Legitimacy In Global Governance Research Articles

A Whale of a Blindspot: The “Effectiveness” of Bribes, Threats, and Socialization in the International Whaling Commission

This paper contributes to broader efforts to de-center and historicize IR theory by bringing into question dominant narratives about developing country behavior at the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This literature either neglects, or actively erases any possibility of developing country agency; different blindspots work to the same effect, whereby developing country behavior is assumed rather than investigated, and behavioral change, such as a decision to join the IWC, vote a certain way, or abide by the whaling moratorium, is driven mostly by exogenous factors—threats, bribes, and persuasion. If a developing country choosing a pro-whaling stance is evidence of vote-buying, and an anti-whaling stance is evidence of coercion or socialization, then great power agency is assumed to exist and matter without being demonstrated—and the possibility of agency is denied to most of the world. I use the case of Brazil, the last country to give up whaling in the American continent, to de-center and historicize important whaling-related decisions made from the 1950s–1990s. Brazil voted against the commercial whaling moratorium in 1982 but has since given up whaling and become a leader in whale conservation. The empirical analysis not only finds scant support for the dominant explanations, but it also challenges them on several grounds—and thus underscores the need for theoretical lenses that allow for developing countries’ agencies to be acknowledged. More than contributing to inclusive scholarship, taking alternative perspectives seriously is imperative for more just conservation practice, and more legitimate global governance.

Institutional sources of legitimacy in multistakeholder global governance at ICANN

AbstractThis article provides a novel systematic exploration of ways and extents that institutional characteristics shape legitimacy beliefs toward multistakeholder global governance. Multistakeholderism is often argued to offer institutional advantages over intergovernmental multilateralism in handling global problems. This study examines whether, in practice, perceptions of institutional purpose, procedure, and performance affect legitimacy assessments regarding this form of global governance. The analysis focuses on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), one of the largest and most institutionally developed global multistakeholder arrangements. Evidence comes from a mixed‐methods survey of 467 participants in ICANN. We find that this representative sample accords high importance in principle to many institutional features, and also rates the actual institutional operations of ICANN quite highly on various counts. Moreover, many institutional characteristics associate significantly with participants' legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN. However, not all institutional qualities have this significance, and the relevance of individual‐ and societal‐level circumstances indicates that institutional sources do not provide a full explanation of legitimacy. The article contributes refinements to theory of legitimacy in global governance; demonstrates the value of mixed‐methods survey work in this field; supplies unique original data and analysis; and identifies implications for the politics of (de)legitimation around multistakeholderism.

Citizens, elites, and the legitimacy of global governance

Assume that a citizen wants to write a postcard to public authorities about a global governance problem. Where exactly should it be posted? Should it be sent to one of the several international organizations (IOs) formally in charge of financial stability, development, health and security? Citizens, elites, and the legitimacy of global governance demonstrates that many individuals are aware of the activities of IOs, and it explores whether they are satisfied with how these institutions address transnational problems. It is often argued that IOs are underfinanced and have little political authority, yet they are burdened with responsibilities that they can hardly manage. The book tries to identify and quantify the expectations of the final users of IOs: the citizens of the world. Its findings will be relevant for scholars and students of global governance, IOs and social movements. The novelty of the book is that it moves away from advocacy to provide fresh quantitative evidence. To do that, the authors use two coordinated surveys. The first gathered responses from a sample of respondents in five countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia and the United States. The second survey, carried out by the book's authors themselves, focused on elites, which are defined as ‘people who hold leading positions in key organizations in society that strive to be politically influential’ (p. 13). Using the same questionnaire as in the first survey, the authors were able to compare the perceptions of elites and those of the broader public. The book offers key insights on the share of the relevant populations that is actually aware of the existence of IOs. This question is far from trivial: while it can be assumed that the public of each nation is familiar with the actions of their national governments, it is less probable that the same level of awareness exists about IOs, especially in countries with less developed information channels.

