Networks, Standards, and Transnational Governance Institutions
This chapter juxtaposes the various governance processes that have emerged in the domains of world trade, transnational business regulation, and internet governance and treats them explicitly as iterations of an emergent network-and-standard-based legal-institutional form. Network-and-standard-based governance institutions are situated within larger assemblages for transnational legal ordering. Their operations reflect complex and mutually interpenetrating sets of relationships and practices that involve a heterogeneous array of public, private, and public-private actors and associations. The shift to a networked and standard-based governance structure reshapes modes of lawmaking and enforcement, patterns of contestation over lawmaking authority, and structures for participation and accountability in ways that pose important challenges both to the realizability of traditional rule-of-law values and to traditional conceptions of the institutional forms that those values require.