Unequal power and the institutional design of global governance: the case of arms control

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE FEHL
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Policy Area ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Institutional Legacies ◽  
Institutional Order

AbstractIR scholars have recently paid increasing attention to unequal institutional orders in world politics, arguing that global governance institutions are deeply shaped by power inequalities among states. Yet, the literature still suffers from conceptual limitations and from a shortage of empirical work. The article addresses these shortcomings through a study of the historical evolution of global arms control institutions since 1945. It shows that in this important policy area, the global institutional order has not been marked by a recent trend toward deeper inequality, as many writings on unequal institutions suggest. Instead, the analysis reveals a pattern of institutional mutation whereby specific forms of institutional inequality are recurrently replaced and supplemented by new forms. This process, the article argues, is driven by states' efforts to adapt the regime to a changing material and normative environment within the constraints of past institutional legacies.

The fourth face of legitimacy: Constituent power and the constitutional legitimacy of international institutions

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Oates
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Constitutional Legitimacy ◽  
Institutional Order

AbstractScholars of international organisation commonly differentiate among three dimensions when studying the legitimacy of international institutions: input, throughput, and output legitimacy. I argue that the study of global governance needs to consider a fourth ‘face’ of legitimacy: constitutional legitimacy. This dimension addresses the normative and practical questions related to the constitutive justification for an institutional order – such as in whose name it is founded, whose interests it should serve, and how authority should be distributed within that institutional order. These questions are distinct from the procedural features of institutions emphasised by other dimensions and concern the constituent power that should ground the authority of governance institutions. In this article, I develop this fourth dimension of legitimacy, explore its varied expressions in world politics, and show how it has implications for the constitutional structure of global governance arrangements. I argue that different representations of constituent power shape the legitimacy of different authority relations within international institutions and illustrate these claims with an analysis of the politics of legitimacy in three cases: the ongoing effort to reform the UN Security Council, the negotiations over the founding of the International Criminal Court, and the debates over the Responsibility to Protect at the UN.

scholarly journals Measuring institutional overlap in global governance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoram Z. Haftel ◽  
Tobias Lenz
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Data Set ◽  
International Authority ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
And Performance

AbstractOver the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.

scholarly journals Towards a ‘pluralist’ world order: creative agency and legitimacy in global institutions

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-544
Author(s):  
Terry Macdonald ◽  
Kate Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Case Study Analysis ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Creative Agency ◽  
Business And Human Rights ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Governance Institutions

This article addresses the question of how we should understand the normative grounds of legitimacy in global governance institutions, given the social and organizational pluralism of the contemporary global political order. We argue that established normative accounts of legitimacy, underpinning both internationalist and cosmopolitan institutional models, are incompatible with real-world global social and organizational pluralism, insofar as they are articulated within the parameters of a ‘statist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as grounded in rational forms of political agency, exercised within ‘closed’ communities constituted by settled common interests and identities. To advance beyond these statist ideational constraints, we elaborate an alternative ‘pluralist’ world order imaginary: this sees legitimacy as partially grounded in creative forms of political agency, exercised in the constitution and ongoing transformation of a plurality of ‘open’ communities, with diverse and fluid interests and identities. Drawing on a case study analysis of political controversies surrounding the global governance of business and human rights, we argue that the pluralist imaginary illuminates how normative legitimacy in world politics can be strengthened by opening institutional mandates to contestation by multiple distinct collectives, even though doing so is incompatible with achieving a fully rationalized global institutional scheme.

scholarly journals International courts and global democratic values: Participation, accountability, and justification

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan W. Kuyper ◽  
Theresa Squatrito
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Global Democracy ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
National Governments ◽  
Second World

AbstractIn a post-Cold War era characterised by globalisation and deep interdependence, the actions of national governments increasingly have an effect beyond their own territorial borders. Moreover, key agents of global governance – international organisations and their bureaucracies, non-state actors and private agents – exercise pervasive forms of authority. Due to these shifts, it is widely noted that world politics suffers from a democratic deficit. This article contributes to work on global democracy by looking at the role of international courts. Building upon an original dataset covering the 24 international courts in existence since the end of the Second World War, we argue that international courts are able to advance democratic values and shape democratic practices beyond the state. They can do so by fostering equal participation, accountability, and public justification that link individuals directly with sites of transnational authority. We contend that the ability of international courts to promote these values is conditioned by institutional design choices concerning access rules, review powers, and provisions regarding judicial reason-giving. We canvass these design features of different international courts and assess the promises and pitfalls for global democratisation. We conclude by linking our analysis of international courts and global democratisation with debates about the legitimation and politicisation of global governance at large.

