From norms to programs: The United Nations Global Compact and global governance

Norms shape policy when they get translated into concrete programs. What if a widely shared norm gets translated into a weak program? How might this influence the program's legitimacy? We examine these issues in the context of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary program that embodies the widely shared norm of corporate responsibility. While both international intergovernmental organization (IGO) and international non‐governmental organization (INGO) networks support this norm, they differ on the adequacy of the Compact's program design. We explore how this tension affects the diffusion of the Compact across countries, which vary in their levels of embeddedness in IGO and INGO networks. Our findings suggest that embeddedness in IGO networks encourages adoption, while embeddedness in INGO networks discourages it. Our analysis provides important lessons for sponsors of voluntary governance mechanisms. Widespread support for a norm does not automatically ensure support for a program that claims to embody it.     

Governing the ungovernable: The challenge of a global disaggregation of authority

The processes of globalization have led to a proliferation of spheres of authority and significant challenges for global governance. In this paper is discussed the concept of spheres of authority, the factors that encourage their proliferation, and the prospects for global governance in a world of disaggregated authority. The proliferation of spheres of authority does not mean that global governance is impossible, but that it will not result from a global government. Instead, governance will emerge from the interaction of overlapping spheres of authority; regulation will be achieved not through centralized authority but through the spread of norms, informal rules, and regimes.     

Can non‐state global governance be legitimate? An analytical framework

In the absence of effective national and intergovernmental regulation to ameliorate global environmental and social problems, “private” alternatives have proliferated, including self‐regulation, corporate social responsibility, and public–private partnerships. Of the alternatives, “non‐state market driven” (NSMD) governance systems deserve greater attention because they offer the strongest regulation and potential to socially embed global markets. NSMD systems encourage compliance by recognizing and tracking, along the market’s supply chain, responsibly produced goods and services. They aim to establish “political legitimacy” whereby firms, social actors, and stakeholders are united into a community that accepts “shared rule as appropriate and justified.” Drawing inductively on evidence from a range of NSMD systems, and deductively on theories of institutions and learning, we develop an analytical framework and a preliminary set of causal propositions to explicate whether and how political legitimacy might be achieved. The framework corrects the existing literature’s inattention to the conditioning effects of global social structure, and its tendency to treat actor evaluations of NSMD systems as static and strategic. It identifies a three‐phase process through which NSMD systems might gain political legitimacy. It posits that a “logic of consequences” alone cannot explain actor evaluations: the explanation requires greater reference to a “logic of appropriateness” as systems progress through the phases. The framework aims to guide future empirical work to assess the potential of NSMD systems to socially embed global markets.     

Civil society participation in global governance: Insights from climate politics

A rather unique feature of global climate negotiations is that most governments allow representatives of civil society organisations to be part of their national delegation. It remains unclear, however, why states grant such access in the first place. While there are likely to be benefits from formally including civil society, there are also substantial costs stemming from constraints on sovereignty. In light of this tradeoff, this article argues for a ‘contagion’ effect that explains this phenomenon besides domestic determinants. In particular, states, which are more central to the broader network of global governance, are more likely to be informed of and influenced by other states' actions and policies toward civil society. In turn, more central governments are likely to include civil society actors if other governments do so as well. This argument is tested with data on the participation of civil society organisations in national delegations to global climate negotiations between 1995 and 2005. To further uncover the underlying mechanisms, the article also provides an analysis of survey data collected at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Durban in 2011.     

G20 institutional transition and global tax governance

The G20 is in transition from a short-term crisis institution to long-term steering institution, adopting a new ‘G20 + established international organization’ governance approach. In this approach, the main role of the G20 is to set the agenda and build political consensus for global economic governance. The established international organization provides the technical support and facilitates proposal implementation, while the precondition for the G20 institutional transition is that the emerging economies need to participate on an equal footing with the advanced economies. The case of global tax governance is among the few success stories of the G20's institutional transition. Within the ‘G20 + OECD’ governance architecture, the G20 builds the political consensus that the profits should be taxed where they are performed, while the OECD proposes the technical Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Action Plan. In this way, the G20's political leadership and the OECD's technical advantage complement each other, making a giant leap in global tax governance.     