Revisiting Interwar Global Economic Governance: Technocrats, Sovereignty, and the Perennial Problem of Legitimacy in Global Governance

The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade and capital flows, protect national sovereignty, and promote peace through interdependence. In short, these institutions represented the solution to the failures of interwar international governance—more specifically, the failure of the League of Nations to stem macroeconomic instability or the Second World War.

Artificial Intelligence and the Political Legitimacy of Global Governance

Although the concept of “AI governance” is frequently used in the debate, it is still rather undertheorized. Often it seems to refer to the mechanisms and structures needed to avoid “bad” outcomes and achieve “good” outcomes with regard to the ethical problems artificial intelligence is thought to actualize. In this article we argue that, although this outcome-focused view captures one important aspect of “good governance,” its emphasis on effects runs the risk of overlooking important procedural aspects of good AI governance. One of the most important properties of good AI governance is political legitimacy. Starting out from the assumptions that AI governance should be seen as global in scope and that political legitimacy requires at least a democratic minimum, this article has a twofold aim: to develop a theoretical framework for theorizing the political legitimacy of global AI governance, and to demonstrate how it can be used as a compass for critially assessing the legitimacy of actual instances of global AI governance. Elaborating on a distinction between “governance by AI” and “governance of AI” in relation to different kinds of authority and different kinds of decision-making leads us to the conclusions that much of the existing global AI governance lacks important properties necessary for political legitimacy, and that political legitimacy would be negatively impacted if we handed over certain forms of decision-making to artificial intelligence systems.

G-group legitimacy in global governance: rightful membership of rising powers?

The shift in global policymaking from the Group of Seven (G7) to the Group of Twenty (G20) is widely seen to reflect the rise to power of emerging markets in the South. It begs the question, though, whether the G20 has the right membership to legitimately govern the global economy. This paper applies a novel framework linking rightful membership to global governance institutions’ roles to address this question. A longitudinal analysis of (1) financial and economic indicators of G-group members; (2) their global ranking on these indicators; and (3) the position of G-group members in technical forums of financial governance demonstrates that the shift to the G20 was necessary to maintain rightful membership given the declining share of G7 members in the global economy. However, rightful membership as a source of legitimacy varies across G-group roles and diffuses across roles and across global governance institutions. These new insights demonstrate the added value of conceptualising rightful membership in relation to different roles of global governance institutions. The analytical framework proposed in this paper allows for better insights into the legitimation strategies and public legitimacy perceptions of global governance institutions, and points to interesting new hypotheses with respect to the legitimacy of global governance institutions.

Inequality and legitimacy in global governance: an empirical study

This article undertakes an empirical investigation of the relationship between structural inequalities and legitimacy beliefs in global governance. Normative theory often emphasises inequality as a major source of injustice in global politics, but we lack empirical research that examines the implications of inequality for legitimacy in concrete situations of global governance. This paper draws on large mixed-method survey evidence regarding inequality perceptions and legitimacy beliefs at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a key site of global Internet governance that has given particular priority to issues of diversity and inclusion. Our analysis arrives at four main findings. First, participants in ICANN do perceive substantial structural power asymmetries and often find them to be problematic. Second, persons on the perceived subordinate side of these power stratifications tend to observe larger inequalities and to find them more problematic than persons on the perceived dominant side. However, third, these perceptions and concerns about inequality almost never associate with legitimacy beliefs towards ICANN, even among people in structurally subordinated positions and among people who express the greatest worries regarding power inequalities. Fourth, in forming legitimacy perceptions, participants at ICANN generally prioritise other aspects of institutional purpose, procedure and performance, unconnected with inequality. This lack of a relationship between perceptions of inequality and legitimacy beliefs suggests that, however sympathetic policy elites at ICANN might be towards greater equality in principle, they are unlikely to give it precedence in practice.

