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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f
G L OBA L P OL IC Y A N D T R A N SNAT IONA L A DM I N I ST R AT ION
The Oxford Handbook of
GLOBAL POLICY AND TRANSNATIONAL ADMINISTRATION Edited by
DIANE STONE
University of Canberra and University of Warwick and
KIM MOLONEY Murdoch University
1
3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authorhave been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965948 ISBN 978–0–19–875864–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Foreword The Transnational Challenge to Public Administration and the Policy Sciences In our times of interdependence, the individual state and its public authorities can no longer claim to deliver alone what is needed to ensure citizens’ optimal ability to pursue individual happiness. Designing and implementing contemporary policies— from protecting privacy in the information age, fighting international terrorism, preparing for infectious diseases and protecting the environment, or regulating maritime transportation and international finance—requires close, intense, and often permanent cooperation across territorial borders. Making policy across borders involves a variety of institutions and agoras populated by experts from public as well as from private organizations, who stretch across policy sectors and via multiple levels of governments from the subnational to the supranational. To understand the transition our states, economies, and societies are going through, and in order to identify the challenges ahead, we need to reflect how legitimate and effective policy making ‘beyond the state’ works and how it is administered. This is easier said than done. As was probably the case with all grand transformations, those in the midst of the experience may have the hardest time making sense of what is going on, distinguishing the relevant from the ephemeral, and developing collective responses that are fair and that work. Few doubt that we currently are in such a transition phase. Academics have the duty to collect observations, to provide clues about what systematically drives the forces at work, to give their bestinformed guesses as to the direction events are developing in, and to suggest where questions of legitimacy and accountability may arise. Doing so with a view to policy making and public management in a globalizing world is a daunting endeavour; especially since our thinking about the range and substance of what is legitimate democratic rule—the norms, configurations, and mechanisms guiding and structuring public life—runs on a political philosophy that peaked in the nineteenth century or a little later. In other words, our categories, concepts, and theories might no longer fit our realities—a reality that appears increasingly coined by the dissolution of borders, by the relativity of physical presence as well as by the rising complexity of economic life.
vi Foreword Against this background, analysts of modern ‘polity, politics, and policy’ have the duty to try to apprehend the new with the help of the traditional. However, at a time when the old and the new are contemporaneous and proper yardsticks are lacking, differentiating the irrelevant from the innovative is intricately difficult. We all need to think harder, but we also need to muster as much empirical evidence of the ongoing transformations to test propositions, to explore the explanatory power of concepts and the validity (and reliability) of theories. The way ahead will be one of trial and error—also in the area of academic reflection and interpretation. The Handbook takes on the challenge—in an admirably systematic and comprehensive way. It engages with what is and how we are able to assure effective government in a world of waning borders, the proliferation of ever more—and ever more diverse— actors, the emergence of new technologies and the rise of new power politics and anti- pluralistic ideologies. The chapters show that we are only at the beginning of an exciting intellectual journey over new and uncharted territory. The presented reflections make clear, however, that we are not confronting a terra incognita. Public Policy and Public Administration are not entirely unprepared. A lot of work has been done already, stemming from various corners of our discipline, and employing a multitude of perspectives. It has become clear that taking issue with the transnational requires a disposition for being open to answers increasingly off the beaten track. The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration is an excellent companion for the journey ahead, as it offers an invaluable orientation at a critical moment. The impressive research assembled underscores how contemporary policy making and public administration transcend and dissolve hierarchies, territories and policy sectors and produce new mixtures of collective action between private and public as well as between local and global communities. To be sure, the analysis of forms and norms, of processes and actor configurations, of effects and pitfalls in the emerging transnational domain is a prime topic of political speeches and academic research. While the consequences of globalization may receive the greatest attention, its effects for national administrative systems, their bureaucratic elites, and domestic organizational arrangements more generally have obtained much less attention. It is the social sciences—broadly defined—to which people have turned for an orientation on what globalization is, and how it affects us. But it is Public Administration, Public Management and the Policy Sciences that have the obligation to provide concrete solutions for transnational problems, to deliver appropriate organizational designs, and to suggest sustainable policies and implementation structures in response to the emerging challenge. In addition, people do expect—and rightly so—that Public Administration, Public Management and the Policy Sciences instruct the next generation of students how to deliver collective action for wicked transnational problems that defy territorial borders and stretch over policy communities, regional cultures, and technical sectors. Students of public administration and public policy will not only find the state of the art in the present volume, they will also be inspired to think outside the box by engaging in a dialogue with top experts in their respective fields when reading the subsequent chapters.
Foreword vii It is said that the scholarly communities of Public Administration and Public Management—perhaps somewhat less so for researchers in the Policy Sciences—have neglected the challenges deriving from the ongoing transnational transformation in the past. This past, however, has long gone. This volume marks a turning point as it makes the state of the art visible and accessible to a broad community of experts and students in this field and beyond. Organized into forty chapters over an impressive range of topics— stretching from transformations of policy making and administrative authority in view of global challenges, over diffusion patterns, global–local dilemmas, global public goods, international political economy, the emergence of transnational communities and networks to the role of global consultancies, transnational firms and philanthropic foundations—the state of the art is brought to the point. This includes chapters considering the limits of administrative sovereignty, the paradiplomatic potential of cities, the administration of fragility, where charisma influences early international organization histories, and whether civil servant protections common to the domestic space extend to the transnational. No other free-standing publication assembles an equally comprehensive collection of virtually all relevant aspects of transnationalization in the public policy and administration area, including frames, processes, and institutions, actors, instruments as well as paradigms, conceptualizations and theoretical approaches. Readers will learn about new concepts that provide innovative foci and a fresh view to the available empirical evidence, and, at the same time, how central approaches of the field are revisited and their performance tested against new administrative and policy configurations, behaviour and outcomes. This volume starts what is really needed in the area of comparative public administration and policy analysis, namely to begin by developing a new language, to reference concepts, to test their applicability on the real problems of a changing world, and to put actors and organizations of globalization—be they private, public or hybrid—centre stage. The contributors offer various conceptualizations of the transnational, new perspectives on political, social, and economic developments as well as the driving forces that constitute the current transformation of our societies and political systems. Each has put public administration and policy perspectives back at the centre of our understanding by encouraging us to make sense of transnational spaces. The authors put these contemporary challenges centre stage and ask about the conditions under which consciously designed and democratically legitimized problem-solving is possible. It becomes clear that transnational interactions may emerge as self-governance across nation states, but most of the time they may still require some form of institutional backing by public authorities—or the very involvement of public authorities from national, international or subnational levels themselves. It is thus the study of collective action by non-state and public actors across territorial borders, systemic levels, legal orders, cultural milieus, and economies of different stages of development that the constitutes the core aspiration of this handbook’s analysis. The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration systematically helps to narrow the conceptual gap between the national and the global.
viii Foreword Nevertheless, much work still lies ahead. We need to engage in theoretical synthesis of the various phenomena under study in a global policy and transnational administration perspective. The shared terminology that emerges from this volume will give a head start to those willing to carry on with this work. The way ahead will involve further empirical analysis and conceptual thinking, the synthesis of the complexities we encounter as well as persuasive theoretical propositions, innovative conceptualizations, testable hypotheses and rigorous empirical strategies to guide further studies. The Handbook constitutes an invaluable contribution to all these endeavours. It underscores that it is of utmost importance for Public Administration and the Policy Sciences to come to grips with the fundamental changes that transnationalization inflicts upon the institutions and communities of democratic public life. The scholarly community and all those who are interested to understand how globalization changes policy making and public administration are indebted to Diane Stone, Kim Moloney, and their contributors for their joint effort. The Handbook is an important achievement and will be a milestone on the way ahead. I have no doubt that its impact will be long lasting. Dr Michael W. Bauer Jean Monnet Professor of Comparative Public Administration and Policy Analysis, German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer and Professor (Part-Time), School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute
Acknowledgements
In undertaking this compendium, we acknowledge the material assistance from our universities, past and present, as well as the financial support of the taxpayers and benefactors who have funded these institutions.
Contents
List of Box and Figure List of Tables List of Contributors List of Abbreviations
xv xvii xix xxxvii
PA RT ON E F ROM NAT IONA L PA R A DIG M S TO T H E I N T E R NAT IONA L I Z AT ION OF P OL IC Y A N D A DM I N I S T R AT ION 1. The Rise of Global Policy and Transnational Administration Diane Stone and Kim Moloney 2. Global Public Policy and the Constitution of Political Authority Grace Skogstad 3. Globalization and Internationalization: Impact upon the State and the Civil Service Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen 4. The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty Karl T. Muth
3 23
41 59
5. State Fragility, International Development Policy, and Global Responses Derick W. Brinkerhoff
75
6. International Policy Transfer: Between the Global and Sovereign and between the Global and Local Mark Evans
94
7. International Policy Entrepreneurship Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens
111
8. City Networks and Paradiplomacy as Global Public Policy Heidi Jane M. Smith
129
xii Contents
9. International NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy: Opportunities and Obstacles in the Twenty-First Century Kelly Ann Krawczyk 10. The International Civil Service Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal
148 165
11. Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions for Grand Social Challenges Susana Borrás
182
12. Sovereignty Renewed: Transgovernmental Policy Networks and the Global–Local Dilemma Timothy Legrand
200
PA RT T WO G L OBA L P OL IC Y F R A M E S , P RO C E S SE S , A N D I N S T I T U T ION S 13. Scales and Network Societies: The Expansion of Global Public Policy 223 William D. Coleman 14. The Transnationalization of Public Spheres and Global Policy Ingrid Volkmer 15. Conceptualizing Global Public Policy: A Global Public Good Perspective Inge Kaul 16. Regionalization and Transregional Policies Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev 17. European Union Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy and Transnational Administration Stella Ladi 18. International Political Economy: A Global ‘Policy Turn’? Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo 19. Law–Space Nexus, Global Governance, and Global Administrative Law Ming-Sung Kuo
240
257 274
293 310
328
Contents xiii
20. Filling the Gap: Global Masters of Public Administration and Public Policy Programmes Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim
346
21. Global Policy and Transnational Administration: Intellectual Currents in World Making Diane Stone
364
22. Knowledge Networks, Scientific Communities, and Evidence-Informed Policy Ole Jacob Sending
383
23. The Importance of Informal Intergovernmental Organizations: A Typology of Transnational Administration without Independent Secretariats Felicity Vabulas
401
24. Transnational Administration from the Beginning: The Importance of Charisma in Shaping International Organizational Norms Jill L. Tao
419
25. Designing Global Public Policies in the Twenty-First Century Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet
437
26. The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks Laura Chaqués-Bonafont
453
PA RT T H R E E AC TOR S , I N S T RUM E N T S , A N D I M P L E M E N TAT ION I N T R A N SNAT IONA L A DM I N I ST R AT ION 27. Transnational Policy Communities and Regulatory Networks as Global Administration Alexander Gaus
471
28. Standard Setting and International Peer Review: The OECD as a Transnational Policy Actor Leslie A. Pal
491
29. Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes and Their Impacts on Governance and Operations Daniele Alesani
509
xiv Contents
30. Development Partnerships’ Governance Structures, Accountability, and Participation Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott
529
31. Governance and Administration in Global Health Organizations: Considering the Legacies of the ‘Golden Era’ of Global Health Policy? Carmen Huckel Schneider
547
32. Organized Business and Global Public Policy: Administration, Participation, and Regulation Karsten Ronit
565
33. The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms in Global Public Policy Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel
583
34. Compliance in Transnational Regulation: A Global Supply Chain Approach Fabrizio Cafaggi
599
35. Providing Foundations: Philanthropy, Global Policy, and Administration Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow
619
36. Global Summitry as Sites of Transnational Technocratic Management and Policy Contestation Andrew F. Cooper
638
37. Heads of International Organizations: Politicians, Diplomats, Managers Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong
655
38. International Civil Servant Management: A Personnel-Influenced Research Agenda Kim Moloney
671
39. The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability Muna Ndulo
691
40. International Organizations, Civil Servants, and Whistleblowing James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney
710
Index
729
B ox and Figure
Box 15.1
Defining global public goods.
261
Figure 15.1
The provision paths of GPGs.
262
Tables
28.1 OECD Main Committees (as of September 2018)
494
28.2 Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs (bodies supported as of September 2018) 496 32.1
Participation and Collaboration between Major Peak and Industry Associations and Major Intergovernmental Organizations 573
Contributors
Daniele Alesani is senior faculty member of SDA Bocconi School of Management. In his professional and academic career, he has extensively worked on the main issues related to financial management, change management, organizational development, and business process improvement in public sector organizations. He has extensively studied management systems and reforms in intergovernmental institutions and NGOs and published a comprehensive monograph on the subject in 2014. He continues to develop a research agenda aimed at fostering transparency, accountability, and result orientation of the transnational public sector. Since 2007, Daniele has been collaborating with United Nations system organizations to support change management projects and to develop and implement innovative managerial practices and tools. Currently, Daniele is a Management Specialist with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, providing advisory services to senior management aimed to strengthen programmatic effectiveness and operational excellence. Susana Borrás is Professor of Innovation and Governance at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She earned her Ph.D. degree in the European University Institute, Florence (Italy) and her Master’s degree at the Autonomous University Barcelona (Spain). She conducts research on the interaction between governments and innovation. Her field of expertise is in public policy, with particular focus on socio-technical innovation and change. She is interested in questions regarding decision-making, effective implementation and instrumentation, as well as the democratic legitimacy of public action. She has substantial experience in university leadership and in several non-academic organizations and boards. She is currently serving as member of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences (Akademiet for de Tekniske Videnskaber—ATV), and on the editorial boards of five international peerreviewed academic journals. She regularly advises national governments and international organizations on issues related to her field of expertise. James S. Bowman is Professor of Public Administration at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University. Noted for his work in ethics and human resource management, Dr Bowman is author of over 125 journal articles and book chapters, as well as editor of six anthologies. Bowman is co-author of the prize- winning Human Resource Management in Public Service: Paradoxes, Processes and Problems (6th ed., Sage, forthcoming) and The Professional Edge: Competencies in Public Service (2nd ed., Sharpe, 2010). He is also the contributing co-editor of American Public
xx Contributors Service: Radical Reform and the Merit System (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007). His most recent book is Public Service Ethics: Individual and Institutional Responsibilities (2nd ed., Taylor & Francis, forthcoming). He served as the inaugural editor-in-chief of Public Integrity (1995–2014), an American Society for Public Administration journal co-sponsored by three other professional associations. A past Fellow of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, as well as a Kellogg Foundation Fellow, he has experience in the military, civil service, and business. He is a National Academy of Public Administration Fellow. Derick W. Brinkerhoff is Distinguished Fellow in International Public Management with RTI International and is an associate faculty member at George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. His research and consulting work focuses on policy implementation, democracy and governance, decentralization, citizen participation, social accountability, partnerships, and fragile conflict-affected states. He has published widely, including eight books and numerous articles and book chapters. His latest book, a co-edited volume published in 2016 by the RTI Press, is Governance and Service Delivery: Practical Applications of Social Accountability Across Sectors. He holds a doctorate in public policy and administration from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, elected in 2010. His previous work experience includes senior positions at Abt Associates Inc., the International Development Management Center at the University of Maryland, and the US Agency for International Development. Fabrizio Cafaggi is a member of the Italian Council of State. Former Professor of Private Law at the University of Trento, of comparative law at the European University Institute, and of comparative law and regulation at the School of National Administration. He is a founding member of the European Law Institute and an affiliate member of the American Law Institute, as well as former director of the European Center for Judicial Cooperation at EUI. He was visiting professor at Columbia University, NYU School of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Universidad de San Andres Buenos Aires, Universidad Pontificia Perù. He is the scientific coordinator of the REJUS project and has collaborated with Unidroit, UNCITRAL, FAO, IFAD, World Bank, and OECD. His research interests include transnational private regulation, international commercial contracts, contracting in global supply chains, judicial cooperation in Europe and transatlantic domains, European private law, behavioural sciences, and public administration. His most recent publications include Judicial Cooperation in European Private Law (with Stephanie Law (Edward Elgar, 2017)). Laura Chaqués-Bonafont is Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona, and Research Fellow at the Institut Brcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). She is the Principal Investigator of the research group Quality of Democracy (www.Q-Dem. com), which aims to analyse how and why policy makers prioritize issues in a comparative perspective. The project establishes a link between policy dynamics research and other areas of concern within political science, mainly political representation,
Contributors xxi interest groups, and the quality of democracy in multi-level systems of governance. It also provides new tools for the development of quantitative measurement of agenda dynamics. She is the author of three books Estructura y Política Farmacéutica (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2002), Redes de Políticas Públicas (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2004), and Agenda Dynamics in Spain (with Frank Baumgartner and A. Palau (Springer, 2015)), and a large number of book chapters, and articles in academic journals like Comparative Political Studies, The British Journal of Political Science, West European Politics, Political Communication, and the Journal of Public Policy. At present, her research focuses on the analysis of agenda dynamics, political representation in multi-level systems of governance, transparency, and right to information policies and interest groups. In 2014, she won the ICREA academia prize. Meng-Hsuan Chou is Nanyang Assistant Professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme at NTU Singapore, Associate Fellow at EU Centre Singapore, and Convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on the Politics of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation. She studied political science at University of California, Berkeley (B.A.), European public administration at Leiden University (M.A.), European politics and society at Oxford University (M.Phil.), and international studies at Cambridge University (Ph.D.). Hsuan was previously a postdoctoral researcher at ARENA—Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Academic Coordinator of UACES collaborative research network on the European Research Area, Visiting Scholar at SCANCOR, Stanford University, and Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies, South Africa. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public policy, regionalism, and International Relations. Hsuan has co- edited The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global /Transforming the Local (Routledge, 2016) and published her research in, inter alia, the Journal of European Public Policy, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Policy and Society (all her publications are available for download at www.menghsuanchou.com). Hsuan acknowledges generous support from the Ministry of Education Singapore (Tier 1) and NTU Singapore (NAP grant) for this research. William D. Coleman is Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He served three years as the Director of the Ph.D. in Global Governance Programme and the M.A. programme in Global Governance. He was the Founding Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He had the privilege of being a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at McMaster for thirty-two years and holds the title of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at McMaster University. In 2010, he was awarded the title Shakorihonnién:ni (Associate Professor), Deyohaná:ge (Indigenous Knowledge Center), Six Nations Polytechnic, Six Nations Grand River Territory. In 2015, he was awarded the title of ‘University Professor’ by the University of Waterloo.