Accountability and global governance: The view from paternalism

A standard view is that global governance institutions require strong accountability mechanisms to perform effectively and legitimately. Yet these institutions are much better at preaching than practicing accountability. A standard explanation for this gap references interests. For various reasons, institutions and their creators would rather be less than more accountable, and they are quite content to live with the hypocrisy. This article points to an alternative possibility: the public interest. An article of faith is that modern governance should be staffed by relatively autonomous experts who use their specialized knowledge for the greater good; accordingly, they cannot be accountable to those who are affected by their decisions. Too much democracy, therefore, can be a source of dysfunction. Yet expert authority's virtues also can become vices; namely, insulation from those affected by their decisions can also be a source of dysfunction, most closely associated with the “iron cage.” Although the possibility that expertise is both a virtue (effectiveness) and a vice (dysfunction) is well known in the literature on domestic governance, it has been neglected in discussions of global governance. Indeed, the dangers of, and dysfunctions associated with the iron cage might be greater in global governance than in domestic governance precisely because of the absence of institutional checks that often are produced by a preexisting social contract between the rulers and the ruled. I probe this possibility in the area of humanitarian governance.     

Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of, policy development generally? The purpose of this article is to reflect on these questions by introducing, and reviewing, a special issue that challenges explicit claims, and implicit methodologies, that treat private and public governance realms as distinct and/or static. We do so by advancing a theoretical and conceptual framework with which to explore how the contributions to this special issue enhance an understanding about governance interactions across a range of empirical, sectoral, and regional domains. We specifically introduce the concept of governance spheres to capture the proliferation of issue domains denoted by highly fluid interactions across public and private governance boundaries.     

Comparing the legitimacy and effectiveness of global hard and soft law: An analytical framework

The international norms that are developed as tools of global governance can be placed on a continuum from traditional “hard law” treaties to the vaguest and voluntary “soft law.” In this article we develop an analytical framework for comparing norms on different positions along the continuum, thus for comparing international hard and soft law. We root the framework in both the rationalist and the constructivist paradigms of international relations by focusing on two overarching evaluative criteria: effectiveness and legitimacy. These broad concepts are divided into smaller building blocks encompassing mechanisms through which norms can exert influence; for example, by changing material incentives, identities, and building capacity, and by contributing to building source‐based, procedural, and substantive legitimacy. We illustrate the applicability of the framework with three norm processes of varying degrees of “softness” in global climate governance.     

When private governance impedes multilateralism: The case of international pesticide governance

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state-led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, a treaty-based information-sharing mechanism that allows countries to refuse hazardous chemical imports. We find that private agricultural standard-setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention's pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention's intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state-based governance to become more stringent. We characterize this as a “confounding interaction” whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance.     

Transcendental institutionalism and global justice

In The Idea of Justice (2009 Sen, A. 2009. The idea of justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Amartya Sen distinguishes between ‘transcendental institutional’ approaches to justice and ‘realization-focused comparisons,’ rejecting the former and recommending the latter as a normative approach to global justice. I argue that Sen’s project fails for three principal reasons. First, he misdiagnoses the problem with accounts that he refers to as transcendental-institutionalist. The problem is not with these kinds of accounts per se, but with particular features of prominent approaches. Second, Sen’s realization-focus does not account well for the value of institutions of global justice. And even Sen agrees that reforms to institutions are urgently needed. And third, the distinction between transcendentalism and comparative approaches is implausible. I close by suggesting a strategy for an alternative institutionalist approach that can offer the kind of guidance for reforming the global order that Sen rightly takes as urgent.     