Legitimacy as the right to function

ABSTRACT Traditional concepts of legitimacy that often focus on a right to exercise coercion or a right to create moral obligations are not applicable to many political institutions. In particular, many global governance institutions rely on ways of providing governance that do not involve coercion or the creation of moral obligations. That is why this paper develops a novel concept of legitimacy as the right to function. This more general concept of legitimacy is able to help us make sense of many references to the term `legitimacy´ in academic or practical-political debates that cannot be explained by traditional concepts of legitimacy. In addition, the use of the concept of legitimacy as the right to function opens up the conceptual space to accommodate important insights with respect to the normative criteria of legitimacy in global governance. For instance, as global governance institutions fulfil very different functions it is plausible that the criteria of legitimacy for different global governance institutions are not the same because in judgments concerning their legitimacy different rights are at stake.

Transnational Representation in Global Labour Governance and the Politics of Input Legitimacy

Private governance raises important questions about democratic representation. Rule making is rarely based on electoral authorisation by those in whose name rules are made—typically a requirement for democratic legitimacy. This requires revisiting the role of representation in input legitimacy in transnational governance, which remains underdeveloped. Focussing on private labour governance, we contrast two approaches to the transnational representation of worker interests in global supply chains: non-governmental organisations providing representative claims versus trade unions providing representative structures. Studying the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety, we examine their interaction along three dimensions of democratic representation: 1) creating presence, 2) authorisation, and 3) accountability to affected constituents. We develop a framework that explains when representative claims and structures become complementary but also how the politics of input legitimacy shapewhoseinterests get represented. We conclude by deriving theoretical and normative implications for transnational representation and input legitimacy in global governance.

Peaceful Use of Lasers in Space: Context-Based Legitimacy in Global Governance of Large Technical Systems

Technology offers unique sets of opportunities, from human flourishing to civilization survival, but also challenges, from partial misuse to global apocalypse. Yet technology is shaped by the social environment in which it is developed and used, prompting questions about its desirable governance format. In this context, we look at governance challenges of large technical systems, specifically the peaceful use of high-power lasers in space, in order to propose a conceptual framework for legitimate global governance. Specifically, we adopt a context-based approach to legitimacy to address the trade-offs between effectiveness (output legitimacy) and inclusivity (input legitimacy) in the governance of large technical systems. We show that distinguishing two basic phases of space laser policy which call for different legitimacy criteria helps balance out the trade-offs without sacrificing either effectiveness or inclusivity. Finally, we construe LTSs’ governance as a tool for creating globally networked spaces which may enable coordinated global democratic governance.

A Volatile Context: A Revisionist Lens on Good Governance.

Pressures on the legitimacy of global governance are coming from many sides, including from people who feel betrayed by unfulfilled promises and others who wonder if governance structures can ever become truly accountable and responsive to often deep and evolving human insecurity. This article calls for the integration of norms of governance that can better balance hierarchy and protocol with constituent care and service.

Explaining elite perceptions of legitimacy in global governance

Elites are central in creating, operating, defending and contesting international organisations (IOs), but little research is available about their attitudes toward these bodies. To address this gap, this article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of elite perceptions of IO legitimacy. Building on a unique multi-country and multi-sector survey of 860 elites undertaken in 2017–19, we map and explain elite legitimacy beliefs toward three key IOs in different issue-areas: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Integrating public opinion research and international relations theory, the article advances an explanation of elites’ legitimacy beliefs that emphasises their satisfaction with the institutional qualities of IOs. We contrast this argument with three common alternative explanations, which respectively highlight utilitarian calculation, global orientation and domestic cues. The analyses show that elites’ satisfaction with institutional qualities of IOs is most consistently related to legitimacy beliefs: when elites are more satisfied with democracy, effectiveness and fairness in IOs, they also regard these IOs as more legitimate. These findings suggest that the prevailing debate between utilitarian calculation, global orientation and domestic cues approaches neglects the importance of institutional satisfaction as an explanation of attitudes toward IOs.