xxii Contributors Andrew F. Cooper is Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. From 2003 to 2010, he was Associate Director and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He is also an Associate Research Fellow at UNU CRIS Bruges, Belgium. Holding a D.Phil. from Oxford University, he has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, The Australian National University, Stellenbosch University, and the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg, Germany. He was a Fulbright Research Chair at USC in 2009, Fulbright Scholar in the Western Hemisphere Program at SAIS in 2000, and the Léger Fellow, DFAIT Canada in 1993–94. He is the author/co-author of twelve books, including, most recently, BRICS VSI (OUP, 2016); Diplomatic Afterlives (Polity, 2014); Group of 20 (Routledge, 2012); Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism (Palgrave, 2011); and Celebrity Diplomacy (Paradigm, 2007). He is also the editor/co-editor of twenty-two collections including the Oxford Handbook of Diplomacy (OUP, 2013). His scholarly publications have appeared in a number of prestigious journals such as International Organization, International Affairs, World Development, International Studies Review, International Interactions, Global Policy Journal, Washington Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Global Governance. The chapter has benefited greatly from conversations with a number of experts including former officials with extensive experience in G7 and G20 summitry. Alan Alexandroff and the editors read draft versions and contributed a number of insightful comments that improved the work. Mark Evans is the Director and Professor of Governance at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. He was formerly Director of the World-wide Universities Public Policy Network, Vice President of the Joint University Council for the Applied Social Sciences, Head of Politics at the University of York in the United Kingdom and Dean of the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra. Mark has played an international role in supporting change governance practices and has acted as a senior policy advisor, and managed research and evaluation projects for twenty-six countries, the European Union, United Nations, and the World Bank. His latest book (with Gerry Stoker) is Social Science and Evidence Based Policymaking—Methods That Matter (Policy Press, 2016). He is the editor of the international journal Policy Studies and has been awarded honorary positions with the universities of Gadjah Mahda, Renmin, York, and Hull. Michal Frenkel is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively on centre–periphery relations in organization studies, international management, critical management studies, gender, ethnicity, race, and religiosity in and around organizations and in the context of globalization and glocalization. Her papers have appeared in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organizations, and others. She has been a visiting fellow at Harvard Center for European Studies, a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis
Contributors xxiii Institute and a Visiting Professor at Smith College. She serves on the editorial boards of Organization Studies and Sociological Theory. Ivaylo Gatev is Taiwan Fellow at the European Union Center, Taiwan National University. His research interests are in interregionalism, networked industries and techno-politics, all in a Eurasian context. He studies how regional organizations, such as the European Union, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, interact at the level of transport and energy infrastructure. His publications have appeared in the journals European Foreign Affairs Review, European Politics and Society, and the International Journal of Energy Security and Environmental Research, as well as in edited volumes and handbooks. Between 2009 and 2017, Dr Gatev was Lecturer in European Politics and Regional Integration at the School of International Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is a recipient of a Taiwan Fellowship at the European Union Centre in Taiwan, National Taiwan University, where he was a Visiting Researcher. Alexander Gaus is PhD graduate of the University of Potsdam at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was part of the research group project, Wicked Problems, Contested Administrations: Knowledge, Coordination, Strategy, where he did research on an international agency collaboration in the area of competition policy. He also works as a project manager at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), a non-profit and independent think tank in Berlin. His research and consulting work focuses on humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, and monitoring and evaluation. He holds a Master’s degree in political science with a focus on International Relations from the University of Freiburg, and received a Diplôme d’Administration et Politique Internationale from the Université Pierre Mèndes France in Grenoble, France. He also holds a postgraduate diploma in public management from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Jenny Harrow is Professor in Management, Cass Business School, City University of London, UK. She holds a doctorate and Master’s qualification in Social Policy and Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her undergraduate degree, in Politics, is from the University of Exeter. She was Co-Director and Principal Investigator for the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy, a five- university consortium, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, 2008–14: the UK’s first publicly funded research centre for philanthropy. Jenny is currently co-director of this Centre’s successor, CGAP@Cass. She has research interests in philanthropy in public policy development, communities, governance and historical contexts, and in voluntary sector management, and has expertise in doctoral supervision, contributing to doctoral programme development and mentoring new scholars. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Jenny is committed to collaborative research, and has extensive experience of charity trusteeship. Richard Higgott is Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick where he was Foundation Director of the ESRC Centre for Globalisation and Regionalisation. He is now Research Professor at the Institute of
xxiv Contributors European Studies and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Diplomacy at Vesalius College at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, working on an EU Horizon 2020 research project on Cultural and Science Diplomacy. He has also held Chair-level appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Manchester. A former Fulbright and Hallsworth Fellow, he has been President of the Australasian Political Science Association and a Vice President of the International Studies Association. He is the author, co-author, or editor of some twenty volumes including Political Development Theory (Routledge, 1983) and Relocating Middle Powers: Australia and Canada in an Evolving World Order (UBC Press, 1993). 120 plus peer-reviewed chapters and articles have appeared in journals including International Organization, Political Science Quarterly, International Political Science Review, International Affairs, International Politics, Review of International Studies, Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, and The European Journal of Public Policy. Over time he has edited three peer-reviewed journals: The Australian Journal of International Affairs, Global Governance, and The Pacific Review. Carmen Huckel Schneider is Senior Lecturer in Health Policy, Director of the Master of Health Policy and co-lead of the Politics and Governance of Health Group at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney. She is also Adviser, Knowledge Exchange and Translation, at the Sax Institute in Sydney, Australia. Carmen completed her doctorate at the University of Tübingen, Germany, researching the legitimacy and stakeholder receptivity of global health organizations. Carmen has published on topics of global health governance as well as interdisciplinary health policy, the use of complexity science for understanding health systems, health system governance and knowledge translation. Her current research examines how global health research and advocacy networks organize for increased voice and sustainability; and how health system governance influences access and equity in health care. Bok Jeong is Assistant Professor at the Kean University in New Jersey in the United States. His research interests include comparative civil society, non-profit accountability, social enterprise and entrepreneurship, and partnership between civil society and international organizations. His dissertation examined the forces shaping the civil society sector and its surrounding accountability environments, taking a comparative look at non-profits in the United States and South Korea. Dr Jeong earned his Ph.D. degree in the fields of public administration and international development from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh in the US in 2013. He worked as an intern in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations in 2012. He convened a Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) Conference Session themed ‘Bringing Nonprofit and Nongovernmental Organizations into Globalized Public Affairs Curricula’ in DC in the US in October 2017. He has written multiple book chapters and published his research in multiple peer-reviewed journals, including VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Asian Survey, Korea Observer, Contemporary
Contributors xxv Politics, Social Enterprise Journal, and the Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Tobias Jung is Reader in Management and the director and founder of the Centre for the Study of Philanthropy & Public Good at the University of St Andrews. He is co- editor of the international handbook on philanthropy, The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy, lead editor of the new Global Perspectives on Philanthropy and Public Good series published by the Policy Press, and book review editor for Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ). Prior to joining the University of St Andrews’ School of Management, Tobias was Principal Research Fellow at Cass Business School City University London, where he worked with the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy (CGAP) and the Centre for Charity Effectiveness (CCE). He is a former Governor and Member of the Boards of Trustees of the St Katharine and Shadwell Trust and of London’s East End Community Foundation. Between 2009 and 2015 he also served on the Board of the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM). Inge Kaul is Adjunct Professor at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany, and advisor to various governmental, intergovernmental, and other organizations on policy options to meet global challenges, including the financing of international cooperation. She was the first director of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office and Office of Development Studies. Inge Kaul is lead editor and author of numerous publications on global public economics and finance, as well as global governance, including Global Public Goods (Edward Elgar, 2016) and The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges (Oxford University Press, 2006). Her current research focuses on a new business model for multilateral development banks and the future role of the Group of Twenty (G20). Pan Suk Kim is currently the Minister of Personnel Management (MPM) in the Republic of Korea starting from July of 2017. He is an elected lifetime international fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in Washington, DC. He was the Dean of the College of Government and Business at Yonsei University and he is currently on leave for public service from Yonsei University. He has led a number of professional associations, including the Asian Association for Public Administration (AAPA) and the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). He was a Vice Chairperson of the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration (UNCEPA) in 2010–13. He is currently a member of the editorial board of several international journals, including the Public Administration Review (PAR), the Public Management Review (PMR), the Public Administration and Development (PAD), and others. He has received several awards including the International Public Administration Award (2009) and the Paul P. Van Riper Award for Excellence and Service (2012) from the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). In 2017, he received the Warner W. Stockberger Achievement Award from the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) and the PSPA Achievement Award from the Philippine Society for Public Administration (PSPA).
xxvi Contributors Kelly Ann Krawczyk conducts research on civic engagement, and facets of democratic governance including corruption, accountability, and decentralization around her broad interest in the relationship between civil society and democratic governance. Her research has been published in Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, and International Review of Administrative Sciences. She has also authored governmental and professional publications for the Governance Commission of Liberia and the World Bank. Dr Krawczyk earned her Ph.D. in political science and a Masters in Public Administration from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Kelly has also worked with a wide range of non-profit organizations, both domestic and international, and has applied experience in non-profit management and leadership, governance, capacity building, fundraising and development, volunteer and event management, and proposal writing. She is a Founding Committee Member of the Strengthening Research on Civil Society in West Africa project, an initiative of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), funded by the Ford Foundation. Ming-Sung Kuo is an Associate Professor of law at the University of Warwick in the UK. His research interests are in the fields of constitutional and legal theory, comparative constitutional law, administrative law and regulatory theory, and public international law. He has also written on global constitutionalism and global administrative law, European constitutionalism and integration, and constitutional law and politics in Taiwan. His publications have appeared in leading law journals, including Modern Law Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law, European Journal of International Law, Ratio Juris, and Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. He earned his J.S.D. and an LL.M. from Yale and his LL.B. and an LL.M. from National Taiwan University. Dr Kuo previously held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), a visiting fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg (Germany), and a stipendiary visiting scholarship with The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He was appointed Visiting Associate Professor at National Taiwan University College of Law in 2015 and 2017. Stella Ladi is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and an Assistant Professor at Panteion University in Athens. She previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and the University of Exeter. She has also been a Research Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). She has acted as a public policy expert at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Aegean, Greece. In 2002 she completed her Ph.D. thesis at the University of York. Her research interests include the Eurozone crisis, public policy and public administration reforms, Europeanization, global public policy, and transnational administration and the role of experts in public policy. She has published in journals such as Policy & Society, Regulation & Governance, Public Administration, West European Politics, New Political Economy, Comparative
Contributors xxvii European Politics and Political Studies Review. She is co-convenor of the Greek Politics Specialist Group (GPSG) of the Political Studies Association (PSA). Luk Van Langenhove is Academic Director of the Institute of European Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and Senior Advisor European Strategy at Warwick University (UK). Before, he served as Director of the United Nations University Institute for Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) and as Deputy Secretary-General of the Belgian federal ministry for Science Policy. He obtained his Ph.D. in psychology in 1981. He has published widely on different social sciences topics, including regional integration. Monographs include Innovating the Social Sciences (Passagen Verlag, 2007), Building Regions (Routledge, 2011), and People and Societies (Routledge, 2010). He has also edited several volumes, including Positioning Theory (with Rom Harré, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), The EU as a Global Player. The Politics of Interregionalism (with Fred Söderbaum, Routledge, 2013), and The EU and Multilateral Security Governance (with Sonja Lucarelli and Jan Wouters, Routledge, 2013). Recent publications include ‘Varieties of Moral Orders’ in Frontiers of Sociology (2017) and a special issue of Contemporary Politics on ‘Major Powers and Their Shared Neighborhoods’ (co-edited with Simon Schunz and Siegliende Gstöhl, 2018). From 2016 to 2019, he coordinated the Horizon 2020 project on Science and Cultural Diplomacy (see www.EL-CSID.Eu). Timothy Legrand is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Adelaide and adjunct Associate Professor at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. Tim has previously held positions at the National Security College at the Australian National University, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security at Griffith University, and visiting research fellowships at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), Johns Hopkins University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of Stockholm. Tim’s research is concerned with international policy transfer, evidence-based policy making, and the transnational dimensions of security policy governance in the Anglosphere. His research has been published in leading international journals including Public Administration, Political Studies, Review of International Studies, Security Dialogue, Policy Studies, British Politics, Terrorism and Political Violence, European Political Science, and the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. Joannah Luetjens is a doctoral candidate within the Successful Public Governance project at the Utrecht University School of Governance in the Netherlands. From 2013 to 2017, she was a research assistant at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government. Thus far, her substantive research focus has been on public policy, policy advocacy, and efforts to improve public sector performance and efficiency. She completed her Master of Public Policy and Management at the University of Melbourne’s School of Government in 2016. Michael Mintrom is Professor of Public Sector Management at Monash University and an Academic Director at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government
xxviii Contributors (ANZSOG). He is a specialist in the politics of change leadership, policy entrepreneurship, and policy innovation. Over his career, his research has focused on answering three questions: (1) How do leaders promote political and policy change? (2) What drives innovation in public policy making and in organizations? (3) What is effective policy analysis? A New Zealander by birth, Michael received his Ph.D. (1994) degree in Political Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, specializing in American politics, public policy, and quantitative methods. His books include: Policy Entrepreneurs and Dynamic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Public Policy: Investing for a Better World (Oxford University Press, 2018), Contemporary Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2012), and People Skills for Policy Analysts (Georgetown University Press, 2003). Kim Moloney is a Senior Lecturer in Global Public Administration and Public Policy at Murdoch University in Perth Australia. Her research focuses on ‘transnational administration’ (its definition, its usage, and its multidisciplinary influences) and the intersection of public administration, International Relations, and international development as it relates to the administrative life of international organizations. She is particularly interested in the budget transparency and personnel management concerns of international civil servants and of the international civil services. This includes international civil servant impact as stakeholders on the transparency, accountability, representativeness, and legitimacy of international organizations. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Administration from American University (2011), an M.P.A. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and an M.A. in International Affairs from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. She has published in multiple journals, including Public Administration Review, American Review of Public Administration, Global Policy, Australian Journal of Public Administration, International Review of Administrative Sciences, among others. Glenn Morgan is Professor of Management in the School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, UK. He has previously worked at Manchester Business School, Warwick Business School and Cardiff Business School. He has been a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School and a number of other institutions in Europe and North America. His research interests lie in the areas of globalization, financialization, institutions, multinationals, regulations, and elites. As well as studies in Europe, he has written on East Asian and Latin American forms of capitalism. He has published in a wide range of journals, including Organisation Studies, Human Relations, Economy and Society, Socio-Economic Review, Industrial Relations, and Journal of European Public Policy. He was editor of the journal Organization from 2005 to 2008 and serves on a number of editorial boards. Recent jointly edited collections include The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organisation Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014), New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Capitalisms and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Contributors xxix Karl T. Muth is a lecturer in Economics, Organizational Behaviour, Public Policy, and Statistics at Northwestern University; he holds a separate appointment as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Pritzker School of Law, also at Northwestern University. Since 2011, at Northwestern, he has taught Economics of Developing Countries and Macroeconomic Policy. After studying law at an undergraduate level in the Netherlands, he earned J.D. and M.B.A. degrees, the latter with a specialization in Economics at the University of Chicago. He earned his M.Phil./Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. After his Ph.D., Muth took part in the Emerging Leaders programme at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition to his teaching, Muth offers his expertise to companies, legislators, and regulators; his comments to the SEC regarding CEO pay were cited by SEC Commissioner Aguilar and he has offered substantive comments on US regulatory frameworks under both Democratic and Republican administrations. His work in economics, law, and public policy appears in more than two dozen journal articles and in several books. His recent academic (and non-academic) work, thoughts, and travels can be found on Twitter at @karlmuth. Muna Ndulo is a Professor of Law, Elizabeth and Arthur Reich Director, Leo and Arvilla Berger International Legal Studies Program Cornell Law School, and Director of the Cornell University’s Institute for African Development. He is also Honorary Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, and Extra Ordinary Professor of Law, Free State University. He was formerly Professor of Law and Dean of the School of Law, University of Zambia. He served as Legal Officer in the International Trade Law Branch of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1986 to 1995. He has carried out several UN assignments, including serving as Political and Legal Adviser with the United Nations Mission Observer Mission in South Africa (UNOMSA) and to the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General to South Africa from 1992 to1994, Kosovo (2000), Afghanistan (2003), and East Timor (1999). More recently he has been a consultant to the constitution-making processes in Kenya, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. He has published nineteen books and over 100 articles in academic journals. He is the founder of the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR). Professor Ndulo graduated in law from the University of Zambia with an LLB degree and subsequently earned an LL.M. at Harvard University and a D.Phil. at Oxford University. Edward Newman is Professor of International Security in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is also an External Associate at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick. Within the security studies field, his interests lie in a number of areas: theoretical security studies, including critical approaches and ‘human security’; intrastate armed conflict, intervention and political violence; International Organizations and multilateralism; and peacebuilding and reconstruction in conflict-prone and post-conflict societies. He previously worked in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and, before that, he spent over a decade
xxx Contributors in Japan, mainly working at the United Nations University where he was Director of Studies on Conflict and Security in the Peace and Governance Programme. He is a former editor of the journal Civil Wars (2011–16), a founding executive editor of the journal, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, and a member of the editorial board of Contemporary Politics. His latest book is Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and Change in Intra-State Conflict (Routledge, 2014). Leslie A. Pal is Chancellor’s Professor at the School of Policy and Administration at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and Director of the Centre on Governance and Public Management. He is also Visiting Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. His most recent publications include Public Policy Transfer: Micro-Dynamics and Macro-Effects (co-edited with Magdaléna Hadjiiksy and Christopher Walker, Edward Elgar, 2017), Policy Making in a Transformative State: The Case of Qatar (co-edited with M. E. Tok, L. Al Khatar, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Beyond Policy Analysis: Public Issue Management in Turbulent Times 5th ed. (Nelson Education, 2014), and Frontiers of Governance: The OECD and Global Public Management Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He has published over sixty articles and book chapters in a wide variety of areas, including Canadian politics, public policy and administration, information technology, European integration, international human rights, and international public administrative reform. Jos C.N. Raadschelders is Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Public Administration, University of Leiden, the Netherlands. His research interests include comparative government, comparative civil service systems, the nature of government and its study, administrative history, and generally anything that captures his attention. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Pauline Ravinet is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at CERAPS, University Lille, France and an Associate Fellow at the CSO, Sciences Po. Her research focuses on the emergence and governance of the European Higher Education Area, and, more generally, European knowledge policies. (She won the prize for best PhD in Public Policy of the Association Française de Science politique for her PhD thesis on genesis of the Bologna process, defended in Sciences Po in 2007). During 2008–09, she researched European governance mechanisms in education, higher education and research at the Université Libre de Bruxelles from a comparative perspective, and in a FrancoNorwegian project together with Åse Gornizka and Meng-Hsuan Chou. She is the co-editor of the best-selling Dictionnaire des politiques publiques (2004, 2006, 2010, translated into Spanish, Romanian, Russian, and Chinese), and has authored articles and chapters on the Bologna Process and EU policies in different refereed journals and edited books. Together with Meng-Hsuan, she is now working on a research project on ‘Higher Education Regionalism’ (2014–18), comparing higher education regional initiatives in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as researching Science Diplomacy interfaces and actors within the H2020 Consortium S4D4C led by the Center for Social Innovation
Contributors xxxi in Vienna, and exploring the recomposition of Higher education cooperation in the context of globalization in her on-going habilitation research. Pauline Ravinet is also Vice-President for European Affairs of the University of Lille, member of the editorial committee of Gouvernement et Action Publique and Policy Design and Practice, nominated member of the Council of the Association française de science politique and the International Public Policy Association, and member of the expert Board of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (Direction Europe de l’Ouest). Ellen Jenny Ravndal is a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, the Australian National University. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science, Lund University, affiliated to the STANCE research project. Ellen’s main research areas include international organizations, the UN Secretary- General, and International Relations in the nineteenth century. Her research examines international organizations from a historical perspective and addresses the broader questions of what kind of actors international organizations become and how they and their representatives gain autonomy. She holds a D.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Oxford and has published in journals such as Global Governance, Diplomacy & Statecraft, and The International History Review. Karsten Ronit is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been a Visiting Fellow at universities and research institutions in Germany, the US, Canada, and Australia. He is former Chair of the Research Committee 38 on Politics and Business of the International Political Science Association and is now editor of the book series, Politics and Business, with Edward Elgar. He has a broad competence in the study of politics and business with special expertise in business and employer associations, intermediary institutions, public regulation, self-regulation, public policy, and countervailing powers. He takes an interest in the comparative aspects of politics and business and how business operates in different national contexts, but he is also engaged in projects examining the behaviour of business at the global level. He has published in many different journals and contributed many book chapters. His most recent publication is the monograph Global Business Association (Routledge, 2018). Ole Jacob Sending is Research Professor and Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, NUPI. His research focuses on global governance, with a particular focus on the role and functioning of international organizations and non-governmental organizations. He has been visiting scholar at Stanford University (2002) and at UC Berkeley (2008–09). In 2006–08, he worked as senior advisor at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His work has appeared, inter alia, in International Theory, Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, and European Journal of International Relations. He is co-author, with I. B. Neumann, of Governing the Global Polity (University of Michigan Press, 2010) (Recipient of IPS Book Award 2012). More recent works include The Politics of Expertise: Competing for
xxxii Contributors Authority in Global Governance (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (co-edited with V. Pouliot and I.B. Neumann) (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is currently finalizing a co-edited special issue on misrecognition in world politics, forthcoming with Review of International Studies. With Leonard Seabrooke, he is working on a book—The Market for Anarchy— on the emerging market for the management of transnational risks. Support from the Research Council of Norway through the project ‘Armed Violence in Urban Settings’ (Research Project no. 217260) towards writing this chapter is gratefully acknowledged. Grace Skogstad is a Professor of Political Science and currently Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto. She served as President of the Canadian Political Science Association in 2002–03 and is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the International Public Policy Association. She specializes in Canadian Politics, especially Canadian federalism, and comparative public policy. Her chapter in this handbook reflects her long-standing interest on the interaction between economic globalization and political internationalization and public policies with respect to agriculture, biotechnology, and biofuels in Canada, the United States, and the European Union. Her book-length publications include The Global Promise of Federalism (University of Toronto Press, 2013, co-edited); Canadian Federalism: Performance, Effectiveness and Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, 2012, co-edited); Policy Paradigms, Transnationalism, and Domestic Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2011, edited); The Common Agricultural Policy: Continuity and Change (2010, Routledge, co-edited); and Internationalization and Canadian Agriculture: Policy and Governing Paradigms (University of Toronto Press, 2008). Her most recent articles have appeared in Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Journal of International Law and International Relations, and the Journal of Public Policy. Heidi Jane M. Smith is a Professor, Researcher, and Coordinator of the Master’s in Public Policy at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She has a Ph.D. in Public Administration from Florida International University in Miami, focusing on municipal finances and has extensive experience working with local and regional governments in Latin America as a consultant (with the World Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, Organization of American States, Organization of International Cooperation and development) and serving in the US government (within the US Department of State and the Inter-American Foundation). She was a recipient of a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship in Mexico and has taught research methods, political economy, and public policy at ITAM and Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and at George Mason University in Washington, DC. Her publications have appeared in Governance, World Development and Public Budgeting and Finance. Diane Stone is Centenary Professor at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra. She is also Professor of Politics and International Studies, at the University of Warwick. She was the European Commission’s Marie Curie Chair
Contributors xxxiii (2004–08) and Founding Professor of Public Policy at Central European University, where she continues as Visiting Professor. At the World Bank, she was a member of the secretariat that launched the Global Development Network, a new international organization. She is Consulting Editor of Policy and Politics. She has been co-editor of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism, and International Institutions. In 2012, Diane Stone was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. In 2014, she was elected Vice President of the International Public Policy Association. She researches global and regional policy, network governance, the ‘new’ diplomacy, and the influence of ideas and expertise on governance. Recent articles have appeared in Public Administration, Policy and Politics, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Policy and Society, Policy Studies, Minerva and Global Networks, and a book, Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance: The Private–Public Nexus in the Global Agora (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Andrew Sturdy is Professor and Head of the Department of Management at the University of Bristol. Previously, he held posts at Imperial College London and the Universities of Bath, Melbourne, and Warwick: he was an Associate Dean at Warwick Business School. His research lies in the field of organizational innovation and the role of management consultancy in particular. His work includes co-authored books such as Beyond Organisational Change (Macmillan, 2000), Management Consultancy (Oxford University Press, 2009), and most recently, Management as Consultancy (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has worked with diverse organizations in research projects on the use of consulting and the adoption of new management ideas. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry and an Academic Fellow of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes. His latest work explores consultancy in national and transnational public sector contexts. Jill L. Tao is the first international Professor of Public Administration at Incheon National University (INU) in Songdo International City, located on the west coast of Incheon in the Republic of Korea. Her specific areas of research examine the behaviour of subnational governments, especially as innovators in state political and economic policy behaviour. From a policy perspective, she is particularly interested in how public organizations evolve over time in relation to the issues they address, issues of a chronic yet pressing nature: poverty, intergenerational sustainability, and resource depletion. She is currently involved in research projects investigating local government behaviour in implementing environmental policy in China, and the influence of Confucian management norms on organizational decision-making. She has served as the Dean of the Office of International Affairs at Incheon National University since 2016 and is currently researching the influence of non-Western perspectives on policy analysis frameworks. She holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University, Askew School Public Administration and Policy. Felicity Vabulas is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Pepperdine University in California, where she teaches International Relations, Global Economics,
xxxiv Contributors International Organizations and Law, and International Human Rights. Dr Vabulas earned her Ph.D. and M.P.P. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago where she also completed a four-year postdoctoral teaching fellowship. She earned her B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Illinois. Dr Vabulas’ doctoral dissertation, ‘Enhancing Monitoring and Enforcement in Intergovernmental Organizations: When and Why States Grant Consultative Status to NGOs’, argues that states strategically select NGOs for consultative status in IGOs, dispelling some of the myths of NGO access. She has three ongoing research projects. The first project examines when and why states exit international organizations (IOs) including suspensions as well as unilateral IO withdrawals (like Brexit). Her second project studies states’ increasing use of informal intergovernmental organizations such as the G7 and G20 rather than traditional IOs with treaties and permanent secretariats. Her third research project examines how foreign lobbying affects US foreign policy, including how it alters human rights, trade, and foreign aid allocations. Tony Verheijen, currently the World Bank Country Manager for Tunisia, has had a fifteen-year career with the World Bank that has spanned three continents and focused primarily on public sector management, civil service reform, governance and anti-corruption, and economic management issues. Previously he was based in Belgrade as the World Bank Country Manager for Serbia. He has also worked for the Public Sector Management and Governance department in the Europe and Central Asia region, served as Manager of the Public Sector and Governance department in South Asia, based in New Delhi, India, and served as Lead Public Sector Management Specialist for East and Central Africa, based in Kampala. Prior to joining the World Bank, Mr. Verheijen worked as Chief Technical Adviser for the United Nations Development Programme Regional Office in Bratislava, Slovakia, and held positions at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and at the European Institute of Public Administration. He has also held teaching and research positions at the College of Europe, Leiden University, and the University of Limerick. He has contributed to transformation processes in Central and Eastern European states in the context of their European Union accession, serving as adviser to European Integration offices and EU accession negotiation teams. Mr. Verheijen holds an M.A. in International Relations (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and a Ph.D. (Leiden University). Ingrid Volkmer is Professor and Head of the Media and Communications Program at the University of Melbourne. She has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Harvard, and MIT. Her research has a focus on International Relations, Politics and Public Communication. She has published widely in the area of transnational political communication and its implications for societies and cultures in, for example, The Global Public Sphere—Public Communication in the Age of Reflective Interdependence (Polity, 2014) and (with Kasim Sharif) Risk Journalism between Transnational Politics and Climate Change (Palgrave, 2018).