The Global Climate Regime: Explaining Lagging Reform

There have been growing calls for reform of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). How have governments met the demand for action on climate change despite the lagging pace of UNFCCC reform? New qualitative data demonstrate that the institutional, sectoral, and technical characteristics of multilateral institutions have guided government choices in managing climate change issues. Institutional resources and sectoral participation in multilateral institutions have enabled governments to handle climate change issues outside the UNFCCC, reducing the need to invest in its reform as demand for action has grown. These specialized institutions are able to mitigate political disputes and facilitate greater efficacy in handling specific issues such as financing and emissions mitigation. They have mandates that overlap with the cross‐cutting nature of climate change, requiring no new mandates, which mitigates political disputes in managing specific climate issues.     

China's economic slowdown: implications for Beijing's institutional power and global governance role

China's spectacular economic growth over the past decades has given rise to a more confident and proactive China in global governance. China is now an institution-builder, with new Chinese-led institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank designed to cement Beijing's central role in global economic governance. What, then, are the potential implications of a slowing economy for China's institutional power and global governance role? This article locates China's economic growth and slowdown in broader discussions about China's global position and questions about responsibility, order and governance. It argues that China's economic slowdown will not result in a drastic impact on Beijing's institutional power as there are key material, historical and ideational drivers at play here. Unless China is confronted with the prospect of an economic collapse, it will continue to pursue an active institutional role, speak the rhetoric of South–South solidarity with emerging economies and seek a leadership role in reforming global economic governance, even with a slowing economy, because this is intrinsically tied to its identity and how China now positions itself in an evolving global order.     

It's economic size,stupid! How global advocacy mirrors state power

Numerous empirical studies suggest that global interest communities are heavily biased in favor of wealthier countries. This research note critically reviews these works suggesting that they (i) lack a benchmark to assess the biased nature of global interest communities and (ii) conflate the concepts of “wealth” (based on GDP per capita) and “economic power” (based on GDP) into one analytical category. As a corrective to these problems, we compare variation in global interest group mobilization across countries to the size of these countries' national economies. Relying on an original dataset mapping interest groups communities at the World Trade Organization (1997–2012) and the United Nations Climate Summits (1997–2011), we show that (i) global interest representation almost perfectly reflects differences in countries' relative economic power and (ii) contrary to the conventional wisdom, wealthier countries are, relative to their economic size, actually underrepresented in global interest communities.     

Assessing the institutionalization of private sustainability governance in a changing coffee sector

The potential of transnational private governance initiatives to constitute effective alternatives to state‐led regulation of global value chains rests on their ability to scale up and become institutionalized in a given sector. This study examines whether such institutionalization has occurred in the coffee sector, the commodity with the most widespread adoption of certified products and over 30 years’ experience of private governance, and tests hypotheses on facilitating and inhibiting conditions. It finds that while norm generation around responsible supply chain management and the organizational institutionalization of standard‐setting bodies is well advanced, the practice of internalizing social and environmental externalities through the routinized production and purchase of higher priced certified goods continues to be questioned by industry actors. Indeed, conditions that favored normative and organizational institutionalization, such as high levels of industry concentration, product differentiation, and deliberative interaction, are shown to represent barriers to the practice‐oriented institutionalization of market‐driven regulatory governance.     

Power transitions and global trade governance: The impact of a rising China on the export credit regime

The existing liberal international economic order was constructed during the era of American hegemony and has been heavily shaped by US power. How is the rise of China affecting global economic governance? This article analyzes the case of export credit, which has long been considered a highly effective international regulatory regime and an important component of global trade governance. I show that the rise of China is profoundly altering the landscape of export credit and undermining its governance arrangements. State-backed export credit is a key tool of China's development strategy, yet I argue that an explosion in China's use of export credit is eroding the efficacy of existing international rules intended to prevent a competitive spiral of state subsidization via export credit. The case of export credit highlights a fundamental tension between liberal institutions of global governance and the development objectives of emerging powers.     

