Transnational Regimes Research Articles

Transnational governance standards in ensuring sustainable development and operation of hydropower projects in transboundary basins

The notion of “transnational” law encompasses a sophisticated corpus of globally applicable rules, standards and safeguards, often informal in origin, which are widely accepted around the world and supported across a range of business sectors and civil society constituencies. The recent proliferation of such “transnational” law extends to the hydropower sector, where normative standards and safeguards increasingly apply to promote and certify sustainable practices in the development and operation of hydropower projects. Such projects are associated with significant environmental and social impacts and the projected increase in hydropower investments, mainly in emerging economies, will require effective supplemental regulatory tools. Many such projects will be located in, or impact upon, international rivers, thereby adding a further layer of complexity regarding their effective regulation and increased the risk of inter-State disputes over the equitable use of shared waters. Such complexity and risk will be exacerbated by increased uncertainty due to climate change. Thus, the existence of widely accepted transnational standards, which are relevant and applicable to hydropower development globally, can play a key role in building trust between watercourse States and in promoting greater transboundary water cooperation. This article explores the potential role of transnational standards in improved regulation of environmental and social impacts associated with hydropower projects located on international watercourses and the extent to which such standards cohere with established and emerging requirements of international water law. It thus examines the synergies arising between these informal and formal regulatory frameworks with a view to developing a better understanding of their interaction in practice. In so doing, it focuses on two key categories of applicable transnational regime: a sustainability certification and labeling scheme dedicated to hydropower projects and operated by the Hydropower Sustainability Council; and MDB environmental and social safeguard standards imposed upon major water-related projects, including hydropower projects, particularly those adopted by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Military Court Trials of Civilians in Pakistan

The call to try civilians in military courts in 2022 reignited the debate surrounding the legitimacy of quasi-judicial tribunals, and their exercise of jurisdiction over civilians. Regarding trials of civilians in military tribunals, there have been many judgments and academic discourses. There are diverging views either endorsing or condemning this sui generis practice. The higher courts have not decided the matter conclusively. Pakistan does not subscribe to the idea of the direct effect of international treaties. Yet, like any other dualist state, many rights guaranteed in such treaties have been incorporated into its constitution. There is a stark contrast, however, between the case law interpretation of these rights and their international corresponding equivalents in the transnational regimes. The international mechanisms for the protection of rights still pose many questions on the legitimacy of civilians being tried in military courts. More confusion arises with the proliferation of contemporary idea of sustainable justice, which seems divergent and somewhat in contravention of such Pakistani state practices. This qualitative research paper juxtaposes the traditional constitutional interpretations with contestations in relevant international instruments and explores the possibility of harmonization. It lays out a futuristic proposal to predict a direction for proposed future amendments. The same would be done with the increasingly important idea of sustainable justice which directly relates to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16. Moreover, as indispensable themes, the paper explores the following: whether the trial of civilians in military courts is a constitutionally sound practice. Does trying civilians in military courts infringe upon Pakistan’s international obligations? And is the expediency behind these specialized courts still prevalent in the country?

Neoliberalism and education in the developing world: the case of principal leadership in Morocco

ABSTRACT With the advance of neoliberalism as the ideal organizing principle for socioeconomic activity across much of the world, this study sets out to determine the impact of the transnational regime of neoliberalism on education and leadership in Morocco and the so-called developing world. The study consists of two major components: one is empirical and investigates the leadership practices of school principals in Morocco while the other is theoretical and explores how these practices are influenced by certain processes of neoliberalism. The first part seeks to describe the leadership practices found across schools while the second aims to explain how such practices have largely resulted from global neoliberal processes. The empirical results based on data from 44 questionnaires and 7 interviews reveal a lack of principal leadership across schools resulting from a lack of decision-making authority and inadequate resources and infrastructure. On the other hand, the conclusions drawn from the theoretical inquiry indicate that the lack of leadership found at schools is rooted in certain neoliberal techniques and strategies. Finally, the study provides recommendations for policy, practice and research, emphasizing the need for developing an indigenous leadership model grounded in the Islamic, Arab-Amazigh intellectual tradition.