Contributors xxxv Patrick Weller, AO, is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. He was Professor of Politics at Griffith from 1984 to 2015. He is author/co-author of Can Ministers Cope? (Hutchinson, 1981), First among Equals (Taylor & Francis, 1985), Malcolm Fraser PM (Penguin Books, 1989), Australia’s Mandarins (Allen & Unwin, 2001), Don’t Tell the Prime Minister (Scrive Publications, 2002), Cabinet Government in Australia, 1901– 2006 (UNSW Press, 2007), Westminster Compared (Oxford University Press, 2009), Learning to be a Minister (Melbourne University Publishing, 2010), and Kevin Rudd, Twice Prime Minister (Melbourne University Publishing 2014). He is co-author with Xu Yi-chong of The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants in the GATT/WTO (Edward Elgar, 2004), Inside the World Bank (2009), The Working World of International Organisations (Oxford University Press, 2018). He was elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Science in Australia in 1996 and appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2002. He was a member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Group on Reform of Australian Government Administration in 2010. Clay G. Wescott is an evaluation and management consultant with the World Bank and Asian Development Bank and President of the International Public Management Network. His advisory work, research, and teaching covers public sector management, public financial management, political economy, civil service reform, annual performance agreements, decentralization, citizen participation and democracy, capacity development including South–South cooperation and networking, e-government, regional cooperation, combating corruption, monitoring and evaluation and project management. He held senior positions with the Asian Development Bank, UNDP, Development Alternatives, Inc., Price Waterhouse and the Harvard Institute for International Development, and taught at Princeton University. He has degrees in Government from Harvard College (A.B.) and Boston University (Ph.D.). He is an Editorial Board Member of the International Public Management Journal, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, and International Review of Administrative Sciences. He is Book Review Editor, Governance, Senior Editor of International Public Management Review, Permanent Active Member, Transparency International, and Executive Committee Member, Section on International and Comparative Administration (SICA), and American Society for Public Administration. Chapter findings, interpretations, and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of The World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The chapter draws from Wessal and Wescott, in press. Arianne Wessal is an Education Specialist with the Global Partnership for Education. Prior to this, she worked with the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), with a focus on monitoring and evaluation capacity development with the Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEAR). She has worked in international
xxxvi Contributors development policy for more than a decade and with global partnership programmes for the past eight years. Her research interests include the governance of public partnership programmes and improving their effectiveness, as well as education policy research focused on issues of access to and equity of basic education, particularly in rural areas for marginalized groups. Ms Wessal holds a Master’s degree in International Development Policy from Duke University. The chapter draws from Wessal and Wescott, in press. Jonathan P. West is Professor and Chair of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Public Administration Program at the University of Miami, where he has been since 1980. His research interests include ethics, human resource management, productivity, local government, and public policy. He has published nine books and more than 145 scholarly articles and book chapters. American Politics and the Environment (SUNY Press, 2016, second edition), Human Resource Management in Public Service (2015, fifth edition, sixth edition in progress), Public Service Ethics: Individual and Institutional Responsibility (Routledge, 2018), Achieving Competencies in Public Service: The Professional Edge (Routledge, 2010, second edition), and American Public Service: Radical Reform of the Merit System (CRC Press, 2007) are his most recent co- authored or co-edited books. He served sixteen years as managing editor of Public Integrity and is a member of the editorial board of the Public Administration Review (2018), Review of Public Personnel Administration (1980–present), and Public Personnel Management (2012–present). J.J. Woo is Assistant Professor in the Public Policy & Global Affairs Programme of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. From 2016 to 2017, he was concurrently Rajawali Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Dr Woo received his Ph.D. from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and holds an M.Sc. in International Political Economy from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests revolve around policy design, urban governance, and theories of the policy process. Xu Yi-chong is a professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. She is the author of: Powering China (Routledge, 2002); The Politics of Nuclear Energy in China (Springer, 2010); Sinews of Power: Politics of the State Grid Corporation of China (Oxford University Press, 2017); and (co-authored with Patrick Weller) The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants and the GATT/WTO (Edward Elgar, 2004); Inside the World Bank (Springer, 2009); and The Working World of International Organisations (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is editor of The Political Economy of Sovereign Wealth Funds (with G. Bahgat) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), The Political Economy of State-owned Enterprises in China and India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and The Politics of International Organisations: Views from Inside (with Patrick Weller) (Routledge, 2015).
Abbreviations
ACF
Advocacy Coalition Framework
ACUNS
Academic Council of the United Nations
ADB
Asian Development Bank
ADEA
Association for the Development of Education in Africa
ADG
assistant directors-general
AfDB
African Development Bank
AGPA
Asian Group for Public Administration
AGRA
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
AIDA
Asociación Interamericana para la Defensa del Ambiente
AMEXCID
Agencia Mexicana de Cooperación para el Desarrollo
ALNAP
Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action
APEC
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
APN
Anglosphere Policy Networks
APSIA
Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs
ASEAN
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
ASO
AIDS Services Organizations
ATTAC
Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financière et l’Action Citoyenne
B20
Business Twenty
B5
Border Five
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation
BDA
Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände
BDI
Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie
BEPS
Base Erosion and Profit Shifting
BIAC
Business and Industry Advisory Committee
BMGF
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
BP
Budapest Process
xxxviii Abbreviations BRICS
Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa
C20/C40
Cities20 /Cities40
CaAC
Children and Armed Conflict
CAP
Common Agricultural Policy
CAR
Central African Republic
CARICOM
Caribbean Community
CCO
Chief Compliance Officer
CDC
Commonwealth Development Corporation
CEE
Central and Eastern Europe
CEIP
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
CEM
Clean Energy Ministerial
CETA
Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
CGAP
Consultative Group to Assist the Poor
CICA
Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building in Asia
CIF
Climate Investment Fund
CIS
Commonwealth of Independent States
CCI
Clinton Climate Initiative
CNN
Cable News network
COCOPS
Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future
CO2
carbon dioxide
CoE
Council of Europe
COP21
21st Conference of the Parties
CPIA
Country Policy and Institutional Assessment
COPRA
Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation
CSCE
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
CSHO
Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS
CSO
Civil Society Organization
CVI
Children’s Vaccine Initiative
DAC
Development Assistance Committee
DfID
Department for International Development (UK)
DG
Directorate General (of the European Commission)
DG
Directors-General
DGF
Development Grant Facility of the World Bank
DHL
Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn of DHL Worldwide Express
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic Acid
Abbreviations xxxix DNDI
Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative
DPKO
Department of Peacekeeping Operations
EAPPA
European Association for Public Administration Accreditation
EBPM
Evidence-based Policy Making
EBM
Evidence-Based Medicine
EC
European Commission
ECHR
European Court of Human Rights
ECOSOC
United Nations Economic and Social Council
ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States
EEAS
European External Action Service
EGPA
European Group for Public Administration
EITI
Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative
EL-CSID
European Leadership in Cultural, Science, and Innovation Diplomacy
EPOC
Environment Policy Committee
ERN
European regulatory networks
ESA
European Space Agency
EU
European Union
EUPAN
European Public Administration Network
FAO
Food and Agriculture Organisation
FATF
Financial Action Task Force
FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCC
Five Countries Conference
FCO
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FCTC
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
FENSA
Framework for Engagement with non-State actors
FGV
Fundção Getulio Vargas
FICSA
Federation of International Civil Servant Associations
FIGO
Formal Intergovernmental Organizations
FIND
Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics
FSC
Forest Stewardship Council
G7+
group of fragile and conflict-affected countries
G20
Group of Twenty Nations
G24
Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development
G7
Group of Seven Nations
xl Abbreviations G8
Group of Eight major industrial democracies
GAIN
Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition
GAL
global administrative law
GATT
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GAVI
Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation
GCAP
Global Call to Action against Poverty
GCDP
Global Commission on Drug Policy
GCF
Green Climate Fund
GCIF
Global Cities Indicators Facility
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
GEF
Global Environment Facility
GFC
Global Financial Crisis
GIIN
Global Impact Investing Network
GMO
Genetically Modified Organisms
GNI
Gross National Income
GovNet
Network on Governance
GPA
Global Program on AIDS
GPE
Global Partnership for Education
GPI
Global Policy Institute
GPG
Global Public Good
GPP
Global Public Policy
GPPi
Global Public Policy Institute
GPPN
Global Public Policy Network
GPPP
Global Public–Private Partnerships
GSC
Global Supply Chain
HIV/AIDS
Human Immunodeficiency Virus /Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
HRW
Human Rights Watch
IAEA
International Atomic Energy Agency
IAS
International AIDS Society
IASC
Inter-Agency Standing Committee
IASIA
International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration
IATA
International Air Transport Association
IATI
International Aid Transparency Initiative
Abbreviations xli ICA
International Court of Arbitration
ICANN
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICAO
International Civil Aviation Organisation
ICAPO
International Commission on Accreditation of Public Administration
ICASO
International Council of AIDS Service Organizations
ICC
International Chamber of Commerce
ICCA
International Council of Chemical Associations
ICJ
International Court of Justice
ICLEI
Local Governments for Sustainability
ICMA
International City/County Management Association
ICRC
International Committee for the Red Cross
ICS
International Chamber of Shipping
ICS
International Civil Servants
IEA
International Energy Administration
IEG
Independent Evaluation Group
IFA
International Fertilizer Association
IFC
International Finance Corporation
IFI
International Financial Institutions
IFPMA
International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations
IFRS
International Financial Reporting Standards
IGO
Intergovernmental Organization
IIAS
International Institute of Administrative Sciences
IIGO
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations
ILO
International Labour Organization
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IMO
International Maritime Organization
INCAF
International Network on Conflict and Fragility
INGO, iNGO
International Non-Governmental Organization
IO
International Organization
IOE
International Organisation of Employers
IOM
International Organization for Migration
IOSCO
International Organization of Securities Commissions
IP
Intellectual Property Rights
xlii Abbreviations IPA
International Public Administration
IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPE
International Political Economy
IR
International Relations
IRA
Independent Regulatory Authorities
IRN
International Rivers Network
ISEAL International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance ISO
International Organization for Standardization
IT
information technology
ITU
International Telecommunications Union
IVCC
Innovative Vector Control Consortium
JEEAR
Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda
JPART
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
JVI
Joint Vienna Institute
LAGPA
Latin American Group for Public Administration
LED
Light Emitting Diode
LEG
Local Education Groups
LICUS
Low Income Countries Under Stress
LMCF
Large Management Consultancy Firms
M&E
Monitoring and Evaluation
M5
Migration 5
MAC
Marginal Abatement Curve
MAI
Multilateral Agreement on Investment
MAP
Mutual Assessment Process
MAR
Multilateral Aid Review
MCM
Ministerial Council Meeting
MDG
Millennium Development Goals
MDTF
Multi-Donor Trust Funds
MEF
Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change
MENAPAR
Middle East and North African Public Administration Research Network
MINUSCA
United Nations Multi-dimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic
MINUSTAH
Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti
Abbreviations xliii MLG
Multi Level Governance
MNC
Multinational Corporation
MOU
Memorandum of Understanding
MPA
Master of Public Administration
MPP
Master of Public Policy
MSA
Metropolitan Statistical Areas
MSF
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
MTCR
Missile Technology Control Regime
MVI
Malaria Vaccine Initiative
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NASPAA
Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration
NCD
Non-Communicable Diseases
NELTI
New Eurasian Land Transport Initiative
NEX
National Execution modality
NFA
National Fortification Alliance
NGO
Non-Governmental Organization
NIB
National Indian Brotherhood
NIBC
Nestlé International Babyfood Campaign
NPM
New Public Management
NPO
Non-Profit Organisation
NSMD
Non-State Market-Driven
NUTS
Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics
NYU
New York University
OCHA
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance
ODA
Official Development Assistance
OECD
Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development
OECD/DAC
OECD Development Assistance Committee
OED
Operations Evaluation Department
OFA
Official Financial Assistance
OIHP
Office International d’Hygiène Publique
OIOS
Office of Internal Oversight Services
OMB
Office of Management and Budget
OMC
Open Method of Coordination
OSCE
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
xliv Abbreviations OSF
Open Society Foundations
PA
Public Administration
PACI
Partnering Against Corruption Initiative
PATH
Program for Appropriate Technology in Health
PEFA
Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability
PISA
Programme for International Student Assessment
POC
Point of Contact
PDPs
Product Development Partnerships
PPPs
public–private partnerships
PRD
Democratic Revolutionary Party (Mexico)
PRI
Institutional Revolutionary Party (Mexico)
PSVI
Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative
PWC
Price Waterhouse Coopers
R&D
Research and Development
R&I
Research and Innovation
RBM
Results-Based Management
REDD/REDD+
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
ROTA
Reach Out To Asia
RSB
Roundtable for Sustainable Biomaterials
SAFA
Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems
SARS
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
SCO
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
SDG
Sustainable Development Goals
SIDA
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
SIPA
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
SIPRI
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
SME
Small and Medium Enterprises
SPS
sanitary and phytosanitary measures
SSC
South–South Cooperation
StAR
Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative
STI
Science Technology and Innovation
SVI
Sabin Vaccine Institute
SWAps
Sector Wide Approaches
T20
Think 20
Abbreviations xlv TANs
Transnational Advocacy Coalitions
TB tuberculosis TCS
Transnational Civil Society
TENs
Transnational Executive Networks
TGN
Transgovernmental Networks
TIR
Transports Internationaux Routiers
TPCs
Transnational Policy Communities
TPR
Transnational Private Regulation
TTIP
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
TUAC
Trade Union Advisory Committee
UCL
University College London
UCLA
University of California at Los Angeles
UCLG
United Cities and Local Governments
UDHR
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UHC
Universal Health Coverage
UK
United Kingdom
UN
United Nations
UNAIDS
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
UNAT
United Nations Administrative Tribunal
UNCAC
United Nations Convention against Corruptions
UNCED
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
UNCTAD
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UN-DaO
United Nations Delivery as One
UNDESA
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNDRIP
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
UNDT
United Nations Dispute Tribunal
UNECE
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
UNESCAP
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
UNFCCC
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNFPA
United Nations Population Fund
UNGCCP
United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme
UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
xlvi Abbreviations UNICEF
United Nations Children’s Fund
UN-JIU
United Nations Joint Implementation Unit
UNOPS
United Nations Office for Project Services
UNRISD
United Nations Research Institute for Sustainable Development
UNSC
United Nations Security Council
US /USA
United States of America
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
USD
United States Dollar
VfM
Value for Money
W20
Women Twenty
WBCSD
World Business Council for Sustainable Development
WCM
World Conference of Mayors
WDR
World Development Report
WEF
World Economic Forum
WFP
World Food Programme
WG
Working Group
WHO
World Health Organization
WIN
Water Integrity Network
WIPO
World Intellectual Property Organization
WRI
World Resources Institute
WTO
World Trade Organization
WWF
World Wildlife Fund
WWII
World War Two
Y20
Youth Twenty
Pa rt O n e FROM NATIONAL PARADIGMS TO THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION
Chapter 1
The Rise of Gl oba l P ol i c y and Transnat i ona l Administr at i on Diane Stone and Kim Moloney
1.1. Introduction Global policy studies and new scholarship on transnational administration are becoming key elements towards understanding the diversity of global governance. Global governance is a response to collective action problems that transcend national boundaries. Global governance actors include international organizations (hereafter IOs), corporations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, associations, networks, and private citizens among others. Likewise, the public policy of nation states is created to resolve collective action problems with the state regarded as the central institution of authority. Global public policy shares both similarities and differences to state- level public policy. Yet, global public policy entails a double devolution from traditional government-driven public policy, First, a decentralization of policy deliberation and authoritative decision-making beyond the nation state into global and regional domains. While still cognisant of, and bounded by, member-state agendas, both formal and informal IOs have acted with some autonomy and have experimented with new arrangements such as the Group of 20 (G20) and interregional initiatives such as the Asia–Europe Meeting, amongst many other IOs. Trans-governmental dynamics are emerging where state-level civil servants and officials interact directly with their state peers elsewhere in networks in areas such as cyber-security and money laundering (see Legrand this volume). Second, and often in tandem with decentralization, there has been a delegation of authority to semi-private networks and non-state actors (Stone, 2013). For instance, through the internationalization and privatization of rule-making surrounding bodies like the International Accounting Standards Body or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to
4 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney international private-sector organizations. This dynamic has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex regulatory tasks (Büthe and Mattli, 2011). These tasks bleed across state boundaries and, in doing so, require new concepts and ideas for their explanation and influence. Global policy making also requires institutions, organizations, networks, and individuals to help shape and implement global policy tasks. Capacities for such administration exist within sovereign-level administrations as some contributors to this Handbook highlight (inter alia, Raadschelders and Verheijen; Legrand). Yet, transnational administration is not exclusively the product of the bureaucratic action of state and local governments. The administration of transnational spaces is also undertaken by international organizations, corporate actors, NGOs, and other network actors that coalesce into transnational policy communities. Transnational administrators help design, implement, and evaluate global and regional policies. This transnational space consists of two pillars: the private and the public. Transnational administration, like global policy, also features decentralization and delegation. The administration of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) involves international actors (e.g. United Nations), state actors (e.g. environmental agencies, port authorities, and trade ministries), and non-state actors (e.g. World Wildlife Fund). They work to administratively ensure that a global agreement to endangered species is observed. This action is a decentralization (and extension) of the administrative state to other state parties, to non-state actors, and with a coordinating role allocated to the United Nations. This is particularly apparent in the global health field (see Huckel-Schneider, this volume). By re-engineering what have been typically state-specific concerns into transnational administrative spaces, collective action concerns within the global commons can be tackled. Administrative authority has also been delegated to private rule-making bodies. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a multi-stakeholder organization with the authority to coordinate domain name registration worldwide. While states are represented via its Government Advisory Committee, the ICANN Board of Directors is made up, not of states but, instead, of twenty individuals of whom only one is a liaison from the committee of member states (GAC, 2018). Others study ‘international bureaucracy’ or ‘international public administration’ (IPA), by which they mean the administration of international, regional, and sub-regional organizations (Eckhard and Ege, 2016; Knill and Bauer, 2016). Analysis of the actors and processes within IOs is a distinct area of study from the broader focus of transnational administration. Transnational administration differs from IPA by encompassing, first, private or non-state actors in administration and, second, because it does not create an artificial set of ‘hard’ boundaries between international civil servants, sovereign-level civil servants (at national, local, or city levels of governance), and those non-state transnational administrators with whom they collaborate across different scales of governance (see also Coleman, this volume).