Alternative Global Governances

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amaya Querejazu
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Diverse World ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Traditional Approaches

Global governance has become part of the international relations vocabulary. As an analytical category and as a political project it is a strong tool that illustrates the major complexities of world politics in contexts of globalization. The study of global governance has expanded and superseded traditional approaches to international relations that focus on relations among states. Moreover, the study of global governance and has included nonstate actors and their dynamics into a more intricate thematic agenda of global politics. However, global governance has become less a political space of deliberation and more of a managerial aspect of world politics because of some assumptions about reality, humanity, and the international community. It would appear that this is a result of the predominance of liberal thought in world politics after the end of the Cold War. Regardless of how diverse the approaches to global governance may appear, the ontological assumptions—that is, the beliefs about reality that are behind its definition, conceptualization, and implementation as political projects—are not neutral nor are they universal. These assumptions respond to specific appreciations of reality and are inherited from Western modernity. The problem with this is that claims to contemplate the interests of humanity as a whole abound in global governance institutions and arrangements, whereas in fact global governance is constructed by neglecting other possible realities about the world. The consequences of this conceptualization are important in the sense that global governance becomes a tool of exclusion. Only by taking into consideration the ontological difference through which global governance can reflect the complexities of a diverse world can one explore the importance of alternative governances as a way to consider how global orders can be approached. Such alternative global governances draw from ontological pluralism and conceive political global orders as based on the coexistence and negotiation of different realities.

Bringing Power and Markets In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Tussie
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Institutional Order ◽  
Power Transitions

This commentary argues for greater attention to issues of power and markets as research on global governance legitimacy advances. The topic of legitimacy in global governance is ethically and politically urgent to explore because of serious challenges from within and without the current institutional order. This commentary calls for more attention to two specific issues: geopolitical change and markets. First, in times of geopolitical transition, the sources of legitimacy are themselves points of contestation. Power transitions expose the limits of the liberal order and intimate a return of geopolitics with implications for the perceptions of legitimate global governance. Second, the role of markets has been neglected in scholarship on global governance legitimacy. This legitimacy is fragile partly because private interests have dominated the representation of public interests in decision making. The legitimacy of global governance institutions requires that domestic governance is not undermined by international markets.

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”’

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Oliver Westerwinter
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Institutional Architecture ◽  
Global Law ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
Law Making

Abstract Friedrich 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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Tallberg ◽  
Karin Bäckstrand ◽  
Jan Aart Scholte
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The Core ◽  
Governance Institutions

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy’s importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume, which engages with the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy. This introductory chapter explains the rationale of the book, introduces its conceptual framework, reviews existing literature, and presents the key themes of the volume. It emphasizes in particular the volume’s sociological approach to legitimacy in global governance, its comparative scope, and its comprehensive treatment of the topic. Moreover, a specific effort is made to explain how each chapter moves beyond existing research in exploring the book’s three themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.

scholarly journals Fixing Technology with Society: The Coproduction of Democratic Deficits and Responsible Innovation at the OECD and the European Commission

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392199910
Author(s):  
Nina Frahm ◽  
Tess Doezema ◽  
Sebastian Pfotenhauer
Keyword(s):  
European Commission ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Responsible Innovation ◽  
Democratic Deficit ◽  
Major Barrier ◽  
Societal Participation ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Governance Institutions

Long presented as a universal policy-recipe for social prosperity and economic growth, the promise of innovation seems to be increasingly in question, giving way to a new vision of progress in which society is advanced as a central enabler of technoeconomic development. Frameworks such as “Responsible” or “Mission-oriented” Innovation, for example, have become commonplace parlance and practice in the governance of the innovation–society nexus. In this paper, we study the dynamics by which this “social fix” to technoscience has gained legitimacy in institutions of global governance by investigating recent projects at two international organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission, to mainstream “Responsible Innovation” frameworks and instruments across countries. Our analysis shows how the turn to societal participation in both organizations relies on a new deficit logic—a democratic deficit of innovation—that frames a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies. These deficit politics enable global governance institutions to present “Responsible Innovation” frameworks as the solution and to claim authority over the coproduction of particular forms of democracy and innovation as intertwined pillars of a market-liberal international order.

scholarly journals Elite attitudes and the future of global governance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Aart Scholte ◽  
Soetkin Verhaegen ◽  
Jonas Tallberg
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
The Future ◽  
Medium Level ◽  
Government Bureaucracy ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
Problem Solvers

Abstract This article examines what contemporary elites think about global governance and what these attitudes might bode for the future of global institutions. Evidence comes from a unique survey conducted in 2017–19 across six elite sectors (business, civil society, government bureaucracy, media, political parties, research) in six countries (Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, the United States) and a global group. Bearing in mind some notable variation between countries, elite types, issue-areas and institutions, three main interconnected findings emerge. First, in principle, contemporary leaders in politics and society hold considerable readiness to pursue global-scale governance. Today's elites are not generally in a nationalist-protectionist-sovereigntist mood. Second, in practice, these elites on average hold medium-level confidence towards fourteen current global governance institutions. This evidence suggests that, while there is at present no legitimacy crisis of global governance among elites (as might encourage its decline), neither is there a legitimacy boom (as could spur its expansion). Third, if we probe what elites prioritize when they evaluate global governance, the surveyed leaders generally most underline democracy in the procedures of these bodies and effectiveness in their performance. This finding suggests that, to raise elites' future confidence in global governance, the institutions would do well to become more transparent in their operations and more impactful problem-solvers in their outcomes.

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