Perspectives regarding the Institutions of the Global Order of Civilizations: some notes about the Global Mediator of Civilizations

Our paper is trying to explore the passage of the contemporary international order to what we call here a ”global order of civilizations”, by taking into account the new political quality of ”civilizations” to become autonomous, original political actors on the future global stage. As introductory section, we shall make briefly references to the present juridical regime offered by the contemporary legislation regarding civilisations and cultural heritage. Cultural obligations of UN states increasingly constitute a trans-national regime, as human rights kind of juridical regime, surpassing the boundaries of the national politics and the ordinary competences of the states. The new ”global order of civilizations” is also imposing, in our view, a sort of basic body of legislation, specific and distinct from the present legal level regarding civilizations (a kind of Magna Charta of Civilizations). We shall have in mind, also, the shape that this future order can have (hierarchical or heterarchical pattern; an atomist, schizoid, or an open order). This new order can also be seen as a complex network of actors, which cannot be limited to the state order, embracing a variety authority levels and actors not regulated by today legislation (based on nation-states and international intergovernmental organizations). Finally, within the third section, we shall approach briefly some aspects related to the “Global Mediator of Civilizations”, a new institution proposed here to work within this new type of order.

Do Transnational Rating Agencies “Regulate” National Political Budget Cycles?

Regulatory theory assumes governments constrain undesirable behavior by firms, but the opposite could be true internationally. We show how with credit rating agencies (CRAs) and election-year government borrowing. Political business cycle theory implies that governments sometimes borrow excessively to retain office. Transnational regime theory implies that CRAs regulating global credit allocation can threaten borrowing governments with rating downgrades signaling poor economic stewardship to voters. Analyses of CRA ratings and government borrowing for 63 countries holding 109 elections from 2001-2011 indicate support for both implications: 1) governments increase election-year borrowing; 2) CRA rating downgrades increase government electoral defeat likelihoods; and 3) governments diminish excessive election-year borrowing when CRAs signal higher downgrade likelihoods. Such reverse “regulation” raises new issues for international business research, practice, and public policy.

Constitutional boundaries of presidential power and general level of political culture. the case of Serbia 8-20 DOI: 10.52388/2345-1971.2021.e2.01 CZU: 342.5(497.11) Djordjevic Miroslav ORCID Citizens’ involvement in the european Union common commercial policy

The starting point of this contribution is, first, a factual observation and, second, a normative finding. Free trade agreements today often enjoys a high degree of public attention including controversial deliberations among and within political parties and have thus obviously turned into a politicized area of law. It is recognized that traditional concepts of democratic legitimacy developed under the conditions of the nation-state alone constitute an inadequate approach for legitimizing the respective transnational steering regimes. Rather, those scholars who are sympathetic towards a conceptual change of legitimacy favor more complex approaches comprising of ’input-oriented’ as well as ’output-oriented’ elements; legitimizing factors that are more appropriately qualified as alternatives to, or surrogates for, democratic legitimacy and find their overarching normative basis in the republican constitutional principle. Against this background, the contribution assesses the possibilities for the involvement of the general public as well as individual non-state actors in the two main phases of EU FTAs. This includes an evaluation of the direct and indirect participatory option during the negotiations of these agreements. Moreover, the contribution attempts to identify and assess the venues for participation by interested and affected non-state actors in the implementation and continued progressive development of EU FTAs.

South Africa's jurisdictional challenge with the under-development of cross-border commercial litigation: Litigation v Arbitration

Private international law is a globally established field of law however, its pre-eminence in Africa is insignificant and this has been as a result of its relevance, which according to many scholars is arguable. It follows logically therefore, that it is underdeveloped in Africa, and as this article posits, specifically in South Africa. This article advocates for the development of South African private international law by endorsing South Africa as a viable neutral jurisdiction venue for cross-border commercial disputes, in future. According to this article, this is to be achieved by the recognition of neutral jurisdiction clauses in South African courts. This can only be done by developing an effective and just system of cross-border/trans-national litigation. The proposed sound cross-border jurisdictional rules will supplement the newly established transnational arbitration regime. In order to achieve this, this research reflects an integrated comparative approach by establishing comparative perspectives mainly from the UK, USA, Brazil, Kosovo and South Africa.1 Based on its constitutional values of inalienable human rights and access to courts (justice), South Africa stands to gain immensely from incoming commercial arbitration and commercial litigation as forms of dispute resolution. This will establish the country as the preferred venue for arbitration and litigation on the African continent and beyond.

Human Traffickers’ Fair Trial Rights and Transnational Criminal Law

The right to a fair trial is enshrined in international and domestic law around the world. This article makes the simple argument that the focus on the rights of victims of human trafficking and efforts to increase the rate of prosecutions of human traffickers should not come at the cost of alleged traffickers’ rights to a fair trial, as a failure to uphold fair trial rights places them at risk of unfair prosecution. I consider the extent to which the transnational criminal legal regime regulating human trafficking at the international level provides for these fair trial rights, suggest that the fundamental purposes of transnational criminal law exist in a state of tension against the aims of the international human rights regime, and conclude that further empirical research on the legal experiences of human traffickers is necessary.