Governance gaps in eradicating forced labor: From global to domestic supply chains

A growing body of scholarship analyzes the emergence and resilience of forced labor in developing countries within global value chains. However, little is known about how forced labor arises within domestic supply chains concentrated within national borders, producing products for domestic consumption. We conduct one of the first studies of forced labor in domestic supply chains, through a cross‐industry comparison of the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labor in the United Kingdom. We find that understanding the dynamics of forced labor in domestic supply chains requires us to conceptually modify the global value chain framework to understand similarities and differences across these contexts. We conclude that addressing the governance gaps that surround forced labor will require scholars and policymakers to carefully refine their thinking about how we might design operative governance that effectively engages with local variation.     

Multinationals as global institution: Power,authority and relative autonomy

This article aims to inform the long‐standing and unresolved debate between voluntary corporate social responsibility and initiatives to impose binding legal obligations on multinational enterprises. The two approaches share a common feature: neither can fully specify its own scope conditions, that is, how much of the people and planet agenda either can expect to deliver. The reason they share this feature is also the same: neither is based on a foundational political analysis of the multinational enterprise in the context of global governance. Such an analysis is essential for providing background to and perspective on what either approach can hope to achieve, and how. This article begins to bridge the gap by illustrating aspects of the political power, authority, and relative autonomy of the contemporary multinational enterprise. The conclusion spells out some implications for the debate itself, and for further research.     

从优势到效能：推进国家治理现代化的实践遵循

把制度优势更好转化为治理效能,是推进国家治理现代化的实践遵循。制度优势向治理效能转化,能够展现制度根本优势而优化治理结构,能够提升制度执行能力而优化治理功能,能够促使制度和制度执行能力充分结合以及制度建设和治理实践有效互动,从而整体上有力推进国家治理现代化。遵循把制度优势更好转化为治理效能这一实践取向,推进国家治理现代化,要依托由最大优势和显著优势共同构成的制度基础、由制度完善和现实发展共同构成的价值基础、由治理经验和主体创造共同构成的实践基础,坚持科学的实践进路,突出治理实践这一关键环节,通过三个阶段推进实践过程,基于十三个坚持和完善把握任务重点,不断实现制度优势更好向治理效能转化。     

Cloth without a weaver: power,emergence and institutions across global value chains

Abstract

In studies of the fragmentation and internationalization of production, most value chain approaches consider the inter-firm balance of power as the critical dynamic in development. With the firm as the primary unit of analysis, research long held out two promises: first, bridging the ‘micro-macro gap’ in development theory, meaning making valid inferences from micro-level actors (firms) to macro-sociological outcomes; and second, reconciling its firm-level organizational approach with institutionalism. This paper argues, first, that the literature is artificially constrained in bridging the micro-macro gap due to its delimited conceptualization of ‘power’, based on the ‘agentic-strategic’ behaviour of firms. It argues for broadening the notion of power to bridge the levels of analysis, based on the concept of ‘emergence’. Second, while institutional critics are correct in criticizing value chain scholarship for its neglect, this paper finds that the effects of institutions are not as consistent or determinative as suggested, and hence it seeks to expand the scope for incorporating institutionalism. These points are illustrated through an intra-industry comparative study of three textile agro-industries in China.     

Japanese civil society in global governance: the case of 2015 UN World Conference on disaster risk reduction

In 2015, the Hyogo Framework for Action on disaster risk reduction (DRR) expired, necessitating the introduction of a new international agreement. This article investigates the activities and achievements of the Japan civil society organization coalition for the 2015 UN World Conference on DRR (JCC2015) from the point of view of its involvement in the shaping of the new Sendai Framework for DRR. Although JCC2015 contributed to agenda setting and policy development processes and managed to secure recognition for its position on nuclear risk at a regional level, its participation did not translate into impact on the Sendai Framework to the extent it wished to achieve. The article’s findings testify to the on-going and active inclusion of non-governmental stakeholders in the UN-led global policy-making processes concerning reducing disaster risk, but they also illustrate difficulties that actors who aim to introduce new elements into the agenda need to tackle.