The Rise of Global Policy 5 Recognizing the different and more privatized composition of public policy and administration at global and regional levels of governance, the terms ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ are adopted from here on. Some have already suggested that there is an emerging ‘global public domain’ which provides a ‘transnational arena concerned with the production of global public goods’ (Ruggie, 2004, p. 499), but this arena or public space remains rather unformed and conceptually shapeless in its institutional, legal, and policy practice dimensions. Indeed, it is arguable that rather than one sphere, there are multiple public spheres of intersecting transnational policy communities and subaltern counter-publics who do not fall neatly within the ‘Westphalian grammar’ of sovereign nation states (Fraser, 2013). The expansion of traditional, domestic-focused (or sovereign-level) understandings of policy and administration makes the Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration a timely enhancement of scholarly understanding of evolving practice and conceptualization of public policy, and the administration of world affairs. This volume offers a policy studies perspective in this new subject area, a critical examination of the progress and direction of debates, as well as a foundation for future research. The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the manner in which public policy and public administration studies are evolving to study transnational policy problems and practices.
1.2. Transnational Themes In the wake of the 100th anniversary of the League of Nations, the Handbook offers a modern, forward-looking reflection on global governance—its institutions, its actors, and its issues. Today, there are more than 800 formal intergovernmental IOs (UIA, 2013; 2015/16) ranging from small bodies like the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency through to larger and better-known entities like the World Bank Group. These ‘conventional’ IOs are complemented by a range of informal international organizations— like the G20 and the BRICs—that are growing in number (see Vabulas this volume). Accordingly, there are significant differences of opinion as to what constitutes an IO and their actual number (Woodward and Davies, 2015). Whatever the precise number might be, this institutional growth of IOs creates new sites of policy and administrative practice in organizational and network domains not under the traditional purview of the state. The spread of such organizations and their differing institutionalization, policy foci, stakeholder interactions, and policy effectiveness has created an opportunity to coalesce scholarship of Global Public Policy and transnational administration into a sub-field complementary to both the scholarship and the practice of regional and international affairs, public policy, and public administration. With a disciplinary origin established well before the creation of the League of Nations, traditional public administration and public policy studies have focused upon national (primarily) and subnational concerns (deLeon, 2006). A more recent rise in
6 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney comparative policy and comparative and/or development administrative studies was heightened by the experiences of emergent states in the post-World War Two era. This research interacted with new scholarly interests in economic development and questions around how and why countries developed along different social, economic, and political trajectories (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012). Today, the comparative methodological foundations of modern studies of public administration and public policy are challenged by the depth and breadth of new cross-border policy problems and other global and regional institutional developments that require administrative coordination. Each trend challenges the domestic foci of traditional policy and administration (Roberts, 2014). Communicable disease, trafficked people, money laundering, pollution, invasive species, and intellectual property are just a few examples of phenomena crossing national borders and presenting problems for sovereign-level and transnational-level policy makers and administrators. Public policy and public administration scholars have recognized the impact of globalization on the state. There is ongoing ‘puzzling’, unpacking of concepts, and theoretical links as well as innovation around the notion of global policy in its economic (Reinicke, 1998; Ronit, 2007) and social (Deacon, 2007; Yeates, 2008) dimensions. Scholarship has addressed the impact of extra-state dynamics upon domestic politics and policy (inter alia, Farazmand and Pikowski, 2007; Skogstad, 2011; Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot, 2015). In the public administration field, global trends are more frequently viewed as subsidiary concerns (inter alia, Menzel and White, 2011, but see Kim et al., 2014). Even among sub-fields such as organizational studies, there is often a side-lined or de-emphasized understanding of how concepts created, studied, and applied at domestic levels of governance are altered in transnational administrative and global policy spaces (inter alia, Tsouka and Knudsen, 2005). This myopia extends to questions about whether such concepts and theories should apply and, if so, how their interaction with decentred, largely uncoordinated, and diverse communities of global actors will alter what we think we understand about such concepts and theories in the domestic space. In mainstream policy and administration studies, scholars infrequently view the locus of policy power, decision-making processes, and implementing authority as extending beyond the state; that is, executed by transnational policy actors and administrators. Such scholarship (for example, Wu et al. (2017) in Asia, Hill and Varone (2016) in the UK, and Birkland (2015) in the USA) is less likely to see domestic actors as being capable of influencing transnational actions or influencing emergent transnational administrative structures. Today, most textbooks on comparative public policy compare across countries but infrequently consider its delegation and decentralization to transnational spaces where policy and administrative loci may not be state-centred. Instead, such texts will often devote a chapter or two to ‘globalization and public policy’ (for example, Perry and Christiansen, 2015). Usually, these chapters revolve around the question of how globalization impinges on sovereign powers and constrains, or at least, transfigures the decision-making autonomy of national policy makers. There is less concern to reverse the line of causal explanation to ask how and why domestic actors, private and
The Rise of Global Policy 7 public, shape the architecture of global governance with administrative innovations and policy experiments in transnational domains. Many contributors in the Handbook repeatedly assert that global policy making is not a one-way process from international deliberations and global summits downwards to national politicians and local communities. Neither are global public policy makers or transnational administrations ‘on top’ but, instead, they are deeply interconnected with, and frequently controlled by, political actors and administrative agents working within national contexts and across levels of governance. By bringing the analytical lens of policy studies and the conceptual tools of public administration, the Handbook observes in a manner different from mainstream approaches in the academic field of International Relations, how, why, and where transnational and global actors (from the state to corporations to NGOs to networks to citizens) influence global policy outputs and outcomes. However, the terms ‘Global Policy’ and ‘Transnational Administration’ are relatively novel in academic studies and, more often than not, absent from the political lexicon of government agencies and political parties. A side effect of this absence in politics and policy is a de-politicization of ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’. Alongside insufficient development of concepts in the policy sciences, de-politicization arises from a lack of public awareness of a bewildering array of disconnected governance architectures on the one hand, and from technocratic distancing tactics on the other, practised by international civil servants, government officials, and various experts (Stone, 2017). Counterintuitively linked to questions of power and influence, are normative assumptions that the venues of global policy development and transnational administration should be spaces of depoliticized interaction. This includes the mandate of the World Bank (and other IOs) that it will not intervene in the political affairs of client states. Similar is the influence of neoclassical economics on structural adjustment agendas at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Such perspectives suggest that good policy and administrative practice (most often defined as Weberian or the imagined neutrality of Whitehall civil servants) is apolitical by design and harkens to an earlier era in which a politics– administration dichotomy drove the domestic space. The ability to control knowledge, including terms and their meanings, shapes understanding, actions, and outcomes. The objective of the Handbook is to help overcome the seemingly ‘subsidiary’ concern of mainstream public policy and public administration with the global, regional, and transnational. This volume of forty chapters addresses different facets of transnational spheres, dynamics, and structures of policy making and administration. Accordingly, The Oxford Handbook on Global Policy and Transnational Administration is timely for many reasons. First, as a field of inquiry, public policy and public administration scholarship has increasingly extended its remit to move from domestically driven studies to address cross- border policy problems and transnational management practices. Typical policy studies are focused more on what the International Relations discipline regards as national policy or social issues, inter alia, education policy, urban policy, gender policy, and crime and justice issues. Nevertheless, the problems and public concerns that emerge in each issue
8 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney area no longer respect national borders, and their management often requires transnational expertise. The chapters within Global Policy and Transnational Administration offer some new conceptualizations of these developments while also revisiting established concepts to see whether they can be conceptually stretched outside cartographic notions of the nation state. This experimentation with established concepts is an important source of rejuvenation within public administration and policy studies, as well as for related disciplines, including International Relations, economics, and sociology, along with sector-specific policy studies in health, the environment, gender, education, and so on. The Handbook does not leave what happens beyond the nation state to the scholar of International Relations, international development, international political economy, or international law. Instead, contributing authors address how understandings of policy and its administration are crucial to navigating an increasingly institutionalized global governance system. In short, administrative theories and public policy concepts have been an under-utilized component of global governance scholarship. In 2015, the journal Governance provoked debate with the claim that policy studies: ‘Needed: a new kind of global governance research’. The authors argued: ‘The “global” in governance remains largely terra incognita et obscura for many academics’ (Coen and Pegram, 2015). They echoed the same lament within the journal Public Administration in its special edition on global policy and transnational administration. The conveners of that symposium argued that innovative policy initiatives to deliver global and regional public goods and new modes of administrative praxis in transnational spheres were outstripping conceptual development in the policy and administrative sciences because of the dominant doxy of methodological nationalism that was particularly entrenched in policy and administrative studies (Stone and Ladi, 2015). This methodological nationalism is further entrenched by normative biases favouring Western conceptualizations of (and journal preferences for) what is or is not ‘good’ policy practice and administration (Drechsler, 2013). The narrowness or relative insularity of such approaches has limited contributions from public policy and administration to global governance and its policy and administrative spaces. The Handbook seeks to widen global governance scholarship. The ‘terra obscura’ claim in Governance is in some degree disputable: there has been at least three decades of research and scholarship on global governance with strong disciplinary contributions from International Relations, from Economics, Sociology, and Law as well as International Policy Economy. Yet, the question is whether a ‘new kind of global governance research’ is available. The Handbook demonstrates that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. There is scope to take the questions, concepts, and analytical tools that are peculiar to policy and administrative studies and adapt these frameworks to make a substantive and distinctive contribution. As Stone and Ladi (2015, p. 884) argue, ‘If the study of public administration is centrally concerned with the organization of public policies as well as the behaviour of officials formally responsible for their conduct, then there is a need to grapple with the idea of public administrators who are not public servants or who are not working in public sector organizations but are nonetheless operating in the global public domain’. The professional demands upon a transnational network
The Rise of Global Policy 9 executive or officer of a philanthropic entity require management skills and bureaucratic knowledge that differs from their counterparts in national or local governments. By addressing the pressures upon ‘transnational teams’ to deliver global public goods where secretariats and staff are at significant geographical remove from target populations, we learn about the additional challenges of cross-national coordination and implementation. While mainstream public administration, public management, and public policy studies continue to build strength in their comparative approaches, a new generation of scholars are also looking to re-engineer existing concepts and create new frameworks for analysing, widening, and diversifying understanding of global governance. The reader may also object that there are many volumes that address sector-specific issues. It is not unusual to find studies of ‘global forestry policy’ (Chan and Pattberg, 2008) or ‘global tobacco policy’ (Mamudu, Cairney, and Studlar, 2015). Notwithstanding the merits of these issue-specific global studies, they are in fact indicative of the fragmentation of the study of global policy as an analytic endeavour. Those undertaking sector-specific studies of global policies are highly specialized and often not familiar with literatures beyond their ‘own’ field. Moreover, where their insights reach into and inform the global policy space, their analysis often includes limited interest in how their sectoral interests might generate ‘knock-on’ effects with other sectors or cumulatively contribute to global policy and the development of transnational administrative spaces. Second, the wakening research interest of policy and administrative studies in the idea of transnational administration and global policy processes is a step behind both practitioner and student pressures for curricula innovations in higher education programmes. Students hankering for employment in IOs and NGOs to ‘manage’ regional global problems need graduate programmes and other kinds of training as part of their career progression (Stone, 2013, pp. 23–4). Many of these programmes are still emerging. They reflect a response to demand from government, corporate, and NGO employers for skills and competences in graduates that accommodate the range of influences on contemporary global policy (Jeong and Kim, this volume). This includes curricula developed at the intersection of business and international public affairs. Demand also arises from new generations of policy entrepreneurs who see a future career situated among the nexus of transnational networks, IOs, global public–private partnerships, and international NGOs. These students view a world where transnationalism is not an oddity but a fundamental fact within an increasingly institutionalized and interconnected global order. Third, there is little agreement to date among those scholars who are interested in transnational administration and Global Public Policy on what constitutes the parameters of ‘public policy beyond the nation-state’. For instance, European scholars, in the textbook Public Policy: A New Introduction by Christoph Knill and Jale Tosun (2012, p. 223), argued that public policies are directed by nation states rather than being the concern of private actors. By contrast, Patricia Kennett in Governance, Globalization and Public Policy (2008, p. 3) considered that globalization had ‘disrupted the traditional analytical and conceptual frameworks’ of policy making and implementation in the shift from government to governance. Likewise, slapping the word ‘international’ or
10 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney ‘global’ in front of ‘public policy’ or addressing public administration in a ‘global context’ (for example, Kim et al. (2014)) can sometimes be regarded as ‘old wine in new bottles’, ill-reflective of changing fashions and fads in higher education service delivery. This masks what are actually comparative studies of international dynamics affecting states or policy actors. Others study ‘international bureaucracy’ or ‘International Public Administration’ (IPA) by which they mean the internationalization of policy and administration, usually within the European Union (EU) (Eckhard and Ege, 2016; Knill and Bauer, 2016). This literature has highlighted the administrative and public policy opportunities when member states interact with such regional systems and, perhaps as notably, how this regional union can bypass a member state’s national-level administrative and policy arrangements for direct subnational engagements. The administrative and policy reconfigurations from the EU’s specific competencies rearrange not only the traditional state boundary but also the state and region’s networks, identities, and ideas as to who administers which policies, when, where, and how (inter alia Egeberg, 2006; Hooghe and Marks, 2003). The relative success of the EU has led to debates as to whether the EU is unique or if portions of its model are applicable elsewhere (see Ladi, this volume; Beeson and Stone, 2013). The general belief that the EU is sui generis partially drove the exclusion of EU- specific chapters within the Handbook. It is not that EU studies are not important or do not have value—far from it—but rather that there are already many volumes on the Europeanization of public administration or policy (for instance, Bauer and Trondal, 2015). Moreover, and notwithstanding the policy parallels and lessons that emerge from the EU context, the soft law and transnational administrative conduct that has developed within the EU is not necessarily a template to be ‘mapped onto’ the rest of the world. Finally, while the EU has sought to export its model of economic and political regionalization, other nations and regions are considerably less sanguine about the ‘beauty’ and utility of European policy and administrative exports (Beeson and Stone, 2013). American textbooks on globalized administration may include the word ‘comparative’ or ‘development’ before the term ‘administration’ but infrequently the word ‘global’ or ‘transnational’. This reflects both a methodological nationalism and a disciplinary belief that studies of the global or transnational are best left to International Relations. Similarly, and with fewer scholars than comparative policy studies, American-driven transnational administration research may offer little more than brief references to a bygone era of limited international civil servant research in the 1970s (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012). Alternatively, such research may mention that IOs such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (with reference often limited to those four) have been important influences on the development efforts of emerging states (Farazmand, 2001). This research infrequently contextualizes how an IO’s administrative processes and procedures alter international civil servant behaviour and the policy and administrative outputs that influence an IO’s member states. Instead, like its cousins in policy studies, this administrative research tends to focus on the state-level comparative or development administration experience
The Rise of Global Policy 11 (Jreisat, 2002; Tummala, 2003). Globalization has not dissolved these internal spaces of policy making and administration at the national level. Indeed, governments and their public servants remain core actors, as many of the contributors to this Handbook stress. The Oxford Handbook on Global Policy and Transnational Administration uses a broader frame of analysis to posit that public and private agents—whether business actors or civil society organizations—directly interact with policy making, policy design, and its delivery through policy experiments like global public–private partnerships and via the porous boundaries of transnational policy communities. With the involvement of private actors, ‘the public sphere’ (see Volkmer, this volume) has a qualitatively different character in global and regional domains compared to sovereign states vis-à-vis matters of public authority and the legitimate exercise of power. Fourth, these debates and developments in administrative and policy studies interact with the wider social science literature on global governance. However, there are some significant differences to note. To start, there is a different conceptual arsenal in policy and administrative studies that can complement ideas and approaches developed in International Relations as well as development studies (see earlier Oxford Handbook by Moran, Rein, and Goodin, 2006). These policy concepts and theories provide a source of distinctiveness. Elements of the ‘policy cycle’ heuristic, for example, can be conceptually stretched to transnational domains to ask questions about agenda-setting dynamics (Chaqués-Bonafont, this volume) or monitoring and evaluation processes (Wessal and Westcott, this volume). Other concepts could be adapted and deployed to address global issues, IOs, and transnational problems. Analytical work on transnational ‘policy streams’ and ‘windows of opportunity’, adapted from John Kingdon’s (2003) work, has already provided fertile territory for re-consideration of decision-making dynamics within IOs (inter alia, Alimi, 2015; di Ruggiero et al., 2015) as does the concept of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (Mamdu, Cairney, and Studlar, 2015). The ‘policy entrepreneur’ concept has also been applied to certain IOs (see Nay, 2012). There is an entire sub-field of ‘Policy Design’ enjoying a scholarly resurgence (see Howlett, Mukherjee, and Woo, 2015) that addresses policy instruments and their ‘mixes’ for policy implementation, policy change, and very occasionally policy termination (and extended to global policy design by Chou and Ravinet, this volume). From public administration, potential concepts, frameworks, and theories for transnational administrative studies may include the politics–administration dichotomy, organizational culture, resource dependency/stakeholder analyses, collaborative governance, public service motivation, ethics, and public personnel management. An analytical stance from public administration may also include the broader role of efficiency first/New Public Management ideas into both formal and informal IOs, as well as the composition, management, outputs of the multiple networked, and other actors engaging transnational arenas. A more specific example is the public administration concept of ‘representative bureaucracy’ (Dolan and Rosenbloom, 2003). This concept raises some key questions and concerns. Is an IO meant to ‘look like’ its member states and how should such
12 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney organizations apportion hiring of international civil servants to reflect ethnic, religious, differently abled, gender, and other diversities? Does this ‘passive representation’ become ‘active representation’ of one perspective if an international organization regularly hires staff who have Anglo-American terminal economics degrees in a Chicago-or Oxford-style of higher education? Likewise, the role of leadership—to address questions such as what pressures do international organization leaders face when balancing member-state demands with international civil servant sectoral, programmatic, and regional or country-specific expertise (Weller and Xu, 2015, and their chapter in this volume) are important. Equally intriguing are questions as to whether IO budgets are as transparent as the client states whose transparency they encourage or require (Moloney and Stoycheva, 2018). Such administrative analyses may also take a detailed organizational look at the creation, operationalization, implementation, and evaluation of policies, programmes, and projects. This includes the recognition that international civil servants are important actors capable of not only imparting expertise but also influencing implementation either as street-level bureaucrats (for example, a World Bank official stationed in Quito advising the Ministry of Finance) or ones located at global or regional headquarters. Nor does this observation exclude traditional sovereign-level public servants whose job may require interaction with the World Health Organization via the US Centre for Disease Control on Ebola or the UN High Commission for Refugees or Interpol via Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The networking of national-level public servants may also include engagement with global agreements such as CITES via Brazil’s Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources or engagements with informal IOs like the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN via South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. The growth of international consultancy firms around the monitoring and evaluation industry has paralleled the mandate creep of international, regional, and sub-regional governmental organizations and the proliferation of transnational policy communities. There is a rich field for addressing the management responsibilities of international civil servants and the flourishing corps of consultants, development specialists, expert advisors, and others circulating in transnational policy communities (see the chapters by Ronit; by Morgan, Sturdy and Frenkel; and by Jung and Harrow). Such responsibilities pose new questions about how international civil servant representativeness, programmatic legitimacy, organizational accountability, and administrative ethics are altered at the global level when transnational administration is disbursed to private entities. The emergence and interaction of global administrative law within an international (and region-specific) order poses important questions about sovereignty, its limits and which outputs arise when international civil servants interact with nation-state public servants (Kuo, this volume). Fifth, the practice of transnational administration and Global Public Policy often focuses on the outcomes and outputs of an international organization but less on how its process, that is, the internal rules, procedures and processes, along with civil servant expertise, organizational cultures, and other stakeholders, shapes outputs. An outcome
The Rise of Global Policy 13 analysis that does not consider these factors along with the chain of programme and project designs is an incomplete analysis. This task requires a deeper dive into the ‘black box’ of IOs and the transnational policy communities they co-habit. International civil servants interact with state-level civil servants as well as non-state actors, encountering unique ethical and accountability challenges in complex sets of transnational administration engagements outlined in the typology below (Stone, 2017): • Horizontally, through trans-governmental networks between officials at the same level, that is, networks of regulators, legislators, and mayors with cross-national counterparts. This is mostly an intergovernmental dynamic of information sharing that recognizes the sovereign authority of state officials. For example, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an official network of financial regulators with responsibilities for money laundering, or the annual Four Countries Conference of chief executives of electoral agencies from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom (Legrand, this volume). • Vertically, between trans-governmental networks of state/federal/local and other state-based public-sector officials with their international civil servant counter- parts for multi-level policy coordination. For example, the OECD peer-review and standard-setting practices discussed in this book (Pal, this volume). • Diagonally, across the public–private divide where government officials and international civil servants partner—informally and formally through their agency— with corporations, philanthropic foundations, academic establishments, or NGO consortia for multi-level policy coordination. A classic example is the Global Vaccine Alliance or GAVI (Huckel-Schneider, this volume) but other examples of global public–private partnerships include the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Global Water Partnership. • Unilaterally, through private initiatives such as the Global Commission on Drugs (Alimi, 2015) or independent NGO initiatives such as the multi- stakeholder Forest Stewardship Council (Chan and Pattberg, 2008). Business groups and other non-state actors often seek to shape and inform global policy agendas through preference-shaping initiatives such as those undertaken at the World Economic Forum in Davos or through other dialogue processes such as the World Social Forum. The quasi-public transnational policy communities that revolve around these four poles constitute a global public sector or a discernible transnational administrative space where the strict dichotomy between domestic and international has broken down. The Handbook does not seek to impose a conceptual straitjacket on what is an unruly reality of policy experimentation alongside an unravelling of traditional administrative boundaries. Instead, the intention is to draw together some common patterns that emerge across these different transnational administrative spheres in IOs and in transnational networks, whether they are networks of cities, NGOs, or scientists, in global public–private partnerships, or in between government agencies.