Transnational networked authority

AbstractThe structure of the global governance system has undergone significant changes in the past few years. From a system governed primarily by global public law institutions established through multilateral treaties, it has metamorphosed into a hybrid field in which a plethora of public, private, and semi-public institutions interact in various ways. The shift to a hybrid global governance architecture presents a complex challenge for legal and political theory, with immense policy implications. In the present article, I respond to this challenge by developing a new model of transnational legal authority, which conceptualizes it as an emergent, network-based phenomenon. According to this model, the emergence of transnational networked authority is dependent on the existence of a multi-layered structure of strongly connected transnational regimes. Key factors in the emergence of networked authority are the normative and compliance synergies that arise through the densification of links across the network. I examine in this context the linkage between the sociological and the jurisprudential aspects of the authority of private transnational regulatory regimes, and develop the idea of ‘network grounding’, which emphasizes the relational structure of private transnational legality. I illustrate the thesis by reviewing findings from a network analysis of transnational corporate social responsibility networks.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and transnational hybrid governance in Ecuador’s palm oil industry

• The local institutionalization of RSPO standards shifts national and sub-national structures of environmental governance, power, and authority. • In Ecuador, palm oil governance is increasingly driven by a transnational regime of private and public institutions of governance. • The state has pursued an alternative model of governance that harmonizes private regulatory instruments with national economic plans. • Standards entrenchment has influenced community-company dynamics, public–private governing coalitions, and scalar approaches to landscape governance. • New arrangements bring about novel governance coalitions and approaches while reinscribing the exclusionary nature of palm oil governance. The expansion of Latin America’s palm oil frontier has spurred an explosion of interest in the social and environmental impacts of palm oil production. Researchers have been particularly focused on the effectiveness of global sustainability certification standards in addressing induced vulnerabilities. Only a small fraction of this research, however, analyzes how the local institutionalization of global standards has shaped national and sub-national structures of environmental governance, or regional conceptualizations of authority. It also fails to examine how the entrenchment of global standards has reworked local social relations inhering within formal and informal palm oil governing arrangements. To address these gaps, this paper draws on the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Ecuador to answer the following research questions: 1) How does the local introduction and institutionalization of RSPO standards (re)shape national and sub-national environmental governance structures and relations? 2) How do RSPO standards reconfigure long-standing notions of power and authority? Drawing on extended fieldwork, the paper finds that the introduction of RSPO standards has prompted three major shifts in domestic palm oil governance. These shifts are: 1) technicalization of community-company relations, 2) hybridization of governance coalitions 3) regionalization of governance efforts. Taken together, these transformations point to an emerging transnational hybrid governance regime that blends public laws with private guidelines to reach national and international sustainability objectives. The regime has enabled the emergence of new palm governance authorities in the sector yet at the same time, it has reinscribed the uneven power relations of palm oil governance. The study concludes that future research and policy efforts must go beyond simply evaluating RSPO standards in local spaces, and instead aim to improve the social relations that exist within agro-commodity chains in order to make the governance of sustainable palm oil more socially-inclusive and just.

Negotiating hegemonies in language policy: ideological synergies in media recontextualizations of audit culture

ABSTRACT One of the products of globalization in sociolinguistics is the emergence of transnational regimes in language policy, in which power is exercised across boundaries of traditional nation states. This paper engages with audit culture, a transnational policy mechanism which involves the continuous evaluation of nation states’ performance through the use of purportedly neutral, typically quantitative instruments. As achieving broader visibility in public discourse is a key part of how such evaluations enforce language policy regimes, the paper presents an analysis of how an audit instrument, the Education First English Proficiency Index, was recontextualized in media discourse in Thailand over a 6-year period. The findings highlight an apparent discontinuity, as much of the neoliberal rhetoric in the audit instrument was not taken up in Thai media. Rather, the recontextualization was selective, with elements of the audit texts being integrated into an already established language policy regime in Thailand, built on nationalism and developmentalism. These findings point to the need to consider how language policy mechanisms like audit culture can facilitate synergies between hegemonic ideologies, particularly when they are recontextualized across different scales.

