global North; strengthening institutional capabilities necessary for these responsibilities to be effectively discharged; and enabling marginalised groups themselves to exercise some control over processes of institutional transformation. However, these initiatives have typically been designed as discrete systems of ‘supply chain’ governance, which has limited their ability to advance those dimensions of worker and producer well-being that are shaped by a range of state and non-state actors beyond as well as within supply chain institutions. In theory this limitation could be overcome via appropriate allocation and co-ordination of partial and shared responsibilities across a plurality of relevant decision makers. In practice, however, the failure of these initiatives to develop either transparent means of defining the boundaries of partial responsibilities, or institutional modalities to enable their co-ordination, has significantly weakened their capacity to entrench empowerment principles throughout the governance system of the coffee industry as a whole. It is concluded that the development of such conceptual and institutional models will be necessary to enable both consistency and enforceability of empowerment outcomes, and thereby to ensure that principles of justice can be realised among workers and producers throughout the global coffee industry.

Guidelines for Submission to Ethics & International Affairs

The aim of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, is to help close the gap between theory and practice (and between theorists and practitioners) by publishing original essays that integrate rigorous thinking about principles of justice and morality into discussions of practical dilemmas related to current policy developments, global institutional arrangements, and the conduct of important international actors. Theoretical discussions that originate in philosophy, religion, or the social sciences should connect with the interests of journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens who are primarily concerned with assessing and reforming specific policies, as well as existing rules and institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; arrangements governing trade, environmental protection, and the use of force; and the International Criminal Court and ad hoc tribunals that address genocide and past societal injustices.Recent issues of Ethics & International Affairs have contained articles on international monetary arrangements, immigration restrictions, the preventive use of force, global health, and climate change.

Globalisation and sustainability: environmental Kuznets curve and the WTO

Economic globalisation is seen by many as a driving force for global economic growth. Yet opinion is divided about the benefits of this process, as highlighted by the WTO meeting in Seattle in late 1999. Proponents of economic globalisation view it as a positive force for environmental improvement and as a major factor increasing the likelihood of sustainable development through its likely boost to global investment. These proponents mostly appeal to analysis based on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) to support their views about environmental improvement. But EKC-analysis has significant deficiencies. Furthermore, it is impossible to be confident that the process of economic globalisation will result in sustainable development, if ‘weak conditions’ only are satisfied. ‘Strong conditions’ probably need to be satisfied to achieve sustainable development, and given current global institutional arrangements, these are likely to be violated by the economic globalisation process. Global political action seems to be needed to avert a deterioration in the global environment and to prevent unsustainability of development. This exposition demonstrates the limitations of EKC-analysis, identifies positive and negative effects of economic globalisation on pollution levels, and highlights connections between globalisation and the debate about whether strong or weak conditions are required for sustainable development. The article concludes with a short discussion of the position of WTO in relation to trade and the environment and the seemingly de facto endorsement of WTO of weak conditions for sustainable development. It suggests that WTO's relative neglect of environmental concerns is no longer politically tenable and needs to be reassessed in the light of recent developments in economic analysis. The skew of economic growth, e.g. in favour of developing countries, is shown to be extremely important from a global environmental perspective.

Achieving Democracy

Overcoming corruption and authoritarian government in developing countries is hampered by global institutional arrangements. In particular, international borrowing and resource privileges, which entitle those exercising power in a country to borrow in its name and to effect legally valid transfers of ownership rights in its resources, can be obstacles to achieving democracy. These international conventions greatly increase the incentives toward attempts at coups d'état, especially in countries with a large resource sector. In exploring how this problem might be highlighted and addressed, it is essential to understand that affluent societies have a great interest in upholding the prevailing institutional arrangements: Their banks benefit from their international lending and, far more importantly, their firms and people benefit greatly from cheap resource supplies. Institutional reform is more likely, then, to come from the developing countries.Thus, fledgling democracies may be able to improve their stability through constitutional amendments that bar future unconstitutional governments from borrowing in the country's name and from conferring ownership rights in its public property. Such amendments would render insecure the claims of those who lend to, or buy from, dictators, thus reducing the rewards of coups d'état. This strategy might be resisted by the more affluent societies, but such resistance could perhaps be overcome if many developing countries pursued the proposed strategy together, and if some moral support emerged among the citizenries of affluent societies.