14 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney
1.3. Structure of the Handbook The forty chapters of Global Policy and Transnational Administration are organized into three sections. Part One details how public policy and administration is no longer the exclusive domain of the territorial state. Contributors to Part Two consider different ways of conceptualizing transnational public policy and its global public domains with special consideration for how global policy is framed, its processes, and its institutions. In Part Three, the authors assess the actors, instruments, and implementation concerns within transnational administration. The transnational administrative and policy landscapes that are presented have no uniform approach but instead employ a myriad of approaches reflecting the complexity of transnational spaces of policy and administration.
1.3.1. Part One: From National Paradigms to the Internationalization of Policy and Administration In the past, the traditional scholar of public policy and administration usually assumed a largely insulated sovereign domain of policy making and its administration. What happened beyond the sovereign borders was relegated to diplomats and foreign policy analysts. The Handbook and its contributors argue that such assumptions are no longer tenable in either theory or practice. Instead, nation states often encourage policy diffusion among and between states (Skogstad, this volume). Sovereign-level civil servants are no longer immune from the influences of globalization not only upon their states but also upon their job description and duties (Raadschelders and Verheijen, this volume). As such, administrative sovereignty is no longer a binary concept but one in which nuances exist. This includes entities whose state-like status allows the execution of partial or incomplete administrative sovereignty or where one or another state function appears state-like while others may operate with a co-administrated function (Muth, this volume). Derick Brinkerhoff reminds us that global policy responses require understanding not only of wealthy and/or Western states but also that fragile states require politically- informed and contextualized policy frames. In other words, policy transfer, an idea largely studied as a within-state or across-state transfer, must expand to recall that transfer includes vertical transfers from the global to the sovereign and from the sovereign to the local and even global to local policy transfer (Evans, this volume). Transnationally conceived and administered activities incorporate cities (and their managers acting as para-diplomatic actors). Heidi Smith observes the increasing importance of cities, networks of municipalities, and locally based but global-oriented associational actors as shapers and implementers of global policies. Policy transfer creates opportunities for political and policy leaders to use their networks or advocacy coalitions to scale
The Rise of Global Policy 15 up advocacy and to frame and define policy solutions in an internationalized dynamic of policy learning (Mintrom and Luetjens, this volume). International civil servants have a history as long as there have been IOs. Questions about their influence, legitimacy, and accountability are crucial to understanding global policy and transnational administration (Newman and Ravndal, this volume). However, deepening networks of transnational civil society actors also help set global agendas, define problems, and monitor and evaluate solutions (Krawczyk, this volume). Part One focuses on the internationalization of policy and administration within a Westphalian grammar of state sovereignty; that is, the challenges that state actors encounter in coping with global pressures. As Susana Borrás notes, this includes whether there is domestic policy capacity to correspond with and complement the transnational initiatives that are evolving beyond the state. Tim Legrand discusses how national-level bureaucrats and government officials now interact regularly with their overseas counterparts and respond to global policy problems through close cooperation and coordination in a policy process known as ‘trans-governmentalism’, a much deeper transnational dynamic than the internationalization of policy that starts the first part of the Handbook.
1.3.2. Part Two: Global Policy Frames, Processes, and Institutions The unreflective methodological nationalism and state centrism of administrative and policy studies of last century are already disappearing. Even so, scholars are still in definitional struggles with what is ‘global policy’, how it should be framed, and from which disciplinary origins influence should be felt. Often there is a preference for ‘international policy’ rather than the use of ‘global’ as the word ‘global’ has an all-encompassing earth- spanning reach that belies the realities of unevenly dispersed or geographically concentrated applications of policy. The opening chapter highlights the variance among different understandings of the scales and spheres of policy activity in international, transnational, regional, and supranational domains (Coleman, this volume). The idea of ‘global “public” policy’ challenges understandings of publicness. How communication is undertaken and the fluidity of the public sphere, especially its links to questions about a ‘de- bounding’ of civic identity through transnational action has created what Ingrid Volkmer refers to as trans-border ‘publicness’. Inge Kaul reminds readers that global public policy relates to the concept of ‘global public goods’ and the transnational risks created by state and/ or market failures. Complementary to Kaul’s chapter is Luk van Langenhove and Ivalyo Gatev’s discussion of regional public goods and a desire to recognize when and where public goods are best conceptualized from a national, regional, or even transregional perspective. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the EU’s institutions, its legacy for understanding global policy and transnational administration is significant, particularly concerning its multi-level governance and networks, along with idea of ‘Europeani zation’ (Ladi, this volume). Likewise, other fields of scholarship inform and shape
16 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney the development of global policy studies such as International Political Economy (Higgott and Woo, this volume) as well as Global Administrative Law (Kuo, this volume). The evolution of the concept of methodological transnationalism that releases policy studies from the Westphalian conceptualization of the ‘state’ (Stone, 2013) has created spaces for global policy studies to emerge. Journals (many of them new), international NGOs, and think tanks have grabbed hold of such shifts and created opportunities for scholars and practitioners to debate the theories and concepts of global policy and transnational administration. Universities and their teaching programmes have sought to ‘fill the gap’ between typically domestically focused public policy and public administration graduate degrees and student desires to learn the global skills to interact across levels of governance (Jeong and Kim, this volume). These opportunities are complementary to the creation of new knowledge networks and scientific communities, within which the role of normative commitments, the creation (and questioning) of ‘objective’ measures, the placement of expertise, and the differentiation created by transnationalization influence how we understand, create, and transmit public policy shifts (Sending, this volume). The last four chapters of Part Two question the conceptual, and methodological boundaries between global and national policy, transnational administration, and intergovernmental organization. Boundaries themselves are also of interest. Felicity Vabulas articulates the power and influence of a host of informal international organizations that also ‘administer the global’. Looking inside to their foundations, Jill Tao suggests that IOs are creatures of their originating promises and the charisma (or lack thereof) of their first leaders. Each factor affects their administrative culture and policy design choices. The ability or even inability of scholars and practitioners to push beyond domestic frames of analysis, to operationalize the insights from the resurging study of ‘policy design’, and to effectively select policy instruments in transnational administration is discussed by Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet. The boundaries of global networks are (re)defined constantly by states, IOs, and the civil society actors who create and operate them, while network capacity to control policy agendas also reflects their level of institutionalization, the motivations of their gatekeepers, and where and when policy ideas are introduced or deflected (Chaqués- Bonafont, this volume).
1.3.3. Part Three: Actors, Instruments, and Implementation in Transnational Administration The third part of the Handbook moves from global policy processes to consider transnational administration and its structures, functions, and actors, as well as how ‘global administrative ethics’ influences the administrative life within IOs. ‘Transnational Administration’ entails the management and staffing, financing and implementation, regulation and monitoring of global policies by both private and public actors that are operating primarily beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the state (Stone and
The Rise of Global Policy 17 Ladi, 2015, p. 840). These actors form more-or-less permanent transnational policy communities and Alexander Gaus views such communities and their accompanying regulatory networks as a new type of global administration. Questions of power, influence, and effectiveness of these networks also apply to unitary actors such as the OECD—a transnational policy actor with standard-setting and international peer-review mechanisms that Leslie Pal argues is influencing the administrative life not just of the OECD’s member states but non-member states as well. In terms of the evolving funding patterns of global programmes and partnerships, Daniele Alesani details how new funding mechanisms, including private sources, play a fundamental role in shaping global programmes. Of these, Wessal and Wescott explore the effectiveness of eight global partnerships, created relatively recently, taking into consideration partnership structure, accountability and participatory mechanisms. Furthering this global partnership emphasis, Carmen Huckel Schneider explores the internal structures and cultures of such organizations, whether they create new standards of transnational administration, and where oversight and accountability does or does not exist. Five chapters evaluate the interaction of one type of global actor with the administrative challenges of global policy making. Karsten Ronit discusses how the global business community and specialized industry bodies leverage global policy forums to achieve their objectives. Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frankel articulate how large management consultancy firms leverage their expertise and social networks to shape elite-level policy interaction and, ultimately, its direction. The creation of transnational regulatory standards and the difficulty of private actors ensuring compliance within those standards is the focus of Fabrizio Cafaggi’s chapter on global supply chains. The rise of the foundation as a powerful global actor with administrative (and policy making) power is evaluated by Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow in their chapter. Andrew Cooper notes that global summitry, the role of sherpas, and the transnational technocratic management of Group of Twenty (G20) summits is a contested space at the highest and most elite level of dialogue. In one way or another, the final set of chapters address questions about ‘global administrative ethics’. Each chapter encourages the reader to consider what is being asked of international civil servants, where leadership may frame or alter what is possible, and how questions of representation, personnel management, and misbehaviour (by the IO or by the international civil servants, or by peace-keepers) influence our emergent global order. Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong examine the leadership requirements for IOs and the need of leaders to combine managerial roles with both diplomatic and political skill. Similarly, Kim Moloney argues that the decisions of IOs on how they will recruit, hire, and promote, matter for organizational outputs around mission and for meeting member-state expectations. Obtaining justice for a community or person who suffers a wrong from an IO or its international civil servants is often difficult or even impossible. By analysing the interaction of immunity and other privileges, Muna Ndulo suggests how the global community might encourage greater accountability. The difficulty of blowing the whistle is this section’s final chapter. Given the propensity of IO’s to not define whistleblowing, to structure employment contracts (and visas) to discourage whistleblowing, along with real fears of
18 Diane Stone and Kim Moloney retribution and the difficulty (and cost) of accessing justice, this volume’s final chapter highlights how approaches to accountability and legitimacy require new methods of analysis (Bowman, West, and Moloney, this volume).
1.4. Conclusion In an era of rising nationalism and populism, questions about the permanence of democratic traditions, and debates over inequality and economic models of development, it may seem that globalization dynamics are in retreat or, at the very least, face strong challenges from domestic political powers and social forces. The label ‘globalist’—the people, groups and organizations that observe and interpret, advocate or find opportunity in globalizing and regionalizing dynamics—has become a slur word among some nationalist groups, on both the left and the right, who believe the nation state and local communities to have come under threat from multinational corporate power and a heterogeneous group of global elites. Notwithstanding the political strength of populist resistances to global dynamics, transnational policy problems continue to persist. Such problems exist regardless of countervailing local and national political forces. These problems are not contracting but, instead, they are expanding, evolving, and morphing as technology advances and as interactions across states increase and humans put greater pressure on the global commons. Communities and citizenries have real ‘lived’ experiences of austerity, poverty, and inequity that result from global pressures but they are bound by a Westphalian grammar of representation and do not have recourse to global public forums. Instead, the evolution of global policy making and transnational administration has been de- politicized in three ways (Stone, 2017): first, by the delegation of authority and implementation to ‘arms-length’ bodies of indirect governance such as ‘global public–private partnerships’ and transnational networks as well as informal international organization; second, by the ‘soft law’ of voluntary standards, benchmarks, ‘best practice’ and other kinds of targets that function as a set of calculative practices to regulate; and third, by the fragmentation of policy deliberation to new cadres of transnational administrators, consultants, and experts—dynamics that the majority of contributors to the Handbook detail and discuss. While global policy making and new modes of transnational administration are poorly understood, societal frustration is likely to persist and disrupt global policy coordination. The Handbook endeavours to both examine and define global policy and transnational administration but, perhaps as importantly, it places both concepts within an ever-globalizing space where solutions to transnational problems will be solved less by the singular effort of a few states but instead through a collective of public and private action in delegative processes and decentralized global spaces. Nevertheless, forty chapters cannot do full justice to this domain of scholarly inquiry. Not every concern could be covered. On the ‘wish list’ for this Handbook were also chapters on matters such as
The Rise of Global Policy 19 cyberwarfare, structural inequality, renewable energy, and how food policies and freshwater resources will shape the future global community. Other ‘wish list’ topics included the emergence and strengthening of sub-regional organizations, stakeholder power within IOs, deeper comparative work across formal and informal IOs, and more discussion of the emergent global judicial space (international law, global administrative law, international administrative law) and how it connects to the administrative domain and outputs of IOs. This includes the incorporation of disciplines largely overlooked within this volume, such as political geography, anthropology, and sociology. In addition, there are several perspectives for which there was no space to fully develop, such as interpretative policy analysis, post-structural/post-modern notions of policy making, rational choice approaches, non-Western models (whether by country or by administrative tradition), Marxist or Gramscian perspectives, and likely many more. Finally, whether or not global policy and transnational administration is democratic in development remains an open question, and a perennial one, for scholarly consideration. Each of the above sectors, topics, and organizations represent opportunities for future research and publication. Each are ripe for a comprehensive analysis of where current and past generations of scholars have been, and where future generations will frame and interact with global public and transnational administration. They are opportunities to reframe and reconsider not just what the Handbook has covered but also to remember that, for many, the origins and evolution of administrative studies and the ‘policy sciences’ inside the nation state were ‘directed towards knowledge to improve the practice of democracy’ (deLeon, 2006, p. 53, citing Harold Lasswell). Outside the nation state, where there is no world government architecture (nor likely to be), this intersection of knowledge with democratic practice—or perhaps more sensibly, with ‘good governance’ of the global policy and transnational administrative space—may imply that neither policy nor administration are exclusively state-specific endeavours but, instead, a project with global reach. Regardless of whether one focuses on accountabilities within global policy and transnationally administered spaces, its transparency or even its representativeness or legitimacy, there is one idea that joins those who fear the so-called globalists and those who hope that global and transnational spaces will help solve humanity’s greatest problem: more knowledge, understanding, and collaboration will help improve global policy and its administration in transnational spaces. The Handbook is one step in that direction.
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Chapter 2
Gl obal Publi c P ol i c y an d the C onsti t u t i on of P olitical Au t h ori t y Grace Skogstad
2.1. Introduction What are the problems and prospects for policy and administration beyond the territorial state? The answer provided in this chapter is that these prospects hinge on the possibilities for, and the challenges to, constructing sites and processes of legitimate transnational political authority. In making its case for the imperative of legitimate political authority for policy making whose scope transcends a single territory/jurisdiction, this chapter advances three propositions. The first proposition is that transnational political actors require a legitimate basis for their exercise of political, including regulatory, authority. No less than in the domestic public policy arena, transnational political actors and transnational policy processes must conform to socially accepted standards of who are appropriate political actors and what are appropriate policy processes if their policy outputs are to be seen as obligatory. The second is that constructing a legitimate basis for the exercise of transnational political authority (authority that yields regional or global policy outcomes) is challenging. The strategy used in the domestic arena of building a legitimate basis for policy making by aggregating different sources of authority (legal, delegated, expert, and/or principled) to establish input, output, and throughput legitimacy is less effective in the global arena where there is considerably less consensus regarding legitimate political actors and legitimate rule-setting procedures. The third argument is that focusing on how transnational political actors draw on different sources of authority can help us to understand the politics of the transnational policy process and its scope for yielding policy outcomes of global or regional scope. In short, understanding the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of constructing transnational political authority bring us closer to a theory of how
24 Grace Skogstad political actors, events, and contexts interact over time to either yield or preclude policy outcomes of transnational scope. To develop these themes, the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section discusses the significance of perceptions of legitimate political authority in the policy process. Drawing attention to the liberal democratic norms that constitute popular consent as a basis for legitimate political authority in the domestic policy arena of advanced industrialized states, it discusses how policy makers design policy processes in order to couple their institutional ‘in authority’ with the ‘an authority’ credentials of non-state actors. The second section of the chapter builds the case for the significance and challenge of constituting transnational political authority. It explains why constituting the authority to make binding rules in the international/transnational policy arena—for example, by international institutions and private actors—is a significantly greater challenge than in the domestic arena where policy makers can normally rely on (domestic) taken-for- granted norms of appropriate actors and procedures of policy making. To illustrate the nature of the authority challenge and how these challenges affect the policy process, three pathways in which transnational political actors (state and non-state) are expected to be present are investigated. The first pathway is via international organizations granted legal authority by their member states. The second pathway is via private actors establishing regulatory standards for the conduct of transnational businesses— absent delegated authority from states. The third pathway is via processes of voluntary diffusion of policies across states. The authority challenges that arise in pathways one and two—about who gets to decide and via what processes—are less likely to surface in pathway three. The final section of the chapter summarizes and suggests a few avenues of research for shedding more light on the dynamics of constituting transnational political authority.