The Unrealized Potential of National Human Rights Institutions in Business and Human Rights Regulation: Conditions for Effective Engagement and Proposal for Reform

While National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) are widely regarded as particularly promising tools in the emerging transnational regime for the regulation of business and human rights, we still know little about their potential and actual contribution to this field. This article bridges the gap between business and human rights research and NHRI scholarship, proceeding in three steps: Firstly, I analyze the structural conditions for NHRIs to tackle business-related human rights abuses effectively, focusing on the key conditions of legitimacy and competences. Secondly, I examine the envisaged role and functions of NHRIs in business and human rights regulation according to the Paris Principles and the UN Guiding Principles. Thirdly, I reconstruct and critically assess NHRIs’ mandates and powers to address corporate human rights abuse, based on the analysis of surveys and reports. I argue that there is a significant mismatch between the essential structural conditions for effective NHRI engagement with business and human rights, the expected contribution of NHRIs to the prevention and remedy of corporate human rights abuses, and the limitations of their mandates and powers in practice. To overcome that misalignment and unlock NHRIs’ full potential, this article proposes a reform of the Paris Principles which would provide these institutions with a robust source of international legitimacy and increase the pressure on state governments to extend their powers.

No End In Sight: How regimes form barriers to addressing the wicked problem of displacement

Wicked problems are complex and dispersed challenges that go beyond the capacity of individual organizations and require a response by multiple actors, often in the form of transnational regimes. While research on regimes has provided insights into such collective responses, less is known about how such regimes may form barriers that hinder and block appropriate responses to addressing wicked problems. Exploring the problematic role of regime-level responses is timely given that many of today’s wicked problems are far from being alleviated and in many instances appear instead to be intensifying. We draw from complementary insights of regime theory and research on institutional barriers to explore our research question: How do regimes form barriers to addressing wicked problems, and which mechanisms sustain such barriers? We explore this question with a longitudinal case study of the transnational regime for refugee protection and its response to displacement in Rwanda. From our findings, we develop a model of dissociation that explains how actors move further away from addressing a wicked problem. We identify four dissociative mechanisms (discounting, delimiting, separating, and displaying) that each create a distinct regime-level barrier. These barriers are distributed and mutually reinforcing, which makes it increasingly hard for actors to find alternative ways of responding to an escalating problem. Our study provides insights for research on regimes and wicked problems as well as studies on institutional barriers. We conclude with policy implications for overcoming those barriers, in line with the wider concerns and motivations of this special issue.

International Higher Education and the Formation of Business Diasporas

ABSTRACT A contemporary definition of diaspora points to communities that are transnationally dispersed but remain connected to their place of origin. Accordingly, diaspora do not have an objective existence but are forged through a variety of means, involving multiple agencies and sites of formation. One of these sites is higher education. Based on interviews conducted with Indian and Chinese students in Australia, this paper suggests that recent policies and practices of internationalisation of higher education, shaped by market rationality, have steered international students in Business Studies towards particular forms of diaspora, aligned to a range of beliefs about the importance of their participation within the global economy and in particular their role in facilitating transnational regimes of business activities.

Contemporary political ecologies of hydropower: insights from Bolivia and Brazil

Focusing on political ecology's grounded, empirical reading of broader environmental and epistemological claims, we identify two different ways that insights from political ecology can reveal the contemporary relevance of the local scale in critiquing global hydropower infrastructure and its claims to be a part of global decarbonization agendas. Drawing from recent fieldwork in Bolivia and Brazil, we adopt frames of 'plurality'and the 'production of space' to analyze how local-scale dynamics of dam building challenge dominant definitions of sustainable hydropower. With the 'green-ness' of contemporary hydropower based on a narrow, CO2 definition, these insights complicate, challenge and broaden this definition by illuminating how the impacts of this energy infrastructure and power networks contradict claims of 'sustainability' and widen the relevance of respective projects' impacts, in terms of socio-natures and ontologies. We argue that these hydropower projects limit the generative capacity of the local scale, in terms of place-based politics and socio-natures, and remake land- and waterscapes in the image of state and transnational extractive regimes. Together, our analysis opens up new trajectories for political ecology, to question the socio-environmental politics generated and enabled by the reworked environments of green energy production.

