Transnational delegation in global environmental governance: When do non‐state actors govern?

Non‐state actors – including firms, non‐governmental organizations, and networks – are now a permanent fixture in environmental politics. However, we know surprisingly little about when states choose to delegate to non‐state actors through multilateral treaties. This paper provides an historical picture, tracing patterns of delegation to non‐state agents in a random sample of multilateral environmental agreements from 1902 to 2002. I introduce a new unit of analysis – the policy function – to understand what non‐state actors actually do as agents. I find that analyses of delegation are sensitive to the unit of analysis; patterns of delegation at the treaty level are very different from those at the level of individual policy functions. While overall the decision to delegate to non‐state actors – what I term transnational delegation – is rare, it has grown over time. Complex treaties, those with secretariats, and those focused on the management of nature are more apt to delegate to non‐state actors. Non‐state agents fill a small, but growing role in multilateral environmental treaties.     

Private operation with public supervision: evidence of hybrid modes of governance in prisons

Received theories suggest a possible cost-quality tradeoff when private outsourcing arrangements are used in public services. Using data from Brazilian prisons, our study provides evidence that contradicts this prediction: the prisons not only run at a lower cost, but also show similar or improved performance on a range of quality indicators. The attenuation of the cost-quality dilemma in our context is due to the hybrid management, which allocates control rights to a state-appointed public supervisor. We also discuss conditions in which the public supervisor may refrain from colluding with the private agent, therefore guaranteeing an effective monitoring of service quality.     

Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

This article analyzes photographic and graphic narratives of missions conducted by MSF in the Sahel (1984–1985), Afghanistan (1986), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2005) for the ways in which the narratives construe the responsibility of their readers toward what they see as well as of MSF's missions toward those they serve, particularly in relation to MSF's official policy of témoignage or witnessing as advocacy. I read the chronotopes (space-time) within these books for how they represent suffering and position the reader as voyeur, philanthropist, or protester (Chouliaraki 2006). In their distinctive forms, these texts bridge the presence of immediate crisis and the larger historical framework through which it may be understood. As simultaneously visual and literary media, photo/graphic narratives work through the dual compulsions to show and to tell, both of which manifest through their formal manipulations of the structure of a humanitarian crisis. In their framing devices, these books play with constructions of temporality and distance (moral, intersubjective, and geographical) that govern “the ethics of mediation[,] the humanization of vulnerable others” (Chouliaraki 2011: 363) upon which humanitarian responsibility depends.     

All the world is a stage: global governance,human resources,and the ‘problem’ of smallness

Abstract

The involvement of small island states (SISs) in a growing number of international organisations (IOs) has placed increased pressure on domestic bureaucracies and political systems. Rapid turnover among SIS leaders, combined with generational change and decreased local support, has amplified disadvantages. Growing complexity has therefore further exposed the long-standing vulnerabilities of SISs. They can play a creative role at the margins, and on certain issues in certain IOs, but in general asymmetries prevail. The lesson is that national sovereignty does not always equal control, and what might superficially appear to be equal access is constrained by the availability of technical expertise to the detriment of SISs.     

Engaging in ‘Loose Talk’: Analyzing Salience in Discourse from the Formulation of Welfare Policy

Attempts to explain the emergence of policy innovation are regularly constrained by the complexities of political processes and the vagaries of social circumstance. Content analysis of media reports has been used routinely to provide an outline of policy change. However, the results of content analysis can be simplistic and lacking in depth of meaning. This study added the use of principal components analysis (PCA) of media text content to more substantively examine the evolution of a policy “sea-change.” Both the manifest and latent content of newspaper accounts were analyzed to measure the salience of a public policy innovation that expanded religious group utilization with the 1996 welfare reform act. In addition to tracing variations in the flow of policy deliberation, the analysis more fully captured the character of public discourse that surrounded the adoption of this controversial policy. Unexpected findings from analysis of the accounts included limited concern for Constitutional infringement and no evidence of a regional bias toward increased religious group utilization. Furthermore, principal components analysis of textual structure exhibited patterns of discourse indicative of privatistic (rather than communal) religious response, limited concern with diverse social groups and pronounced reliance on “praise and blame” persuasive strategies.     