2.2. Political Authority: Coupling ‘in Authority’ with ‘an Authority’ Legitimate political authority is widely understood to be an essential ingredient in domestic policy making. As Weber (1978[1922], p. 31) observed, when authority is exercised in a way that is perceived to be legitimate—that is, consistent with norms of appropriate actors and proper procedures of rule-making—it is deferred to and voluntarily accepted by those subject to it. The broadly accepted norm in liberal democracies in the Westphalian era is that binding authority—authority that ultimately validates the use of physical force to enforce state ordered regulations (Weber 1978[1922])—requires the consent of the governed. These norms make state actors who derive their own authority from ‘the people’ the major repository of the input legitimacy vital to political authority. Despite being the basis for legitimate policy making in liberal democracies, leading frameworks of the domestic policy process rarely make explicit reference to the
Global Public Policy 25 importance of political authority in the policy process. Rather, ‘political authority’ is replaced with ‘political power’, with the identification of the actors who exercise political power and the sources (institutional, structural, ideational, contingent) of their political power occupying a central place in all accounts of the policy process. Insofar as authority (the ability to induce deference in others) is usually defined as legitimate power (Schmitter, 2001, p. 3), this implicit equation of ‘political power’ and ‘political authority’ is understandable, at least when it comes to state actors. Yet, even with respect to theories of the domestic policy process, there is analytical utility in distinguishing between political power and political authority—because there are sources of authority other than the authority derived from rules and rule-based offices. Katsikas (2010, p. 117) distinguishes the rule-based ‘in authority’ of governmental actors from the ‘an authority’ credentials of individuals or organizations that possess superior knowledge, skill, or other resources. In practice, state actors have themselves recognized that their political power can be reinforced by complementing their institutionally-derived authority with these other sources of authority. Besides drawing on the expert credentials of the personnel in their public service and other state agencies, governments also draw into the policy process non-state actors who possess informational and organizational resources. Their usual rationale for doing so is to enhance their own output legitimacy through more effective performance (Scharpf, 1999). Schmidt (2013) argues that providing civil society organizations with access to decision-makers can also be a way to shore up the ‘throughput legitimacy’ of political authority: that is, the legitimacy that decision-makers derive owing to their adherence to procedural norms of accountability, informational transparency, and openness. Theories of the domestic policy process make room for the ‘in’ as well as the ‘an’ authority wielded by non-state actors. They recognize that states sometimes share their rule-making and rule-implementation powers with non-state actors, delegating them tasks of creating and implementing rules, and adjudicating disputes around these rules. Theories that posit policy networks of state and non-state actors as central policy actors have incorporated the role of ‘an authority’ non-state actors into their accounts (Skogstad, 2003). In a slightly different vein, some scholars characterize the dispersal of rule-making authority to non-governmental actors as a distinct form of ‘governance’: one that departs from policy making centred on the institutional political authority of government actors (Sorenson and Torfing, 2008; see also Bell and Hindmoor, 2009, Chapter 1). Notwithstanding their different conceptualization, both the concepts of policy network and governance capture the idea of authority as a set of relationships across political actors that extend beyond state actors. If state/government actors have incentives to augment their own authority by drawing non-governmental actors closely into the domestic policy process, there should nonetheless be no assumption that they are displaced by non-state actors. The participation of non-state actors is structured by state actors who have considerable capacity to reconfigure the membership and modes of operation of policy networks (Skogstad, 2008). For their part, governance arrangements rely on the meta-governance authority of governments/state actors for their establishment (Hoppe, 2010) and state actors usually
26 Grace Skogstad remain ‘pivotal actors’ within them (Bell and Hindmoor, 2009, pp. 3–4). In the domestic realm, with rare exceptions, those ‘in authority’ retain ultimate control over the policy process. Moreover, citizens hold them responsible for resolving any substantive disagreements across the non-state (expert) actors who profess to be ‘an authority’ on a controversial issue. In summary, the exercise of authority in the domestic realm is supported by different sources of legitimacy: the input legitimacy that derives from majoritarian representation practices based on elections (Scharpf, 1999); the throughput legitimacy of adherence to procedural norms like accountability and transparency (Schmidt, 2010); and the output legitimacy of effective policy outcomes (Scharpf, 1999). Theories of the policy process, particularly those that are focused on networks or patterns of intermediation across state and non-state actors, are conceptual efforts to capture the plural bases of legitimacy upon which the exercise of political authority rests.
2.3. Constituting Transnational Political Authority in Transnational Policy Pathways The policy problem that confronts policy and administration beyond the state is the burden of constituting legitimate political authority. Within liberal democracies, there is likely to be considerable consensus regarding who are the proper actors and what are the appropriate procedures and scope of governing. Providing these consensual norms are adhered to, the authority of those who make rules for others to follow is unlikely to be challenged. Such a consensus regarding who gets to decide and how decisions are reached cannot be assumed of policy-and rule-making authority beyond the territorial state. In the global polity, as Grant and Keohane (2005, p. 35) observe, the chief sources of legitimacy in the domestic arena—constitutional mandates, electoral processes, legality and tradition—are unavailable. In the absence of clear and consensual rules about who are legitimate political actors and what are appropriate governing procedures, claims to legitimacy at the global level, they suggest, are subject to a tension between two models: participatory and delegated policy making. Within a participatory model, transnational political actors such as international institutions acquire legitimacy by inclusion of those (state and non-state parties) affected by their actions and by conformity with democratic norms like ‘fairness’ and ‘the right to exercise voice’ (ibid., p. 35). Within a delegated accountability model, international institutions and other transnational actors retain legitimacy by being accountable to those who delegated them authority, a condition met by behaving consistently with ancillary democratic norms like transparency. Although both the participatory and delegated models are fused in liberal democratic states (as suggested above), there is greater tension between the two models
Global Public Policy 27 in the global realm. As discussed further below, some international organizations (the World Trade Organization, for example) tilt heavily to a delegated model of accountability to their member states, while others, like the World Bank, lean toward a participatory model that provides formal representation for non-governmental organizations. Tensions between the two models and the absence of shared global norms (and practices) on their respective appropriateness, make policy making beyond the territorial state prone to far greater contestation than is found in the domestic arena regarding who are legitimate political actors and what comprise proper procedures of decision-and rule-making. Using different terms but applying a similar logic, Schmidt (2010) describes ‘the democratic trilemma’ of a global polity constituted by multi-level governance as entailing trade-offs across input, throughput, and output legitimacy. For example, efforts to enhance throughput legitimacy by inclusion of a plurality of civil society groups (Grant and Keohane’s participatory model) risk undermining not only output legitimacy but also input legitimacy (the delegated accountability model). Others also recognize the challenge of constructing the legitimate transnational political authority needed to address cross-jurisdictional problems. For example, Grande and Pauly (2005, p. 293) describe constructing transnational political authority as ‘an ongoing struggle’, hindered by problems of legitimacy and accountability, while Peters (2005, p. 82) states the global polity lacks a supply of ‘authority-based instruments for resolving blockages’. For many, the unwillingness of sovereign states to pool their rule- making authority with other states or to delegate it to an international institution is the source of the problem. Yet, states do overcome this problem when they recognize that they cannot realise their own goals without cooperating with other states. Their solution, delegating their sovereign authority to international institutions, creates an important and highly effective pathway to regional and global policy. In the absence of state coordination, or with states’ implicit if not explicit compliance, non-state actors create another pathway to regional and global policy outcomes when they define rules of conduct to coordinate their own market actions. The next two sections of this chapter discuss these two pathways to regional and global policy outcomes. The first is via the delegation of state authority to international institutions; the second, via the exercise of ‘private authority’ to set and monitor rules of market behaviour by private/non-state actors. The two sections examine the authority dynamics of both pathways by addressing two questions. How are authoritative policy instruments and processes constructed via this pathway? What is the nature of the authority contests that are likely to arise via this pathway around policy processes of agenda setting (the rise of an issue on the policy agenda), the formulation of policy and regulatory instruments in response, and/or the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and rules? Although distinguished analytically for the purposes of this analysis, in practice these pathways are expected to coexist. They also coexist with the third pathway to regional and/or global policy outputs: states’ voluntarily adopting the public policies of other jurisdictions.
28 Grace Skogstad
2.3.1. Pathway 1: Via International Institutions This first pathway centres on international institutions as significant sites of regional and/or global policy making. Depending upon the international organization, its influence in the policy process can be one or more of agenda setting, the selection of policy instruments, the monitoring of rules of conduct agreed by member states, and the adjudication of disputes that arise when member states violate these rules. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, is influential in agenda setting, as well as in monitoring member states’ performance against the benchmarks and standards of good behaviour it has established (Mahon and McBride, 2008; Pal, this volume). The European Union is influential throughout all phases of the policy process—with the important exception that its authority does not extend to policy implementation. Policies and rules agreed within EU institutions generally apply to all EU member states, unless opt-outs have also been agreed. The legal authority of both the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO) extends to dispute adjudication. The WTO is the exceptional international organization whose policy pathway extends to having considerable influence over the substantive content of the policies that are implemented. Member states found in legal breach of a WTO treaty face sanctions if they fail to bring the substantive consequences of their domestic policies into conformity with the violated treaty. Given their role throughout the policy process (with the important exception of policy implementation, which member states of international organizations reserve for themselves), international institutions are important sites of transnational political activity. When international organizations serve as the hub of a pathway that results in treaties, conventions, and obligatory codes that apply to all members of the organization, the policy processes that surround them are an important conduit to policies that are regional and/or global in their scope. How do international institutions constitute the legitimate authority to be influential in transnational policy processes of agenda setting, policy formulation, or even policy monitoring/enforcement? Their most obvious and, arguably, most important source of authority in these processes is the delegated authority they receive from member states, not least because it is the basis of their legal authority. Beyond their delegated and legal powers, international institutions are usually also able to construct other sources of authority, most notably, expert authority derived from their specialized knowledge as well as moral authority that comes from their defence of agreed values and principles (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Busch, 2013). Indeed, international organizations usually have strong incentives to fortify their delegated authority since it is a weak source of authority as compared to the popular authority of directly accountable elected governments. The need to strengthen the legitimacy of their authority has given some, but not all, of the world’s most prominent international institutions strong incentives in recent decades to conform to a participatory model of legitimacy and include a variety
Global Public Policy 29 of non-governmental organizations in the policy process. International organizations that do so become hubs of activity for transnational policy actors: that is, organizations and/or individuals seeking to develop and advocate policy proposals in multiple venues (Orenstein, 2009, p. 57). By virtue of the EU’s legal authority for regional governance, the institutions of the EU (the European Commission, the European Parliament) are arguably the best example of a transnational policy hub. But the same holds for international institutions like the WTO and the World Bank (Stone, 2004, Orenstein, 2008). In an effort to shore up the legitimacy of their exercise of authority, these and other international institutions have also taken steps not only to embrace democratic norms of transparency, but also to create opportunities for civil society input. The resulting linkages to non-governmental actors are likely to differ in some important respects from domestic policy networks. For example, civil society groups that find themselves excluded from domestic policy making networks have incentives to venue shop to the international forum, where they may also find their influence augmented by association with other groups seeking similar goals (Pralle, 2003). To the extent that international organizations become sites of transnational political activity, they also become ‘sites of contestation’ (Béland and Orenstein, 2013, p. 136). Using the example of the World Bank, Béland and Orenstein (2013, p. 128) argue that the World Bank’s main source of policy influence, ‘ideas and expertise’, tends to make it ‘riven by disputes between different experts and policy paradigms’. These disputes, they contend, can lead to learning within the international organization and a change of its policies over time. If we want to understand the transnational policy process, Béland and Orenstein (ibid., p. 137) further recommend that we examine how ‘some ideas, and the experts articulating them, become more legitimate or dominant within particular international organisations’. The authority contest referred to by Béland and Orenstein—across experts with competing policy paradigms—is certainly not unique to international institutions and/or transnational policy pathways. Domestic policy making is also subject to periodic paradigm contests in which ‘issues of authority are likely to be central to the process of paradigm change’ (Hall, 1993, p. 280). Who gets to speak authoritatively determines the outcomes of these ideational struggles in the domestic arena (cf. Skogstad and Whyte, 2015). There is no reason to expect ‘who gets to speak authoritatively’ will not also determine outcomes of policy battles across state and non-state actors and institutions in the global arena. For example, Blyth (2013, p. 210) has argued that, despite the neoclassical ‘efficient markets’ paradigm being discredited by the 2007 financial crisis, a major reason why it prevailed was because ‘every recognisable authority’ in the form of international financial institutions and domestic central banks continued to uphold it. Notwithstanding Blyth’s example, authority contests in the international institutional pathway can be expected. One reason is that international institutions (and their ancillary policy networks) are often founded on compromises across different policy paradigms. As such, the very purpose of international institutions can remain
30 Grace Skogstad a subject of political contestation. Another reason is the existence in the global polity of a plurality of international institutions whose authority overlaps even while the ideas and norms they privilege may not. A third reason is the strong likelihood of authority contests between international institutions and their member states; the latter retain the authority to implement international institutions’ rules and enjoy relatively greater legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens (Grande and Pauly, 2005, p. 293). All of these are reasons for transnational political actors to question the legitimate exercise of political authority by international institutions. How international institutions deal with this challenge provides insight into the dynamics of constituting authority in the transnational arena. The WTO’s role in establishing global policies (for over 150 member countries) with respect to agricultural trade policy provides a good example of the authority contests that can surround international organizations as they seek to construct and implement a global policy paradigm that defines desirable goals and means to realize them. The process that led to a significant strengthening of hard global law for agricultural trade, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations, was marked by a clash between two paradigms. One relied on state support to develop agriculture; the other advocated liberalizing agricultural markets in order to promote agricultural production. The 1995 WTO Agreement on Agriculture incorporated many of the principles in the market liberal paradigm. Countries’ scope to use trade-restricting measures to support their agricultural sectors was curtailed by the rules of the Agreement, backed up as they were by the strong dispute settlement authority given to the WTO itself. At the same time, however, the United States and the EU were able to secure a number of provisions that permitted them to continue to support their farmers. Their ability to do so has subsequently produced a major backlash among countries in the developing South who have viewed the Agreement on Agriculture as badly lop-sided and disproportionately benefitting agriculture in rich, industrialized countries. Subsequent to the commencement of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations in November 2001, developing countries sought to level the playing field by obtaining access to policy instruments they believed they needed to develop their own agricultural sectors. Their efforts to do so intersected with the rise of food security on the global agenda in the wake of the 2007–08 food crisis, engendering a global debate that has pitted moral principles of ‘the right to food’ and ‘food sovereignty’ against the WTO’s promotion of trade liberalization. The global policy network promoting the right to food principle is centred on the UN and comprised by global civil society actors and NGOs; prominent members include a movement representing small farmers in the developing South, faith-based groups, and environmental groups. Its normative agenda is congruent with the food security and human rights principles and mandate of UN-based institutions. The result is what Margulis (2013, p. 64) describes as ‘the deepening transnational food security policy network at the UN’. The transnational UN-based food security policy network has squared off against the transnational trade liberalization policy network at the WTO, forcing the latter to defend
Global Public Policy 31 trade liberalization as a solution to food insecurity. The WTO itself has been the site of a prolonged debate between states over the nature of the linkage between trade liberalization and food insecurity in the global South. Informing this debate is the knowledge produced by two epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), loosely organized around competing paradigms regarding the cause–effect relationship between trade liberalization and food insecurity. The paradigm of trade liberalization as a solution to food insecurity has relied on the econometric modelling of academic and professional economists from mainly American universities and international organizations. Social scientists (few of whom are economists), professional researchers, and activists working on food, development, and social justice issues cite longer-term structural developments such as globalization and liberalization to explain food insecurity (Margulis, 2014, pp. 332–3). The second type of knowledge and discourse also figures prominently in the UN-based food sovereignty network. These competing paradigms and conflict over the extent to which the Agreement on Agriculture should accommodate food security became a major source of deadlock in the Doha Round trade negotiations. A break came when WTO members agreed in 2013 to the right of developing countries to public stockpiling of food for food security purposes—until a more permanent solution could be found. This right, reaffirmed in 2015, allowed WTO defenders to argue that WTO law ‘reflects a careful balance between the benefits of free trade and the central principle of state sovereignty, including in respect of food security’ (Hughes and Baker, 2015, p. 103). The political contestation over the sovereign right to food security vis-à-vis trade liberalization illustrates the dynamic nature of the authority contests that can develop in this first pathway when international organizations can produce binding rules and when the mandates of different international institutions overlap. First, in the multiple venue system of international organizations, transnational political actors challenge one international institution’s rule-making authority by leveraging the (moral) authority of another international institution and the knowledge of competing experts (Margulis, 2013, p. 63). Second, these challenges can in turn augment the authority of an international institution-centred policy pathway. Margulis (2014, p. 335) argues that, forced to respond to the linking of the food crisis and trade, the WTO has itself become ‘a legitimate and authoritative voice on food security’ with its officials having acquired greater influence over global norms in food security governance. Rather than deferring to other organizations, the WTO now works alongside experts from other organizations (the FAO, the World Bank, the World Food Programme) to advise the G8 and G20 countries on how to dress food price volatility (ibid.). An organization like the WTO that acts as a hub for the adoption of global rules of trade, and which is accompanied by a dispute settlement mechanism that compels its member states to adhere to its rules, is obviously an important actor in transnational policy processes. The roles played by other international organizations in the policy process—creating and diffusing ideas about the nature of policy problems and appropriate solutions—are discussed further below, in pathway three.
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2.3.2. Pathway 2: Via Private Standard Setting and Market Regulation This second pathway is created by the bottom-up initiative of non-state actors. Depending on whether it is private/firm actors alone, or whether they establish rules of conduct in conjunction with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and public officials, the regulatory initiatives on this pathway have been variously labelled ‘private authority’ (Cutler et al., 1999), non-state market-driven (NSMD) governance (Cashore, 2002), and transnational new governance (Abbott and Snidal, 2009). In contrast to the private standard setting that occurs in the domestic policy arena, transnational private standard setting transcends the domestic arena. Its purpose is to develop voluntary rules and standards for the conduct and activities within a regional or global supply chain of international business firms and/or their suppliers: for example, with respect to labour rights, human rights, and the environment. These initiatives can span the spectrum of regulatory activities that domestic states might otherwise exercise: from the setting of rules/standards to their implementation and monitoring and to imposing sanctions for non-compliance with standards. Undertaken for a variety of reasons—to ward off state action, in response to a perceived failure of states to act, and/or under pressure from non-governmental organizations—evidence suggests private standard-setting initiatives with transnational scope have increased in number and complexity over time (Abbott and Snidal, 2009; Büthe, 2010; Porter and Ronit, 2011). How does rule-making that lacks the legal or moral obligation to obey (which accompanies the international organizations delegated state authority in Pathway 1 and the state institutions in Pathway 3) achieve the legitimacy to induce voluntary compliance? This is the challenge of private authority and NSMD governance. The challenge is twofold. The first is internal: from the target private firms. In the absence of legal sanctions for not following the rules/codes of conduct designed for them, private firms may have incentives to follow their own standards instead. Their incentives to comply are stronger when de jure voluntary standards are de facto compulsory, as Fuchs and Kalfagianni (2010, p. 2) observe is the case for food retail standards where failure to comply prohibits participation in the global market. The second legitimacy challenge is from the external audience of mobilized stakeholders and the broader public, who are likely to view voluntary business codes of conduct as self-serving (Katsikas, 2010, p. 122) and/or an exercise of corporate structural power (Fuchs and Kalfagianni, 2010; Porter and Ronit, 2011). One important way to meet this twofold legitimacy challenge is by a private authority producing desired results. For target private firms, these desired results are overwhelmingly economic: for example, ability of a code of conduct to reduce a firm’s transaction costs in the market place, to yield profits through an enhanced reputation, or to prevent NGO or consumer boycott campaigns (Cutler et al., 1999, p. 337; Porter and Ronit, 2011, p. 19; Cashore, 2002). Considerations of output legitimacy via superior performance— in the form of more effective and/or efficiency outcomes owing to the expertise and
Global Public Policy 33 technical knowledge of private actors—are also important in garnering the support of external audiences. Beyond the output legitimacy created by effective performance (Scharpf, 1999), an additional legitimating source is adherence to principles inscribed in international treaties and conventions. Global norms in support of market mechanisms and economic liberalism are seen to provide a supportive normative framework for NSMD (Bernstein and Cashore, 2007) and private regulation (Fuchs and Kalfagianni, 2010). At the same time, global norms supporting democratic procedures also encourage these standards/codes of conduct to be developed via transparent processes that include stakeholders in order to be recognized as legitimate (Bernstein and Cashore, 2007, p. 353). Such throughput legitimacy mechanisms can be extended to involving other stakeholders and members of civil society in the development and monitoring of codes of conduct with respect to business practices. Adherence to these procedural practices has contributed to the legitimacy of private certification programmes (of sustainable practices) in forestry and fisheries (Cashore, 2002, p. 511). A third way to secure greater legitimacy for this mode of transnational regulation is to supplement it with the legal authority of states and international organizations. The result is a hybrid form of transnational authority (Andonova, 2010) created when states or international organizations establish mandatory baseline principles, operational procedures, and other parameters for standard setting and rely on a private system of compliance and verification. Many private standard-setting schemes, argue Abbott and Snidal (2009, p. 559), recognize the value of incorporating international law rules and principles into their standards. The EU has been active in establishing such private– public hybrids for the certification and auditing of sustainability standards for a variety of products, including for sustainability standards for biofuels (European Commission, 2015). The EU’s 2009 Renewable Energy Directive requires that biofuels that receive public benefits meet stipulated greenhouse gas emissions savings relative to fossil fuels, and conform to requirements on the kind of land that can be used to produce biofuels. It also requires certification of compliance with these standards by authorities recognized by the EU—which include voluntary certification schemes—and auditing of private certification schemes by a third party (Ponte and Daugbjerg, 2015). Although the very nature of privately initiated standard setting of transnational business practices can make it hard to trace the authority contests in this pathway, these contests can be expected to pit business firms and industry groups against one another (for reasons elaborated above) as well as against non-business NGOs and other civil society groups. The business and non-business actors that are party to private governance rely on different sources of authority: technical and operational know-how in the case of business; moral principles and, usually, as well, expertise, in the case of NGOs. Their struggles undoubtedly reflect their different preferences about the substantive content of business codes of practice (for example, the stringency of labour, environmental, and/or human rights standards in private certification schemes). Promoting these distinct preferences, especially in the case of NGOs, proceeds by challenging the expert credentials of others. An example is the court action and eventual suit against the European
34 Grace Skogstad Commission launched by anti-biofuel environmental organizations in 2011. The latter were seeking to gain access to documents used by the European Commission—in order to challenge the Commission’s decision to verify a voluntary biofuels certification scheme (ClientEarth et al. v European Commission, 2012). Notwithstanding the internal EU controversy regarding private biofuels certification schemes, the Roundtable for Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) provides an example of how it is possible to shore up the legitimacy of private certification of sustainable biofuels by, as suggested earlier, relying on plural sources of authority (Winickoff and Mondou, 2017). Recognized as a certification body under the EU Renewable Energy Directive, the RSB has built a high reputation, with endorsements from international organizations, inclusion of stakeholders, and commitment to rigorous science.