AI, Governance Displacement, and the (De)Fragmentation of International Law

The emergence, proliferation, and use of new general-purpose technologies can often produce significant political, redistributive, normative and legal effects on the world. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been identified as one such transformative technology. Many of its impacts may require global governance responses. However, what are the direct and indirect effects of AI technologies on the viability, form, or functioning of the international legal order itself? What, if any, are the prospects, peril or promise of AI-driven legal automation at the international level? This paper draws on an ‘AI Governance Disruption’ framework to understanding AI’s impacts on the global governance architecture. Focusing particularly on the potential for legal automation at the international law level, it explores three potential pathways of such ‘legal displacement’: (1) the automation of rule creation and arbitration; (2) the automation of monitoring & enforcement; or (3) the ‘replacement’ of international law with new architectural modes of (international) behaviour control. It then focuses on the effects of these trends on the architecture of international law. It distinguishes 10 different roles that AI applications could play, with distinct effects on the international legal order. That is, AI systems can serve as (1) legal ‘canary in the coal mine’, highlighting the need for greater cross-regime harmonization. However, it can also serve as (2) tough knot or (3) generator of regime fault lines. Under even modest scenarios of legal automation, AI systems may serve variably as a (4) shield, (5) patch, (6) cure, or (7) accelerator of international legal fragmentation. Finally, AI tools may serve as (8) differential enabler; (9) driver of value shifts, or (10) asymmetric weapon, potentially contributing to trends of contestation or erosion in the international legal order. The paper concludes with a brief review of the ways in which international lawyers or regime scholars might approach the risks and opportunities of increasing automation in international law, in order to leverage these trends and tools towards improved efficacy, resilience, and legitimacy of global governance.

Beyond institutionalism: toward a transformed global governance theory

AbstractPrompted by both promises and pitfalls in Michael's Zürn'sA Theory of Global Governance, this paper reflects on challenges going forward beyond liberal institutionalism in the study of world politics. Six suggestions are particularly highlighted for future theorizing of global governance: (a) further distance from state-centrism; (b) greater attention to transscalar qualities of global governing; (c) more incorporation of social-structural aspects of global regulation; (d) trilateral integration of individual, institutional, and structural sources of legitimacy in global governance; (e) more synthesis of positive and normative analysis; and (f) transcendence of Euro-centrism. Together these six shifts would generate a transformed global governance theory – and possibly practice as well.

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.

Change in or of global governance?

AbstractMichael Zürn'sTheory of Global Governanceis an original, bold, and compelling argument regarding the causes of change in global governance. A core argument is that legitimation problems trigger changes in global governance. This contribution addresses two core features of the argument. Although I am persuaded that legitimacy matters, there are times when: legitimacy appears to be given too much credit to the relative neglect of other factors; other times when the lack of legitimacy has little discernible impact on the working of global governance; and unanswered questions about how the legitimacy of global governance relates to the legitimacy of the international order of which it is a part. The second feature is what counts as change in global governance. Zürn reduces change to either deepening or decline, overlooking the possible how of global governance. In contrast to Zürn's map of global governance that is dominated by hierarchies in the form of international organizations, an alternative map locates multiple modes of governance: hierarchies, markets, and networks. The kinds of legitimation problems that Zürn identifies, I argue, can help explain some of the movement from hierarchical to other modes of global governance.

Asymmetric ratification standards and popular perceptions of legitimacy

ABSTRACT The ratification of EU agreements is characterized by the application of different democratic procedures across member states. Building on the demoi-cratic theory of legitimate global governance, I argue that citizens benchmark their national procedure against highly visible direct democratic ratification votes held in other member states. If citizens experience unequal influence on EU decision-making, the perceived legitimacy of the EU regime erodes. I test this argument with a research design that combines a population-based survey experiment and a quasi-experiment. First, a survey experiment in Germany reveals that information about asymmetric ratification standards decrease fairness perceptions and satisfaction with EU democracy. Second, a natural experiment around the 2005 French vote on the EU constitutional treaty shows that the referendum decreased satisfaction with EU democracy in states with pending and indirect ratification. These findings suggest that asymmetric access of citizens to EU decision-making can decrease popular support for EU governance.

