scholarly journals Networks, Standards, and Transnational Governance Institutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-237
Author(s):  
Julie E. Cohen

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.

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Macdonald ◽  
Terry Macdonald

In this article we investigate the institutional mechanisms required for ‘liquid’ forms of authority in transnational governance to achieve normative political legitimacy. We understand authority in sociological terms as the institutionalized inducement of addressees to defer to institutional rules, directives, or knowledge claims. We take authority to be ‘liquid’ when it is characterized by significant institutional dynamism, fostered by its informality, multiplicity, and related structural properties. The article’s central normative claim is that the mechanisms prescribed to legitimize transnational governance institutions – such as accountability or experimentalist mechanisms – should vary with the liquid characteristics of their authority structures. We argue for this claim in two steps. We first outline our theoretical conception of political legitimacy – as a normative standard prescribing legitimizing mechanisms that support authorities’ collectively valuable governance functions – and we explain in theoretical terms why legitimizing mechanisms should vary with differing authority structures. We then present an illustrative case study of the interaction between liquid authority and legitimizing mechanisms of public accountability and pragmatic experimentalism in the context of transnational business regulation. We conclude by considering broader implications of our argument for both the design of legitimate transnational governance institutions, and future research agendas on transnational authority and legitimacy.


Author(s):  
Rohan Grover

Internet governance institutions embrace a multistakeholder approach, which calls for civil society organizations (CSOs) to represent community interests. How well do digital rights CSOs fulfill these expectations of “community representation”? Through a case study of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian digital rights organization, this paper evaluates community engagement mechanisms through the lens of equity and democratization, and identifies a gap between expectations and observed practices. It concludes that evaluating representation in digital-native CSOs should account for both socioeconomic and technological dynamics in both transnational and national contexts. This paper offers a contribution to an emergent understanding of civil society’s role in internet governance, grounded in a postcolonial critique of representation and legitimacy, in order to understand whose voices are heard, and whose are still excluded, from internet governance processes.


Author(s):  
Luis Cabrera

While there have been numerous recent analyses of the legitimacy of suprastate governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or United Nations Security Council, few accounts have considered individual duties in relation to those institutions, broadly analogous to suprastate political obligation. Identified in this chapter are three categories of duties that should be salient to a range of institutions. These include duties to support their reform, to resist specific institutional features or practices, and to reject the continued operation of some institutions and support the creation of alternate ones. These duties would correspond roughly to how well an institution would appear to fit into a global institutional scheme that actually would fulfill cosmopolitan aims for rights promotion and protections and related global moral goods. An implication is that the current global system itself is a candidate for rejection, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.


Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (9) ◽  
pp. 1967-1982 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Deng

This paper develops a theoretical framework for institutional analysis of the governance of low-income housing in the city. I focus on the provision of local public goods as a central issue for low-income housing. Factors that affect the governance structure from the efficiency perspective and the equity perspective, respectively, are explored. I argue that over-subsidisation is an important problem for income-redistribution institutions and, hence, public housing or social housing becomes an important form of governmental intervention in low-income housing. The framework is then applied to low-income housing in China. In particular, I analyse the governance structures of several major types of low-income housing including public rental housing, private low-income housing, work-unit compound and urban village.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Joha ◽  
Marijn Janssen

Purpose – Shared services are often viewed as a single type of business model but in reality, shared services can be organized in different ways. The goal of this research is to understand the factors influencing the shaping of shared services business models. Design/methodology/approach – Inductive case oriented research is conducted by investigating three different types of shared services arrangements using Al-Debei and Avison's unified framework for business models. Findings – A total of 12 different factors were identified that influence the shape of shared services business models including the path dependency, legal/regulatory driver, customer orientation, target segment, strategic importance, ICT/business orientation, IT governance structure, change strategy, degree of outsourcing, integration potential, economic rationale and the business value. Research limitations/implications – The level of customization and standardization can influence the potential benefits that can be gained from bundling services and it is important to understand the factors that influence this dimension. Practical implications – The appropriate configuration of these factors can be helpful to design shared services arrangements with a balanced degree of standardization and customization. The choices regarding the configuration of these factors could result in a more or less effective functioning business model and could influence the governance processes and mechanisms that need to be put in place. Originality/value – There is no prior research that addresses the shared services business model from a holistic perspective and this research provides a first conceptual model for shared services business models.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 302-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freya Baetens

In his thought-provoking and timely article, Pauwelyn asks how it can be “that today’s perception of two parallel processes involving the legalization of world politics, and on two closely related subjects of global economic affairs—cross-border trade and cross-border investment—differs so much?” He focuses on one explanation: the individuals deciding World Trade Organization (WTO) versus International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) disputes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Alexander Vladimirovich Konovalov ◽  

The article is devoted to the analysis of the general principle of law — ensuring guarantees of individual rights and the inalienability of his legal status. According to the author, they are provided by the synergistic action of private and public law regulation. The article convincingly shows that private and public law is a single system of values with different levels of generalization of terms and different methodology. At the same time, it is the private legal mechanisms that are the basis, the core of the rule of law.


Author(s):  
Alix Dietzel

Chapter Four sets out the parameters for the cosmopolitan assessment of climate governance. The chapter first provides overview of the processes involved in global climate change governance: multilateral (United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC) and transnational (cities, corporations, NGOs, sub-state authorities). Following this, Chapter Four outlines why actors in the UNFCCC and actors involved in transnational governance processes can be held responsible for bringing about a just response to the climate change problem. The chapter grounds the responsibility of these actors in their capability to enable the three demands of justice set out in Chapter Three by restructuring the social and political context. Finally, Chapter Four outlines a methodological framework to clarify how current practice will be assessed. This framework is based on a four-point hierarchy that can be used to investigate to what extent global governance actors enable each demand of justice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann

Legal history confirms that general interests of citizens can be protected most effectively through ‘democratic’ and ‘republican constitutionalism’ protecting constitutional rights and remedies of citizens and of their democratic and judicial institutions to hold governments accountable for providing public goods (PGs). Yet, the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), and related multilevel governance institutions do not effectively protect general interests and corresponding rights of citizens. The inadequate legal, democratic, and judicial accountability of intergovernmental power politics entails that – outside Europe’s multilevel ‘common market constitutionalism’ and ‘human rights constitutionalism’ – many governance institutions fail to protect transnational PGs effectively. This contribution explains why – even if ‘global democracy’ remains a utopia – today’s universal recognition of ‘inalienable’ human rights and of related constitutional principles requires re-interpreting the power-oriented ‘international law of states’ as multilevel governance of transnational PGs for the benefit of citizens and their constitutional rights.


2019 ◽  
pp. 523-536
Author(s):  
Robert Howse

This chapter canvasses the institutions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—left entirely unchanged in TPP11—to assess their cumulative potential to contribute to ties of solidarity among regulatory elites and consequently foster (mega)regional integration. The promise of treaty institutions as conduits of sanguine economic integration, the narrative championed by TPP’s architects, is contrasted with a more critical account in which plurilateral institutions are seen to serve as mechanisms to advance particular economic interests in the face of opposition in the almost-universal trade governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). This “divide and conquer” strategy, so the argument goes, dominates in TPP’s institutions, which remain generally weak and unconnected to existing frameworks in Asia and beyond. But they also vary significantly between stronger mechanisms primarily for business interests and almost entirely aspirational efforts in more social areas such as environment, labor, and development.


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