2.3.3. Pathway 3: Via Voluntary Horizontal Policy Diffusion A substantial body of literature draws attention to the phenomenon of policy diffusion: the spread of policy ideas, norms and practices across borders as policy choices in a jurisdiction are systematically conditioned by prior choices in other jurisdictions and/or international policy models. Diffusion is an important pathway to regional, and more rarely, global policies, as illustrated by the range of policies subject to diffusion processes. A by no means exclusive list of policies that have diffused cross- jurisdictionally includes human rights, including LGBT rights (Kollman, 2007); environmental protection (Holzinger et al., 2008); economic liberalization (Simmons and Elkins, 2004); and social policies with respect to family support (Linos, 2011) and pension privatization (Orenstein, 2008; Weyland, 2005). Notwithstanding its significance, this pathway is given shorter treatment here than the other two pathways because a separate chapter in this Handbook discusses the closely related subject of policy transfer. Evidence that policies tend to diffuse regionally (to neighbouring jurisdictions) and to exhibit elements of commonality and diversity suggests a role for both external/transnational and domestic policy actors. The pattern of policy diffusion across geographically proximate countries suggests the significance of transnational actors, such as foreign governments, international organizations, epistemic communities, non-governmental organizations, and think tanks, as agents of diffusion (cf. Stone, 2004; Dobner, 2009; Graham, Shipan, and Volden, 2012). These transnational political actors act as ‘go between’ actors, spreading policy ideas and blueprints across polities (Graham, Shipan, and Volden, 2012), and are influential in domestic policy processes when their knowledge and/or principled ideas provide a basis for domestic public policies. International organizations appear to have an especially influential potential role in diffusion and convergence processes when they transform not only the strategies (Kollman, 2011) but even the preferences of domestic actors, through mechanisms of transnational communication and learning/socialization. Such mechanisms, for example, enabled the
Global Public Policy 35 World Bank and other transnational policy actors to diffuse their pension privatization ideas across the globe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Orenstein, 2008) and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to spread its economic ideas (Broome and Seabrooke, 2015). However influential transnational policy actors are in giving domestic political actors incentives to adopt external policy ideas or norms or practices, policy diffusion depends upon domestic political actors pulling in policy innovations from elsewhere. It requires ‘domestically based translators’ of global policy norms who are able ‘to choose between alternatives’ on offer (Stone, 2012, p. 496). There are various mechanisms that induce domestic officials to do so: learning about the perceived success of the policy elsewhere, the desire to emulate policies that are seen as appropriate and so provide them with external legitimacy, and the belief that the policy will enhance their jurisdiction’s competitiveness (Dobbin et al., 2007; Simmons et al., 2007). Notwithstanding such motivations, evidence of limits to policy diffusion, and that norms, ideas and practices often change in form and content as they diffuse, indicates the significance of domestic political factors (Klingler-Vidra and Schleifer, 2014, pp. 264, 272). The outcomes of diffusion processes are filtered through domestic political institutions, norms, and economic structures. Among the factors that constrain domestic politicians from following their foreign counterparts and the recommendations of international organizations are the limited information of their citizens regarding international developments (Linos, 2011) and their cultural beliefs (Simmons and Elkins, 2004). Moreover, domestic ‘in authority’ (state) actors are themselves subject to cognitive biases when it comes to their attention to and emulation of developments elsewhere (Weyland, 2005). Providing that domestic public authorities and domestic politics ultimately determine whether transnational policy ideas diffuse into domestic public policy—so that diffusion remains voluntary—this third pathway should not face the legitimation burden of Pathways 1 and 2. Of course, there may be a fine line between voluntary and coercive diffusion, as demonstrated by Hall’s (2003) description of how the International Monetary Fund, and the US Treasury worked in concert with the Kim Dae-jung South Korean administration to successfully delegitimize the Asian developmental model and replace it with neoliberalism. Scrutiny of such cases can help us to refine our understanding of what constitutes voluntary versus coercive diffusion. More generally, examining successful and unsuccessful processes of voluntary transnational policy diffusion is instructive in revealing the differing constitutive bases of legitimate political authority across polities. For example, the failure of the US to diffuse its regulatory model with respect to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the EU (and the EU, its model to the US) exposed significant differences in assumptions about legitimate political actors and policy processes for risk regulation in these two polities (Skogstad, 2005). To the extent that national governments remain crucial sites of political authority in the global polity, how legitimate political authority is constructed in the domestic arena (or, regional arena, in the case of the EU) will continue to define the scope for and parameters of global policy.
36 Grace Skogstad
2.4. Conclusion This chapter has focused on the challenge posed by the constitution of legitimate political authority. It has examined three pathways of transnational political activity, investigated the nature of the challenge of constituting legitimate political authority for each pathway, and discussed strategies of transnational political actors to overcome this challenge. The first pathway, international institutions, relies on a mixture of authority claims, including the (delegated) authority of sovereign governments, the knowledge of experts, and/or principled authority. Norms of input, output, and throughput legitimacy typically clash with one another in this pathway. The second pathway, via market incentives, constructs authority principally around the capacity to deliver superior outcomes. However, private standard-setting exercises also find it necessary to augment the output legitimacy they derive from effective performance with other sources of input legitimacy. The third pathway, cross-national diffusion of public policies, does not face the same legitimation burden insofar as it relies overwhelmingly on the authority of state actors. Although it certainly provides no guarantee of policy convergence, diffusion as a pathway to policies of transnational scope is most consistent with democratic norms of input and throughput legitimate political authority. The investigation of these three pathways has demonstrated the plural bases for constituting socially acceptable authority. As in the domestic realm, transnational policy processes normally attempt, and may indeed find it necessary, to combine a mixture of legal, delegate, expert and/or principled authority in order for their outcomes and processes to be acceptable. The solution, be it labelled transnational hybrid authority or something else, resonates with the observation of Genschel and Zangl (2014, p. 248) that states ‘need the regulatory authority of international institutions in order to cope with trans-boundary problems . . . the operational capacities of private market actors to deal with resource constraints in the implementation and enforcement of public policies; and . . . the output legitimacy generated by non-state actors in order to maintain the loyalty of their citizens’. States’ willingness to recognize that need is an important determinant of the scope of influence of transnational political actors. How to couple ‘in’ and ‘an’ authority claims, and how to reconcile tensions among norms of input, output, and throughput legitimacy, emerge as important empirical questions for students of regional and/or global policy. In seeking to get a purchase on this question, mainstream theories of the domestic policy process, which tend to be predicated on the US policy process, are of limited utility since they have by and large assumed the authority of decision-makers (cf. Sabatier and Weible, 2014). More insights into the nature of the challenge can be gleaned from the literatures on policy networks and multi-level governance, both of which are more prone to recognize the plurality of competing sources of political authority. Methodologically, to understand more fully the scope for transnational policy making, there seems little alternative to comparative historical analyses, especially those that use process tracing to uncover the sequences
Global Public Policy 37 of policy events that link transnational and domestic political actors and institutions in interdependent policy pathways (Farrell and Newman, 2014). In its focus on the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of policy making beyond the territorial state, this chapter has opted not to focus on the question of ‘why’ global policy. Yet, as the examples referenced in this chapter reveal, the questions of who is served by global policy and whether it is good or bad, are never far away. These questions are embedded in authority contests in all three pathways. Who gets to speak authoritatively determines who wins and who loses from global and regional policy making.
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Chapter 3
Gl obaliz ati on a nd In ternationa l i z at i on Impact upon the State and the Civil Service Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen
3.1. Introduction Globalization and the internationalization of government and governance are big buzzwords in the world of practitioners in government and scholars of government. This chapter addresses the impacts of globalization on the state and its civil service. Globalization is defined broadly as a phenomenon where state and international arenas influence each other. Next, the chapter considers the influence of internationalization and globalization upon civil servants in the European Union, in states which engage frequently with multilateral and bilateral development institutions, and, to a much lesser extent for lack of empirical material, in the United States. Finally, the discussion turns to the impact of global economic development upon the career civil service and the state. In the conclusion, some elements of a substantial research agenda for the years to come are sketched.
3.2. Globalization and the Two-Way Street of Interaction Globalization and its impact on the nation state has been the subject of ardent debate over the last decades. Opinions and perspectives on the impact of globalization on the state vary strongly. Some argue that globalization diminishes the ability of states to independently define and manage policy. Others argue that globalization does not change
42 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen the fact that the state is the only actor that can make international agreements on behalf of its population. In this second line of thought, globalization may actually strengthen and enrich national civil service systems, providing new opportunities rather than weakening the policy making capabilities of national civil servants. In the first line of argument, the erosion of the state is a consequence of three main factors. First, there is the influence of globalization’s consequences on the scope and role of the state. Privatization and contracting out may have somewhat hollowed out the domestic role and position of the state (cf. Milward and Provan, 2000; but see Jessop, 1993). However, regarding the role and position of the state in the international arena, one can argue that the state has been enveloped in a network of international forum and advocacy organizations. Indeed there are multiple international economic, cultural, political, military, and social organizations of which states are the most important members. The second factor concerns the rise of shared sovereignty (most explicit in the case of the European Union (EU)) and the transfer of some competencies to the supranational level. Third, there is the growing importance of issues (from the global economic crisis to climate change) that transcend the ability and power of territorial states, and can only be addressed effectively at a supra-and/or intergovernmental level. In this reasoning, globalization diminishes the autonomy and centrality of the state and its national civil servants. We argue that the state is still at the centre of the international political system since it is the only actor that has authority to make binding decisions on behalf of the entire citizenry. In this reasoning, national civil servants have an expanded role that requires new capacity and ability, in framing national contributions to resolve policy challenges that transcend the nation state. There are different ways in which globalization impacts state systems. First, norms and laws set limits to national autonomy and create obligations for the state. Traditionally, national governments are responsible for maintaining the security and economic welfare of their citizens, as well as the protection of human rights and the environment within their borders. With global ecological changes, an ever more integrated global economy, physical and cyber terrorism, and other global trends (e.g. human trafficking), policy design is increasingly a shared activity where multiple national systems interact with each other and with international actors to frame solutions to critical policy challenges. The decisions that flow from these interactions subsequently create binding constraints on states, though states also influence these constraints through their own participation. Second, functional integration, where states jointly generate shared solutions to policy issues, with or without creating binding legal and policy instruments. Functional integration, discussed in more detail in this volume (Legrand), ranges from non- binding exchange and engagement to shared sovereignty in selected areas. Third, globalization allows influence by international organizations that pool knowledge (e.g. the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)) or funds (Regional development banks), or both (International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank) and use these instruments to influence national policy design. This form
Globalization and Internationalization 43 of influence is not limited to international organizations and can be exercised in stateto-state relationships, especially in the context of bilateral development assistance. In addition to these more fluid forms of interaction, there is a rich and long-standing literature on the impact of integration on state autonomy. Research has particularly focused on the growing importance of regional multi-level governance systems, such as the EU particularly, but also the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Mercosur (e.g. Meny et al., 1996; Marks and Schmitter, 1996; Knill, 2001; Andrews. 2013), and the way they have impact on and are influenced by the composite national political and administrative cultures that constitute them. Most of these studies focus on how multi-level governance shapes policy content and drives policy. This body of literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how shared sovereignty influences national policy solutions and vice versa. A smaller number of studies also looked into the impact of this interaction on civil servants, and their participation in these processes. Where does this leave civil servants? The impact of globalization on civil servants and the civil service career has received much less attention, with exception of the influence of Europeanization, upon EU and national civil servants in the member states (Sager and Overeem, 2015). In an early article, Hopkins (1976) reviewed the engagement of the US bureaucracy in international affairs and how this influences US civil servants. He noted a ‘considerable engagement’ of the US domestic bureaucracy in a variety of policy areas, ranging from agriculture to health and from treasury to transportation (1976, pp. 422–3 and 430). However, beyond this well-documented review of how national civil servants interact with bilateral and global institutions, this issue has received limited attention. Yet, engagements that go beyond domestic policy continue to affect national institutions and their staff, though the degree to which this applies depends on many factors (the size of the country concerned, the extent to which the country plays a proactive or reactive role in the international system, etc.). In order to better assess how globalization affects national civil servants today, we will review the issue from two angles. First, how does growing interaction between national and international administrations impact national civil servants? Second, how have recent global economic trends, and in particular the financial crisis, influenced public sector systems? On the first element, there are three dimensions we will consider. First is the impact of direct interaction, nationally and internationally, with an emphasis on relations between national and supranational institutions in the EU. The socialization effect of the participation of national officials in EU decision-making, and in particular the impact on countries that accede to the EU, has been the subject of various analyses (e.g. Wessels, 2001; Mastenbroek and Princen, 2010; Bauer and Trondal, 2015) and takes us furthest on the interaction spectrum. Particular attention will be paid to the use of secondments and external assignments by national civil servants in international organizations, and the socialization of new member states and their civil service into the EU. Second, there is the impact of growing and deepening global engagement with International Financial Institutions (IFI), regional development banks, and other
44 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen multilateral partners. The engagement impact depends on global actors themselves (whether they choose to engage with a given country and how) and on the extent to which countries and their civil servants are receptive to such engagement. Research on this aspect of globalization and its impact on national civil servants is limited. However, documents like World Bank client surveys, which exist for most client countries, provide an insight into how this interaction is perceived by national officials. In addition, recent work done by the AidData consortium (Parks et al., 2015; Custer et al., 2015) has helped shed a rare comparative and evidence-based light on how interaction is perceived by national civil servants and to what extent the hypothesis of growing influence of global actors over national policy making systems is credible. Third, this chapter shares the evolution of structured interaction for civil servants in a large global player like the United States. Are more international interaction and global agendas visible in the daily work of national officials? In the case of the USA, Hopkins’ research from 1976 provides a useful starting point to assess how qualitatively different (or not) international engagement by US officials is forty years later. Regarding the second main question posed above on how global economic trends impact career officials and the development of civil service systems, there are recent studies on European and OECD countries (Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future, or COCOPS report) that catalogue the impact of global economic woes on civil service employment conditions and career perspectives. On this dimension, the erosion of the notion that civil service systems provide ‘safe havens’ in times of economic turmoil is particularly noteworthy, and may in the long term well have a fundamental impact on the ability of public administration systems to attract and retain talent.
3.3. Influencing and Being Influenced by Globalization 3.3.1. The EU and Structured Interaction: The Asymmetrical Use of Secondments The European Union is a logical start point when reviewing the impact of globalization on national officials. Participation in the EU policy process affects national civil servants in numerous ways (Mastenbroek and Princen, 2010, p. 156). Engagement with the EU affects a large number of civil servants to a limited degree, but it only affects a small core group to a significant degree (with regard to four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, see also Meyer-Sahling and Van Stolk, 2015). For the purpose of this chapter, we will focus on a specific dimension of interaction, which is the use of secondment of national officials to EU institutions and how this impacts civil servants. The EU uses secondment of national officials as a structural tool to
Globalization and Internationalization 45 both draw on knowledge available in national administrations and create greater connections between EU institutions and national administrations. While there are other organizations that use secondment (e.g. the OECD), the case of the EU is best documented and provides insights into how secondment affects both the recipient institution, the sending institution, and the individual civil servant. The use and impact of secondment has been the subject of several studies (Trondal et al., 2008; Murdoch et al., 2014). Trondal et al. focused specifically on secondment and its impact, based on empirical analysis of the experiences of secondees. Murdoch et al. examined the creation of the European External Action Service, which is the EU’s new ‘Foreign Service’, and the role of national officials in this process. These studies complement the more extensive literature of EU impact on the operation of member-state administrations and on policy substance via a focus on civil servants and institutions. The studies suggest that the EU draws heavily on seconded member-state officials for expertise and for ‘reality checks’ on policy proposals. National civil servants on secondment tend to be fully engaged in the day-to-day operations of the directorates they work in and, in the case of the European External Action Service (EEAS), have been critical to building the capacity of EU institutions to operate as a foreign service (Murdoch et al., 2014, p. 77). This is similar to the experience of establishing the High Authority in 1952, the effective precursor of the European Commission (Trondal et al., 2008, p. 254). However, based on the study by Trondal et al., there is a significant and qualitative difference in the way the receiving organization (the European Commission) makes use of the capacities it acquires, and the way national administrations use the additional knowledge their officials gain during their secondment. While the expertise of national officials is highly valued and used by receiving organizations (in this case the European Commission), national administrations barely make use of the experience the officials gained while working at the European Commission. Many respondents indicate that no account is taken of their supranational experience when planning their next assignments back home (Trondal et al., 2008, pp. 265–6). National administrations did not appear to value the insights their staff had gained from their secondment. Thus, while secondment may offer interesting opportunities, it is irrelevant and often even a negative when it comes to the national civil service career. Further anecdotal evidence from several national officials seconded to the European Institute of Public Administration (Concerning Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Finnish seconded officials) and from national officials seconded to the World Bank (Dutch and Danish seconded officials) indicates that secondees found it difficult to settle back into their national administrations and might even leave for consulting or private sector positions after returning ‘home’. One striking example of the former situation is of an official who gained significant expertise on EU policy coordination and management and was put in charge of the personnel increase requests of prisons upon return to his home administration, and subsequently left for the private sector. While this is based on a limited number of directly observed cases, it further confirms the conclusions drawn by Trondal et al. and Murdoch et al., that secondment is often a one-way street that does not hold long-term career benefits for national officials. Whether for reasons of institutional inertia or from
46 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen a lack of understanding of the potential insights and connections returnees could offer, hardly any of the respondents reported a structural use of the knowledge and experience they gained during their secondment (Trondal et al., 2008, pp. 266–7). Finally, there is no evidence to suggest that there is a significant change in the volume of secondments. Those organizations that routinely use them (European Commission, OECD, United Nations (UN) organizations, and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs)) continue to do so (Davies 2002, pp. 234–6 on secondment at the UN). While the expansion of EU competencies has opened new opportunities (such as the creation of the EEAS) there is no evidence in the literature that other organizations have either expanded or reduced the use of secondment.