Societal Multiplicity for International Relations: From Intersubjective Knowledge at the Middle Ground to Intersocietal Multilogues

Following this workshop’s discussion of Rosenberg’s emphasis on societal multiplicity, this contribution discusses how and why this might generate an added value for IR as a discipline. To that end, it explores the promises of the concept of societal multiplicity as a deep ontology. It is argued that a key promise consists in the proposed ontology’s qualitative (‘more than one kind’) and quantitative (‘more than one’) dimensions as drivers of international relations practice and theory. Both drivers work across societal boundaries and within societies alike, thereby developing interrelated and mutually reinforcing dynamics. Programmatically, the promises of societal multiplicity remain to be explored with reference to Rosenberg’s five potential consequences (i.e. co-existence, difference, interaction, combination, and dialectical change. Specifically, a central promise lies in its potential to fill the research gap which consists of the absence of social contract theory (i.e. as offering the conceptual angle on the ‘unbound’ quality of fundamental norms, based on the ‘politics of recognition’) for legitimate global governance. Here, societal multiplicity sheds light on societal negotiations of values, thereby adding to extant practice and agency-based theories of international ordering. This article illustrates the point with reference to the subfield of norms research. It shows how extant concepts of political practices vis-a-vis norms stand to benefit from applying societal multiplicity insofar as it targets the contingency of international ordering through societal interaction. This matters because societal and political ordering in a globalised space does not begin from a given ‘liberal community’ (top-down) but from a socially constructed emerging set of orders (bottom-up). The argument is presented in four sections. Section 1 presents the turn towards societal multiplicity as a deep ontology in order to address the absence of social contract theory in IR. It identifies a gap between the ‘use’ of fundamental norms for global governance purposes, on the one hand, and the ‘contestations’ of their implementation by affected stakeholders, on the other. Section 2 addresses the point of re-establishing IR as a lone standing discipline in the social sciences. Against the current state of a fragmented discipline, it asks how a shift towards societal multiplicity might work towards countering that fragmentation. Section 3 turns to the norms research literature. To illustrate the argument it explores potential pathways towards filling the gap between state-mediated and locally contested norms of global governance. Section 4 concludes with an outlook towards framing the crisis of international law as a value based.

Let's Justify! How Regime Complexes Enhance the Normative Legitimacy of Global Governance

AbstractThis theory note develops a theoretical approach which integrates the negative spillovers that international institutions often impose on each other into our thinking about their normative legitimacy. Our approach draws on the political philosophy of Rainer Forst which revolves around the right to justification. It suggests that regime complexes facilitate the breakup of institution-specific orders of justification by prompting invested actors to justify negative spillovers vis-à-vis each other. Thus, regime complexes enable more encompassing justifications of negative spillovers than stand-alone international institutions. Against this backdrop, we submit that the proliferation of regime complexes represents normative progress in global governance.

The global governance problem in the modern Western academic literature: the main approaches and concepts

The global governance theories assessment is among the poorly studied problems in Russian political science, though its topicality in the modern age of civilizational confrontation is beyond dispute. Primarily, the necessity to study the key global governance concepts is determined by the need for establishing effective relations with the Western and the Eastern countries. The purpose of the article is to analyze and estimate the main foreig global governance concepts, and it is achieved by solving the following tasks: 1) to consider the main definitions of global governance; 2) to detect the problem of legitimacy in international relations; 3) to consider the legitimacy of global governance. The authors give special attention to the underestimated source of global governance legitimacy - the liberal legal principles. As a political program, global governance is understood as a political and legal aspect of globalization. In recent decades, global governance theories have been adopted as a research program in the field of social sciences. Within the (neo)liberal institutionalism tradition, particularly, the interdependence theories, global governance approaches consider the consolidation of international cooperation and the transformation of the global system in which the anarchical system of sovereign national states is considered as a multilayer system including nongovernmental subjects. The researchers try to model power as “governance” without subjects which  are formally justified and entitled with the use of force monopoly. The future of global governance is connected with effective international law able to timely settle the arising disputes and deter possible aggression which, in the age of civilizational confrontation, can lead to the last war in human history. The effectiveness of global governance depends on what globalization direction the leading civilizations will choose: the force-based American way, or the way taking into account the interests of most peoples of the world.