Chinese international secondary school students as flexible citizens: toward cosmopolitan learning

ABSTRACT Guided by the notion of ‘flexible citizenship’, as a strategy to accumulate and exchange different forms of capital across national borders, our ethnographic study followed eleven Chinese international secondary school students’ transnational lives. This paper is focused on how instrumental goals of flexible citizenship cover over the emotional and existential qualities of these youths’ lives. To orient this concern, we turn to Rizvi’s conception of ‘cosmopolitan learning’ highlighting learners’ relational awareness of their ‘situatedness’ in a hyper-connected world. Our analysis shows that student participants’ understandings and practices were laced with emotional and moral sensitivities emerging from the intersecting transnational regimes of family, nation-states, and capital. Governed by home and host cultural logics and power discourses, the students were pushed and pulled into an instrumental flexible citizenship. They lacked dialogical spaces and pedagogical supports from teachers and parents for their cosmopolitan learning; we suggest stakeholders in East–West study abroad take notice.

Transnational Labour Regimes and Neo-Liberal Development in Cambodia

ABSTRACT This article analyses the success and the crisis of Cambodian neo-liberal development through situating the country within global capitalism. Drawing on recent labour regime literature emphasising the multi-scalar formation of labour regimes that led to the advance of “transnational labour regimes” (TLRs), this article contends that, over the last two decades, Cambodian labour regimes have become increasingly a transnational process. The Cambodian state supported transnational employers in a desperate attempt to secure financial resources both for economic growth and as kickbacks for ruling elites. Meanwhile, non-binding private schemes and international monitoring played essential parts in maintaining TLRs, branding Cambodia an ethical producer despite poor labour standards and labour rights violations. This pattern of development, initially producing increased growth, eventually went into a crisis with the global recession from the late 2000s and escalating discontent among the local population against the Cambodian state. Labour disputes emerging from TLRs since the 2010s exacerbated already escalating disgruntlement among Cambodian citizens over the pattern of contemporary Cambodian development. Cambodia’s recent turn to more outright authoritarianism and one-party rule reflects the desperate attempt of Cambodian elites to sustain TLRs and their power amid this increasing discontent.

Networked statehood: an institutionalised self-contradiction in the process of globalisation?

ABSTRACT World economy and world science have not yet found a counterpart in a world state and probably never will. However, the contours of a political system have emerged, which fulfil the functions of statehood at the global level. Such a system does not take the form of a uniform corporative-hierarchical collectivity but of networked statehood, ie a network of individual states, international organisations, and transnational regimes. Relying on social science and legal constructions, this article offers a positive and negative definition of this concept and an analysis of its intrinsically self-contradictory character traits. Despite these unavoidable contradictions, this article argues that networked statehood still provides considerable advantages and outlines general principles of a future law of networked statehood. These outlines are founded on the belief that networked statehood must be seen as a new and distinct legal form of action but likewise facing the problem of democratic legitimacy.

Precarious technoscapes: forced mobility and mobile connections at the urban margins

Displaced people settling at the margins of Somali cities live in conditions of extreme precarity. They are also active users of information and communications technology (ICTs), employing mobile phones to maintain social networks, obtain information, navigate urban space and labour markets, transfer and store money, and receive aid. This article explores mobile connectivity from the perspective of displaced people, analysing how they experience mobile phones, and the connections they enable in the context of conflict and urban reconstruction in Somalia. The findings caution against techno-optimist developmental discourses, and provide a nuanced picture of the benefits, constraints, challenges and risks entailed in the engagement of marginalised urban populations with ICTs. Although providing various beneficial affordances, increased mobile connectivity does not by itself diminish inequalities. ICTs can reinforce power differentials between urban labourers and employers, become instruments of exploitation, and increase the distance between receivers of aid and the transnational regimes that govern precarity in Somali cities.

Comments on Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism

Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism is an important, timely book that nonetheless suffers from fundamental difficulties, philosophical and practical. While Hazony persuasively argues the superiority of the nation-state, as a locus of self-government, over empires or transnational regimes, his use of the term “nationalism” to signify the defense of autonomous nations carries with it dangerous associations, derived from its connection with the violent, xenophobic movements that arose in the interwar period in Germany, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere, culminating in the horrors of World War II (Hazony’s denial that Nazism embodied nationalism, as opposed to imperialism, begs the question of how the two are to be distinguished in practice, except ex post facto.) A separate problem is Hazony’s misrepresentation of Locke’s thought as “rationalist” as distinguished from “empiricist,” in an effort to link the former rather than the latter with imperialism. His comparison of the competition among forms of government to the “empirical” process of market competition understates the difference in stakes between the two, implicitly denying the existence and need of fixed, objective political standards. Hazony’s most valuable contribution is his contrast between the lessons drawn from the Holocaust by European transnationalists and defenders of the independent state of Israel.