India,Brazil, and public health: Rule-making through south–south diffusion in the intellectual property rights regime?

This article analyzes the domestic drivers of regulatory state formation in India and Brazil and its consequences for the global rules governing pharmaceutical patents. We first analyze Indian and Brazilian politics of regulatory state formation; then, in light of the extent to which the two countries have built regulatory capacity and capability in the field of patent regulation, we explore whether and how they have been able to influence the existing intellectual property regime in health. We look into India's Section 3(d) and Brazil's prior consent requirement. Whereas India's Section 3(d) regulation has gained international regulatory influence by diffusing to other developing countries, the same cannot be said for Brazil's prior consent regulation, which has been caught by policy-reversals. The transition toward regulatory states in emerging countries is a bulky road and does not progress in linear ways. However, once regulatory capacity and capability have been solidified, domestic policy innovations can become internationally influential.     

Riding the Wave: World Trade and Factor‐Based Models of Democratization

Studies of “waves” of regime change, in which large numbers of countries experience similar political transitions at roughly similar periods of time, though once popular, have fallen from favor. Replacing the “third wave” arguments are several competing models relating domestic social structure—specifically, the distribution of income and factor ownership—to regime type. If any of these distributive models of regime type is correct, then global trade has an important explanatory role to play. Under factor‐based models, changes in the world trading system will have systematic effects on regime dynamics. Trade openness determines labor's factor income and ultimately its political power. As world trade expands and contracts, countries with similar labor endowments should experience similar regime pressures at the same time. We propose a novel empirical specification that addresses the endogeneity and data‐quality problems plaguing previous efforts to examine these arguments. We investigate the conditional impact of the global trading system on democratic transitions across 130 years and all of the states in the international system. Our findings cast doubt on the utility of factor‐based models of democratization, despite their importance in fueling renewed interest in the topic.     

The Role of National Human Rights Institutions in the Implementation of the UN Guiding Principles

National human rights institutions (NHRIs) are key domestic mechanisms for promotion and protection of human rights. The institutions' broad mandate, competencies, and special status between state and nonstate actors on the one hand, and special status between the national and international levels on the other hand enable them to engage effectively in the field of business and human rights. Since 2009, NHRIs have been engaging with the international human rights system in order to increase understanding and raise awareness of their role in addressing business and human rights issues. As a result, they have contributed to the development of the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework and obtained an evolving role within all pillars of the framework and in its implementation. This paper presents how these domestic institutions, bridging the national and international levels, fit into the UN legal regime for corporate responsibility for human rights and what contribution they make to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.     

Democratization,civil society,and women's organizing in post-revolutionary Mozambique and Nicaragua

Mozambique and Nicaragua have each experienced a transition from a Marxist–Leninist, revolutionary state to a liberal–democratic–capitalist, multi-party state in the 1990s. However, in Mozambique, the historic party of the revolution, FRELIMO, remains the party in power, whil in Nicaragua the Sandinistas have been the opposition party since 1990. What impact have these transitions had on democracy, civil society, and the nature of women's organizing in the post-revolutionary period in each country? This article offers a critical examination of the notions of “democratization” and “civil society” by assessing the gains and losses that each country has experienced in terms of political, economic, and participatory democracy in the post-revolutionary period. Then, using the example of contemporary women's movements and current constructions of “feminism” emerging in each country, this article attempts to show the potential of autonomous women's organizing in civil society today.     

Tracing and periodizing China's food safety regulation: A study on China's food safety regime change

How has China's food safety administrative system changed since it was founded in 1949? How can we periodize the process of this historical transformation in terms of regulators, regulatees, and regulatory tools? This review article offers an analytical framework that distinguishes three regimes in the history of China's food safety governance: an old regime of command and control (1949–1977), an intermediate regime of mixed instruments (1978–1992), and a new regime of regulatory governance (1993–ongoing). In the article the regimes' features, advantages, disadvantages, and development tracks are discussed, and the groundwork is laid for an analysis of China's emerging regulatory state. Finally, a new notion of “transitional regulatory state” is used to define the current Chinese regulatory state based on its food safety regulation.     

International diffusion of regulatory governance: EU actorness in public procurement

This paper attempts to go beyond actor‐centered explanations of the European Union's (EU) presence in regulatory politics by examining the role of the EU in the diffusion of regulatory norms and practices. We explore the international diffusion of public procurement policy, to which multiple organizations and especially the EU and the World Trade Organization have made an active contribution. Using the “opportunity‐presence‐capability” scheme, we argue that the EU is actively co‐shaping the global agenda on public procurement, mainly as a result of the “opportunity” and “presence” dimensions of its global actorness and its role in the horizontal diffusion of public procurement regulations between international organizations. For “EU as a global actor” literature to offer valuable explanations, an in‐depth analysis of its relationship with other international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization, reveals significant interactions and the co‐shaping of policy agendas.     