Designing stakeholder consultations: Reinforcing or alleviating bias in the European Union system of governance?

Consultations with stakeholders are a policy instrument widely used by policy makers to design policies and prepare legislative proposals across national and supranational systems of government. The European Union has recently reviewed its stakeholder consultation regime and asked for stakeholders’ policy input. This offers an opportunity to examine empirically stakeholders’ own evaluation of the regime and to ask a fundamental question about its democratic credentials: Do stakeholders recognise the EU consultation regime as reinforcing bias in interest representation by benefiting policy insiders, or conversely as an instrument that alleviates bias in supranational policy making? Building on rational choice institutionalism, this article outlines the potential distributional outcomes of the regime and argues that they are likely to vary along the lines of a classic divide in policy making that opposes policy insiders to outsiders. Two competing narratives are discussed in relation to the expected direction of this variation by focusing on insiders’ incentives to support or oppose the regime. The observable implications are tested empirically on an original dataset containing information about stakeholders’ positions on the evaluation of the regime status quo, its proposed further institutionalisation and their recommendations for change. The findings describe a consultation regime that seems to have created conditions alleviating bias in stakeholders’ participation in supranational policy making. This is evident in the lack of systematic, significant differences between insiders and outsiders in the evaluation of the consultation regime. Where differences do occur, they are consistent with the image of a consultation regime that has not reinforced bias in favour of policy insiders. These actors are found to be more critical of the regime status quo, its institutionalisation and more inclined to recommend policy improvements. This supports an optimistic view over the democratic credentials and legitimacy of the EU consultation regime and outlines an additional scenario under which policy actors that are traditionally associated with exerting more power and influence find themselves stripped of their privileged position in the context of European supranational governance.     

Linking two levels of governance: Citizens’ trust in domestic and European institutions over time

This article puts forward a comprehensive framework for explaining the complex and dynamic relationship between trust in the domestic government and trust in the EU, considering time, country and individual-level variation. Using longitudinal comparative data from 32 Eurobarometer survey waves (2004–2018), we first establish that the link between attitude formation at the national and the EU supranational levels is present over time. Second, we show that during ‘extraordinary’ times of crisis the strength of that relationship intensifies. Third, we posit that the European sovereign debt crisis changed the mechanism for this relationship in two ways: during ‘extraordinary’ times, the link is much stronger in countries hardest hit by the crisis, and the relationship holds independent of individuals' political sophistication across all countries. Our findings have implications for understanding the drivers of EU support and theories of institutional trust.     

Searching for ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in weak governance states: Preliminary examination of the securities and exchange commission of Myanmar

After decades of military rule, internal conflict, and international isolation, Myanmar has embarked on a course of institution building. In light of Myanmar's low rating on the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (World Bank Group), the nation faces an enormous challenge in developing public institutions that meet its needs and expectations. This challenge includes development of institutional capacity that will allow Myanmar to participate in international economic affairs. A step in this direction involves the creation of a securities exchange market mechanism. The current study considers the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Myanmar (SECM) to support securities regulation. It applies a novel organization level of analysis strategy that considers SECM as a ‘pocket of effectiveness’ (POE) in the context of a low-performing public institutional setting in terms of the good governance criteria of responsiveness, accountability, and transparency (RAT). While the study finds evidence of progress in building Myanmar's securities regulation, it also finds limits in RAT development that challenges the SECM's potential designation as a ‘POE’. Based on feedback from proximate stakeholders in the daily work of the SECM, recommendations are offered for revised policies and practices in order to resolve them.     

Drivers of political parties’ voting behaviour in European economic governance: the ultimate decline of the economic cleavage?

The article examines the factors that determined the attitude of parliamentary parties towards eurozone anti-crisis measures. Using a statistical logit model, it demonstrates that, while all governing parties supported such measures, opposition parties were divided. The support of the former is explicable in terms of international obligations. The positions of opposition parties reflected their attitude towards European integration: Eurosceptic parties tended to oppose anti-crisis measures. Furthermore, whereas negative votes were less likely in countries marked by higher levels of popular trust in government and satisfaction with the problem-solving capacity of the EU, the likelihood of no votes increased as a function of the level of trust in national parliaments. The policy preferences of opposition parties, measured on the economic left–right scale, did not provide significant explanatory potential; nor did an additional test measuring the impact of extreme left?right positions.     