Highway to the Danger Zone: United States Legislative Framework Regulating the Commercial Space Sector

The last decade has been witness to a rapid rise of the commercial space sectors of many countries. This development offers myriad prospects for the development and exploration of outer space, but simultaneously poses threats to the international community if not regulated properly. The potential dangers of outer space activity were recognized by both the United States and the former Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War, which led to the concretization of the international legal regime regulating outer space activities. However, without the enforcement of these legal standards at the municipal level of the state, this regime is ineffective. Therefore, it is an imperative that all states with a commercial space presence develop national space legislation that appropriately incorporates international standards. The U.S. space legislation is, at present, the most robust legal framework which addresses many of the necessary concerns. At the same time, in attempts to promote the growth of its space sector, the U.S. regime regulating commercial space ignores some of the standards developed in the international regime. The critical evaluation of the salient features of the U.S. legislation undertaken by this article serves as a guide for many states seeking to develop their own legislation regulating the commercial space industry. It serves as a guide to adopting comprehensive standards of protections provided for in the U.S. legislation and the International Law Association’s “Model Law on National Space Legislation,” but also cautions against the dangers of weaponization, poor environmental protection, and exposure to international liability. A thorough legislative framework that adequately balances economic, strategic, and political concerns with accepted legal principles of international law is essential to prevent commercial space activities from becoming a “highway to the danger zone.”     

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

Communicative Diplomacy for the 3rd Millennium

Abstract

In today's world of revolution in communications and information as well as of global interdependency, a medialised politics became a general reality. One can observe such a trend specifically in the field of international and foreign affairs where state and other actors use communication channels and public relations to a large extent to improve on the content and in particular, on the image of their policies. Here one can also argue that a major share of bilateral and multilateral relations among states is shaped by the international media, or vice versa, that all major “wars” are “fought” through the media.

This article explores the increasing inter-relation between state foreign affairs on one side, and media and public relations, on the other. The article starts off with basic concepts of a “new/democratic diplomacy” (Nicholson, 1988) and a “public diplomacy” (Signitzer in Combs, 1992), and compares them with definitions of “international public relations” (Kunczik, 1997). It attempts to build the general analytical framework on the basis of comparative case studies of developed countries with an established diplomatic tradition and of new democracies still proving themselves on the international fora. In this context, particular attention is given to communication in relation to international organisations like NATO and the EU.     

Effects of Exchange Rate Regime on IMF Program Participation

This article investigates the effect of a domestic policy choice, the exchange rate regime, on countries’ interaction with an international institution, their participation in International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending agreements. I hypothesize that the effect of the level of international reserves on a country's probability of participation in an IMF program depends on the exchange rate regime. A low level of international reserves threatens unfavorable economic and political outcomes only in countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate regime. The level of reserves may thus be a significant determinant of participation in IMF programs only for countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate regime. I use a dynamic univariate probit model of IMF program participation to assess empirically the effect of reserves in countries that maintain fixed, intermediate, and floating exchange rate regimes. The empirical results support my hypothesis: reserves have a significant effect only in countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate.     

Law as a System of Rights: A Critical Perspective

The “rhetorical incorporation of human rights terminology” into domestic law is the central concern of this article. Over the last 20 years or so, countries have faced international pressure to conform to human rights standards in order to enjoy legitimacy. However, there is a huge gap between what is legalized as “human rights” in domestic laws and what is set forth as “human rights” in international human rights instruments. Based on this presupposition that a proper incorporation of human rights on the books is a prerequisite for putting them into practice, this study by adopting a Systems Thinking approach seeks to show that law as a soft system on the books is more than the name and number of rights. It is a complex whole whose function depends on not only the name and number of rights but also different features of rights and the relationships between them. To this end, law is conceived as a system of rights that has five major features including the “frame of reference,” “scope of rights,” “orientation of rights,” “enforceability of rights,” and “realizability of rights.” The way of codification of human rights with respect to each of these features makes a big difference in implementing human rights in practice. To develop a heuristic devise for evaluating the situation of human rights in current legal systems, the conceptual space of law as a system of rights is depicted in a matrix called a “Rights Fabric Matrix.”     

Globalization and Governance Capacity: Explaining Divergence in National Forest Programs as Instances of “Next‐Generation” Regulation in Canada and Europe

New policy initiatives are increasingly embedded in novel governance strategies. These new modes of governance differ from existing policy mixes in that they are specifically designed to reduce the number of instances of counterproductive policy instrument use; to function effectively and meet public policy goals in an era of decreased national state capacity and autonomy; and rely much more heavily than existing instrument mixes have done on the involvement of private actors in both policy formulation and implementation. These instances of contemporary policy design require careful analysis in order to understand where and when such designs may be adopted and, more importantly, prove effective. This article examines efforts made in Europe and Canada to develop “next‐generation” forest policy strategies and finds considerable divergence in the new regulatory processes put into place in different countries. Following Knill and Lehmkuhl, this divergence is attributed to changing patterns of domestic actor capacities in the face of weak international regimes.     