A Comparison of Tobacco Policy in the UK and Japan: If the Scientific Evidence is Identical,Why is There a Major Difference in Policy?

Tobacco policy in the UK and Japan has diverged markedly. In the 1980s, both countries oversaw regimes with minimal economic and regulatory policies. Now the UK has become one of the most, and Japan one of the least, controlled (advanced industrial) states. These developments are puzzling to public health scholars who give primary explanatory weight to scientific evidence and a vague notion of “political will”, because policy makers possessed the same evidence on the harms of tobacco, and made the same international commitment to comprehensive tobacco control. Instead, we identify the role of a mutually reinforcing dynamic in policy environments, facilitating policy change in the UK but not Japan: policy makers accepted the scientific evidence, framed tobacco as a public health epidemic, placed health departments at the heart of policy, formed networks with public health groups and excluded tobacco companies, and accentuated socio-economic conditions supportive of tobacco control. This dynamic helps explain why the UK became more likely to select each tobacco policy control instrument during a series of “windows of opportunity”. Such analysis, generated by policy theory, is crucial to contemporary science/practitioner debates on the politics of “evidence-based policy making”: the evidence does not speak for itself, and practitioners need to know how to use it effectively in policy environments.     

Transnational advocacy networks in global supply chains: a study of civil society organizations’ sugar movements in Cambodia

As a contribution to the growing literature on transnational advocacy networks (TANs) in the global production networks, this article examines how civil society organizations (CSOs), which have adopted the TAN approach, influence the sugar industry in Cambodia. Due to ineffective domestic influencing strategies, the CSOs adopted the TAN approach and escalated to an international supply chain movement approach (ISCMA) aiming to influence international stakeholders at each stage of the sugar supply chain in order to leverage boomerang pressure on the sugar producing companies and the Government of Cambodia. Despite its resourceful networking strategies, the ISCMA failed to leverage significant influence on the sugar companies and the government to achieve its demands. The failure was not due to weak networks, but was in part due to the political nexus between the government and the sugar companies. This article suggests that to ensure the effectiveness of CSOs’ actions within the TAN framework in the global production networks, one should take into account the power of the government in relation to local politico-commercial elites.     

The Dynamics of Domestic Coordination of EU Policy in the New Member States: Impossible to Lock In?

This paper examines the evolution of coordination structures for EU policy-making in the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. The study maps the main features of the established EU coordination machineries, and traces the most important reforms of their organisational structures. It proposes an actor-centred, ‘politics of institutional choice’ approach to explain the rapid and far-reaching changes in EU coordination structures in all the new member states. By contrast, two alternative frameworks focusing on efficiency and historical-institutional arguments emphasising the impact of early institutional lock-in fail to explain the specific institutional forms adopted and the considerable degree of institutional dynamics.     

The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (QLD): A form of private governance in action?

The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 (QLD) (ACHA) removes the Queensland Government from any direct role in the regulation of Aboriginal cultural heritage, and operates by encouraging and in certain circumstances, requiring agreements between developers and Aboriginal groups. This paper argues that these agreements constitute a form of private governance. Agreements between developers and Aboriginal groups have traditionally been seen as falling outside private governance literature as they are domestic and contractual in nature. However, private governance theory has recently been used to understand agreements between developers and Indigenous groups in Canada and this paper will demonstrate that the approach of the ACHA constitutes a form of private governance. This paper will analyse the ACHA against key principles for good governance and explore the challenges for the protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage when the state is removed as regulator.     

A novel understanding of experimentation in governance: co-producing innovations between “lab” and “field”

What do experiments do for governance? Along with pragmatist and performative conceptions, we argue that they do not test already existing conditions of governing, but actively transform such conditions. Experiments help to realize specific models of governance by co-producing collective knowledge and material practices. We analyze a series of experiments with “emissions trading” in the USA between 1968 and 2000. The historical perspective shows how different types of experiments worked together: experiments in the laboratory and in the field supported each other in creating epistemic and political authority. This “ping-pong between lab and field” produced subjects and objects, facts and values, knowledge and power and aligned them in a new socio-material configuration, thus realizing emissions trading as a new form of governance.