Stem Cell Research and Technology in Iran—Window of Opportunity in the Midst of International Tension

This paper aims to explain how the key characteristics of “stem cell research” as an emerging technology facilitate the strategy of an Iranian organization, namely, “the Royan Institute” to learn by interaction and to generate knowledge. It argues that the Royan could take advantage of the window of opportunity that stem cell research and technology had temporarily opened up but its endeavors are now being hampered by unfavorable international factors and weak domestic infrastructure. The article substantiates the case by giving an objective account of networking and gatekeeping in the process of learning/innovation at the Royan and concludes by questioning the continuity of the actual learning strategy in order to sustain the Royan's knowledge production.     

Europeanization and Domestic Employment Policy Change: Conceptual and Methodological Background

The article deals with the differential domestic employment policy adaptation to the European Employment Strategy that occurred over the past years in two European countries—Italy and France. Building on the Europeanization and welfare state change literature, the contribution operationalizes the “goodness of fit” hypothesis and develops a “policy structure” approach for the analysis of domestic employment policy change. The main argument is that domestic adaptation to the European Union depends primarily on the preferences of key institutional and social actors, and not on the specific design of domestic institutions. More in general, the article not only supports the validity of the misfit hypothesis but also shows how the nature and intensity of domestic preferences do explain differential patterns of adaptation to Europe (policy transformation in the Italian case, policy adjustment in the French case) in similar conditions of policy “misfit.”     

Signed but Not Ratified: Limits to U.S. Participation in International Environmental Agreements

Why does the United States sign environmental treaties but not ratify them? U.S. presidents have negotiated and signed several environmental treaties that ultimately could not obtain Senate ratification. This article considers two alternative explanations. First, presidents may face divided government and upcoming elections; elections can increase uncertainty regarding ratification, because they upset majorities and change congressional preferences on issues. Such factors may have caused “involuntary” defection from international environmental cooperation. Second, compensation and compromise on enabling legislation could satisfy enough senators and their constituents to allow the legislation's passage. Failure to secure ratification may be a result of the president's overestimating the potential for negotiating a policy package capable of creating sufficient support to obtain Senate ratification. I compare domestic constraints on U.S. participation in three international environmental negotiations—climate change, biodiversity, and chemicals—to assess the alternative explanations. The cases exemplify how domestic institutions affect international environmental cooperation.     

Retrenchment of Social Policy by Other Means: A Comparison of Agricultural and Housing Policy in Turkey

Abstract

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected by “social policy by other means”. Based on a comparative analysis of two major unconventional welfare programs in Turkey, agricultural state support and access to squatter housing, this article explains retrenchment of social policy by other means. Agricultural retrenchment was the result of coercive policy transfer from international organizations in a post-crisis context, while the retrenchment of squatter housing was driven by domestic political entrepreneurs responding to decreases in the availability of urban land and the number of informal squatters. In both cases, retrenchment became politically sustainable due to functional replacement with more conventional welfare programs. This analysis challenges the narrow focus of mainstream welfare state research, provides an explanation of retrenchment of social policy by other means, and enhances our understanding of Turkey’s uneven welfare state development.     

Domestic regulatory reform and transgovernmental networks: Brazil and China in the global competition regime

Developing countries increasingly participate in transgovernmental networks of global regulatory governance, but they do so in different ways. This article aims to provide an explanation for this variation for two of the major emerging powers in the world economy, Brazil and China, in their transition toward more active players in the global competition regime. Distinguishing between bilateral and multilateral transgovernmental networks and examining the domestic factors conditioning the transition of their national competition agencies from rule-takers to rule-promoters or rule-makers through these networks, the article makes theoretical contributions to the linkage between transgovernmentalism and the regulatory state. I argue that differing political needs and the incomplete process of regulatory state formation push domestic agencies to join transgovernmental networks, with a need for greater legitimacy steering the Brazilian regulators to multilateral networks and facilitating their transition from rule-takers to rule-promoters. The Chinese agencies' primary need for expertise rather than legitimacy, by contrast, led them to pursue technical assistance and cooperation via bilateral relationships. The Chinese approach has slowed its transition from rule-taker to rule-promoter where its norms and practices are aligned with the established powers. Such approach will further impede its transition into a global rule-maker in areas of competition law and policy where China's preferences diverge.     

The “baby steps” in mainstreaming sustainable public procurement in Ghana: A “double‐agency” perspective

The emerging literature on public procurement policy suggests that public procurement may be leveraged to advance several public policy agenda. Hence, many countries have reformed their public procurement process towards social and environmental outcomes termed sustainable public procurement. These reforms have often been launched in response to international initiatives such as the global 10‐year framework for action on sustainable consumption and production by the Johannesburg implementation plan in 2002 and the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, empirical evidence on the drivers and benefits of SPP in developing countries is still scarce. This gap is addressed with a qualitative case study of six public sector institutions in Ghana. On the basis of elite interviews, this paper highlights barriers to mainstreaming SPP in Ghana's public sector. We further advance the scanty principal–agency literature by establishing a double‐agency relationship in the context of SPP, which depicts limited agency cases where principals lack the capacity to defend their own interests.