3.3.2. The EU and the Limited Impact of Socialization: The Case of CEE Member States A second EU-related case about the impact of globalization on national civil servants relates to the EU accession of Central and East European states. As with the previous issue, there has been a limited academic debate (e.g., Verheijen, 2007a, 2007b; Meyer- Sahling, 2011; Meyer-Sahling and van der Stolk, 2015). The accession process of these states has been important in itself, given that this was the first time the EU was taking in countries that had not shared, for over fifty years, European civil service values and traditions (OECD, 1998; Cardona, 2000; Trondal and Peters, 2012). Earlier rounds of enlargement had absorbed countries that had civil service systems similar to the EU. In response, and considering the importance of national civil service systems in the EU policy process, the EU developed its own civil service standards and criteria that new member states were expected to subscribe to and respect (see OECD, 1998; Verheijen, 2000, 2002, 2007; Dimitrova, 2002). Civil service benchmarks include law-based management of the civil service, merit-based recruitment and career management, and limitations on politicization. Studies conducted in the aftermath of accession have generated interesting insights. First, there have been several assessments of whether EU accession has influenced the civil service transformation process in the new member states. Second, studies have looked into how post-accession socialization impacted new member-state civil service systems. Third, how did participation in the EU policy process impact the day-to-day work of national officials? With regard to the first issue it appears that the use of civil service and institutional capacity criteria had limited impact on institutional system development in new member states. Studies conducted within 3–4 years of accession (Verheijen, 2007; Meyer-Sahling, 2009) showed that reforms introduced to ‘qualify’ for EU accession had either been rolled back or abandoned in most new member states (with the exception of the Baltic States). This reversal is ascribed to two factors. First, the limited credibility of the public administration accession criteria themselves and, second, the fact that
Globalization and Internationalization 47 both the political elite and civil servants in new member states have views of the role of the civil service that are different from ‘European Principles’. The differences are particularly stark when it comes to tolerance of politicization and the notion of a life-long career, which, especially in Central European states, is not seen as an attractive option by young talented staff (Meyer-Sahling, 2009, pp. 66–7). In many ways, this experience and the lack of perceived ‘fit’ of ‘best practice’ principles is akin to the challenges developing countries face when having to adopt civil service reforms based on the value systems of ‘core OECD’ countries (Robinson, 2015). In many parts of the world public service as a value is subordinate to other loyalties such as to family, tribe, or ethnic group. Civil service impartiality is overruled by political or other loyalties. It remains unclear whether European principles are losing relevance and becoming a global ‘minority view’ (Verheijen, 2007b). The second element concerns two socialization approaches (Meyer-Sahling, 2011, pp. 251–4). One is the peer-to-peer engagements under EU-financed twinning arrangements, which were expected to help cement critical institutions for civil service development through direct advice and coaching by member-state officials. On this element, the assessment is negative as, in three of the four cases where such engagement took place, civil service offices were abolished in the first years after EU accession. Lithuania was the exception, because of its greater receptivity to European principles and baselines (Verheijen, 2007a). The second tool is post-accession socialization efforts through training programmes and participation in transnational networks such as the European Public Administration Network (EUPAN). As in the case of secondments to the European Commission, member states did not use the additional capacity (Meyer- Sahling, 2011, p. 253). Finally, fairly similar patterns of Europeanization in four CEE states have been noted: many civil servants worked partially on EU-related matters and only a small group of civil servants worked full-time on EU-related issues (Meyer-Sahling and Van der Stolk, 2015). This has also been found to be the case in Denmark (Hanf and Soetendorp, 1998), and even in a non-member state, such as Norway (Tanil, 2012). The final dimension of our review of supranational impact on the day-to-day work of national civil servants in new EU member states is a study by Meyer-Sahling and van Stolk (2015) on the extent to which work with European Institutions is part of the day-to- day work of civil servants in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia. This was in essence a modified repeat of work done by Mastenbroek and Princen (2010, on the Netherlands) and by Laffan (2006, on Ireland, Greece, and Finland). On this dimension, the authors found that engagement with EU affairs affected national civil servants to a higher degree than was the case for the previous studies. This holds both for ministries that are strongly Europeanized (such as agriculture, etc.) and those that are generally less Europeanized (Meyer-Sahling and van Stolk, 2015, p. 240). While not covered explicitly in the article, it is our impression that the relatively recent experience of the intensive EU accession process may, to a large extent, explain this difference. Another finding is that the number of civil servants in these four states who would like to become permanent European civil servants is very high (between 49 and 63 per cent). This can be explained by the attractiveness of remuneration, a generally greater willingness of Central and East Europeans
48 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen to move and the sense of mission that joining the EU (as ‘rejoining Europe’) invoked in most new member states. While efforts by the EU to influence the trajectory of civil service system development in Central and East European states have had limited impact, the exposure and participation of civil servants from these same countries in EU policy making and institutions is relatively high. As noted above, this may be due to higher enthusiasm for European integration and a greater interest in working at supranational level (and the relative novelty of this opportunity), but it is a trend that is worth investigating further as EU membership and engagement at supranational level becomes more of a routine feature of day-to-day work of civil servants.
3.3.3. Interaction Between International and National Administrations and Reform Agendas in Lowerand Middle-Income Countries Another impact of globalization on national civil servants comes in the form of growing interaction with International Financial Institutions IFIs and other international actors. IFI influence on national policies and their engagement with national civil servants grew rapidly in the 1990s as part of the push for market-based reforms under the Washington Consensus. This not only increased the frequency and breadth of interaction between IFI staff and national officials, but also had a strong impact on them as structural adjustment programmes. Such programmes included civil service retrenchment, monetization of benefits and public financial management and expenditure management reforms. From what was previously a one-way street of influence, patterns of engagement evolved into a two-way dialogue on reforms, in many instances involving several international and bilateral actors in harmonized approaches (driven by the Paris Principles on Aid Provision and Harmonisation) and senior officials from recipient states. This dialogue further evolved into the ‘market for advice’ (Custer et al., 2015) where competition in the provision of policy advice and support has changed the dynamic in relations between providers of development assistance and national officials from recipient countries. Apart from the systematic engagement between supranational and national actors in the EU, the increasingly institutionalized relations between IFI/multilateral organization staff and national civil servants is for the latter the main embodiment of globalization, given that this involves officials from virtually all lowerand middle-income countries globally. Again, empirical data on the nature of this engagement, and how it impacts civil servants, is limited. World Bank client surveys provide some insight into the way national officials perceive their engagement with this institution, but these mostly review the impact of the work done by the organization, not so much the quality of interaction with national civil servants. Other studies review the emerging role of the EU in providing
Globalization and Internationalization 49 budget support, and how relations with client countries are framed in this context (e.g. Wolff, 2015). The only global and systematic assessment of the various dimensions of interaction between international development partners and national officials is summarized in two reports by the AidData initiative, ‘The Marketplace of Ideas’ (Parks et al., 2015) and ‘Listening to Leaders’ (Custer et al., 2015). Covering some 3,400 officials in 126 lowerand middle-income countries that receive assistance and advice from multilateral and bilateral partners as well as another 3000+ respondents from development partners, the expert community, NGOs, and the private sector, these studies systemically gathered information on how national officials perceive their growing engagement with global actors; in other words: . . . how the buyers in this market, public sector leaders from low-income and middle- income countries, chose their suppliers. Which development partners do leaders prefer and why do they choose these advisory products and services to guide their reform priorities and evidence. (Custer et al., 2015, p. 9)
Officials participating in the study provided feedback on the frequency of communications, usefulness of advice, agenda setting influence and helpfulness in reform implementation. They also assessed the extent to which the ability of partners to provide financial (budget) support impacts their access to policy makers and agenda-setting influence. Finally, the impact of international benchmarking tools on national policy makers was reviewed. One important finding of the ‘Listening to Leaders’ study is the value that civil servants place on the permanency of relations, in particular with those partners with whom they have developed a positive relation. Network building between global and national officials is a critical feature. Familiarity with organizations and their staff is an important factor (and especially previous work experience at a multilateral organization). Overall, permanent field presence combined with a country-level track record in resolving difficult policy issues are the critical features of perceived partner performance (Custer et al., 2015, p. 26). Finally, the ability of partners to put money on the table enhances agenda- setting influence, but not necessarily other aspects such as the perceived usefulness of policy advice (Custer et al., 2015, p. 55). Another relevant element is frequency of interaction. The Custer et al. study examines two dimensions: the extent to which development partners communicate with counterparts (frequency of communication), and receptivity or the extent to which national governments are open to communications. On the frequency of communication, for donor and recipient countries levels are lower than one might have expected, averaging less than once a month globally. However, specialized (such as the Global Fund and GAVI, active in the health sector, and UNICEF on child development) and generalist multilateral organizations (UNDP and World Bank in particular) have significantly higher levels of interaction. It is these global organizations that advocate for global public goods (such as climate change, eradication of major diseases, sustainable
50 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen development, poverty reduction etc.) that are of most interest in the context of this chapter. On these issues, UNDP, the World Bank and specialized health organizations fall in the range of 2–3 contacts a month with counterparts (Custer et al., 2015, p. 18). The numbers are generally much lower for smaller multilaterals or bilateral development partners (exceptions include Ireland and Denmark). On the opposite side of the same spectrum, there is a significant difference between recipient countries on both the level of engagement and level of selectivity of this engagement. Some countries prefer to interact infrequently with many development partners (and can afford to do so), while others (‘donor darlings’) opt for deeper engagement with many. This is contrasted with selective countries (small countries that interact with few partners) and disengaged countries that avoid deeper partnerships (Custer et al., 2015, pp. 23–4). Another important issue, addressed in the ‘Marketplace for Ideas’ study, is the impact of international benchmarking and its impact on national officials. Programme International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings (on education achievements), IMF Article IV assessments (on macroeconomic performance), World Bank Education and Health Sector Reviews, Global Fund performance-based funding assessments, and PEFA (public financial management) rankings were quoted as the most influential benchmarking systems (Parks et al., 2015, pp. 18–28), impacting the design of national policies and the choice of policy options in specific sectors. One caveat on this issue is the practice of ‘gaming’ ranking-based benchmarks, as illustrated by the evolution of the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ list. While a useful tool to measure progress on business climate reforms, its value has been somewhat eroded by countries targeting specific elements of reform agendas to gain places on the ranking instead of engaging broad- based reforms relevant to the business environment. The AidData studies illustrate the rapid growth of interactions between a variety of international actors with national civil servants, as well as the growing impact of international benchmarking tools on public officials. They confirm that global and multilateral actors remain the dominant players in this area, countering perceptions of greater bilateralism and engagement by non-traditional development partners. The latter remain largely outside the engagement on policy dialogue, which is of most interest to us here. The assessment of how this engagement by national civil servants influences their daily work (in particular on policy design) shows that for a large number of countries, ranging from donor darlings like Tanzania and Rwanda to middle-income countries like Kazakhstan, Romania, and Serbia (Custer et al., 2015, p. 45), engagement levels are high. The usefulness of advice and helpfulness of policy implementation for some countries is positively assessed. This is contrasted by responses from other countries, which either by choice do not engage or are not receptive to the advice and support provided. Follow-up research should include drilling down into how this interaction operates in practice in a sample of the most engaged countries, which would help us gain further insights into how globalization and global interaction impacts on national civil servants.
Globalization and Internationalization 51
3.3.4. Perceptions on Globalization and Its Impact on Officials in the USA The final element of the discussion is based on insights about how policy professionals in the USA perceive the influence and impact of globalization. Hopkins (1976) provides rare empirical insight into the breadth and depth of international engagement by national US officials, albeit at a time when ‘globalization’ as a concept was not yet in currency. There are three issues we came across in the literature. First, with regard to Finland, it has been reported that cabinet ministers, top civil servants, and members of Parliament are very much focused on domestic policies and rarely familiarize themselves with EU matters in any detail (Forsberg and Raunio, 2014). This would be consistent with a finding in the United Kingdom that much policy content is prepared by mid-level, and more often than not, junior-level, civil servants (Page and Jenkins, 2005). There is some suggestion that the same is the case in the United States. Given that specialists became increasingly important in policy making after WWII, Hopkins suggested that some mid-level officials have direct influence upon ‘monitoring, promoting, or regulating resources, services, and information that move internationally’ (1976, p. 406). He also noted that domestically oriented departments and agencies increasingly dealt with problems of international or global concern (Hopkins, 1976, pp. 411) and illustrated this with examples of collaboration (through treaty, working group, and research) of domestically oriented departments with international organizations and committees (Hopkins, 1976, pp. 420–1). He also estimated that more than 12,000 civil servants were predominantly assigned to internationally oriented tasks. Of these, almost 9,500 worked in the State Department (Hopkins, 1976, pp. 422–3). Interestingly, and reminiscent of the distinction in EU literature between full-time and part-time internationally working civil servants, Hopkins noted that in 1974, 1,200 civil servants worked on international issues at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, of whom 403 were full-time (Hopkins, 1976, pp. 422). There is no current empirical information with regard to the extent to which American career civil servants are involved in international policies and/or in adapting domestic legislation to international law and standards. We do know that the influence of international law upon domestic policies has increased substantially (Slaughter and Burke- White, 2009, 466, 485), that domestically oriented civil servants are increasingly involved in complying with international law (Raustiala and Slaughter, 2006, p. 551), and that career civil servants are actively involved in multiple informational, law enforcement, and harmonization networks (Slaughter, 2004, pp. 51–61). We would need to survey American career civil servants in order to understand which departments belong to the inner or outer circle, and the percentage of career civil servants who work full-time on international issues. Given the US’s global role and influence, it might be that a larger number of civil servants are quite actively involved in aligning domestic policies with global trends and international agreements/treaties. One might expect that research on the globalization of the civil service in the United States is substantial given the country’s role on the world stage. However, contrary to
52 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen their European colleagues, American scholars of public administration have mainly ignored this topic for reasons that are unclear to us. Hence, this is a major gap in research that could be filled by (doctoral) studies based on surveys and interviews of career civil servants. Second, recent research has shown that the internationalization of management elites in the private sector in the United States and elsewhere has been substantial and that the number of non-national managers in nationally-based companies, and certainly in multinationals, has increased significantly (Ravasi, 2015). We assume that this is much less the case for public sector personnel because much of government work concerns domestic issues, and foreign nationals will seldom work in national or subnational government unless under secondment. With regard to the US, it would be interesting to see the extent to which departments temporarily outplace some middle- to upper-level civil servants with international organizations as a means of familiarizing them with global and international issues and challenges. In fact, an investigation would be equally interesting with regard to developing countries. As far as the US is concerned, it may well be that some departments are more globalized/internationalized than others and we could use the Gueijen/’t Hart categories to get a sense of this (2010, p. 175). Replacing their Eurocratic labels, we could distinguish between global bulwarks when more than 50 per cent of the civil servants work on global/international issues, the global runners-up with 30–40 per cent globalized/internationalized civil service, and the national champions or laggards with less than 30 per cent of civil servants engaged in global/international issues.
3.3.5. Influencing and Being Influenced: Trends and Patterns The cases discussed above provide some insight into aspects of the engagement of national officials with international and supranational actors. The literature on secondment, diffusion of ideas (e.g. civil service ideals) and the level of permeation of national administrations by supranational engagement remains rather EU specific, and there is significant research to be done on patterns of engagement with comparable regional organizations, which would shed light on the level of representativeness of the EU case (on diffusion, permeating, and the promotion (or not) of values/models). The empirical research on the impact of the engagement of national officials with global and regional institutions in the context of reform dialogue provides us with deeper evidence of the impact of these interactions. While the frequency of contacts varies significantly depending both on the attitude and engagement level of countries, the responses from over 126 countries that engage regularly with global or regional development partners show that for a large number of these states, global actors have a significant impact on national officials. The growing importance of international benchmarking instruments, which have become important guiding elements of the reform
Globalization and Internationalization 53 process, adds to this. While, again, data are limited to one set, the literature on international development points to a rapid growth of contacts and mutual influence between national and international officials since the advent of structural adjustment policies in the 1990s. Today’s relations are more varied and balanced, with a two-way street of influence having replaced the purported ‘imposition’ of ideas and reforms of that period. Finally, the growing number of issues that require international engagement, whether at the regional or global level, has generated a multitude of forms of interaction between national officials and international organizations and systems. While the impact of these evolving patterns of interaction on national civil servants has not been studied extensively, we have presented some of the different features of this engagement and how national officials perceive and respond to these. Based on this review, there is ample room for more evidence-based research on this issue.
3.4. Global Economic Developments and their Impact on the Civil Service and the State The capacity and quality of the civil service is determined by the ability to attract and retain strong human resources. Traditionally, the civil service has ‘traded’ lower salaries (especially in managerial and advisory ranks) for job security and benefits. This traditional model remained unchallenged, especially in developed and emerging economies, for many decades. The economic and financial crisis, however, is posing a serious challenge to its survival. The erosion of the model of the impartial and permanent career civil service arguably started under the influence of New Public Management (NPM), and in developing countries under the structural adjustment policies of the 1990s. However, based on current evidence, this process of erosion accelerated as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis. In CEE countries and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) the fiscal crisis had serious consequences for civil servants, including salary reductions, lay- offs, and an outflow of talent from the public sector into the private sector and even abroad (Verheijen and Rabrenovich, 2015, p. 26; Kickert et al., 2013). The most serious hit were CEE states in that their levels of economic development were reversed (Verheijen and Rabrenovich, 2015, p. 27). Cost-cutting measures coincided with increasing politicization that resulted in growing numbers of civil servants leaving government employment. The effort to establish a leaner government had been ongoing in Western Europe at least since the early 1990s, but received new momentum under the influence of the fiscal crisis. Pay freezes were an immediate consequence (Van der Meer et al., 2015, p. 42; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, pp. 26–8). Fiscal crisis also resulted in further decreasing
54 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen levels of trust in government in Southern European countries. Anglo-American countries, except the UK, were influenced by the fiscal crisis, but less than other OECD countries (Halligan, 2015, p. 71). In general, the fiscal crisis has prompted even more support for austerity through pay cuts, outsourcing of public services (Bezes and Lodge, 2015, p. 136) and reduction of pension rights (Lægreid and Wise, 2015, p. 215). While it is fairly easy to assess the immediate impact of the global fiscal crisis on the civil service, it will take some time before we can really evaluate its impact upon the role and position of the state and its government in society. Some of the recent literature is reviewed by Franke and it seems that state intervention in both a liberal market economy (the UK) and a coordinated market economy (Germany) has increased under the pressure for state intervention to salvage/help out the economy (Franke, 2014, p. 88). Even before the fiscal crisis, there were scholars arguing that the state as actor had not lost any of its importance. Dolowitz noted that the state is still an important, perhaps even predominant, actor in the international arena; any state can use globalization to strengthen its own domestic and international agenda (2006). In reference to a statement made at the beginning of this chapter, the state is still the only actor that can make binding decisions on behalf of the citizenry at large and the only actor with the authority to exercise regulatory oversight over the market (see Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot, 2015, p. 185). International organizations may have regulatory powers, but they have been granted them by the member states. Inter alia, in their study of global trends in government and governance, the latter two authors point out that there is convergence, i.e. globalization, in how governments are territorially structured and bureaucratically organized, but that in terms of functioning there continues to be clear national differences because of variation in societal and political-administrative culture (Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot, 2015, pp. 473–4). Finally, one element of particular importance regards skills requirements. Traditionally, administrations seek to employ skills that are relevant to national policy making, including knowledge of national law, economics, or social sciences and an ability to function in specific national settings. But, engaging in a globalized world also requires the ability to negotiate in complex multi-cultural settings as well as to build alliances through influencing and the soft skills that come with this.
3.5. Conclusions Globalization brings both challenges and opportunities to the state and its civil servants. With regard to the state, it is clear that cross-border economic interactions have substantially increased. It is also clear that NPM reforms—whether voluntarily copied or more or less imposed by multilateral actors, such as under the Washington Consensus in the 1990s (for a critical analysis see Reinert (2007)) or under the restructuring programmes of the IMF, European Central Bank, or European Commission since 2008 (for critical analysis see Stiglitz (2016))—have had a mixed reception that can partially be
Globalization and Internationalization 55 explained by variation in societal and political-administrative culture (Kisner, 2016). We know that at least in one country, NPM-inspired reforms resulted in a government that works a little less well and costs a bit more (Hood and Dixon, 2015), but we need much more empirical research into various aspects of NPM-inspired reforms. In this chapter we have only focused on the literature concerning the EU and—to a much lesser extent—the USA. In general, we need more empirical work into the effect of cost- cutting, personnel reduction, and pension cuts in the public sector in various parts of the globe. More specifically, and inspired by the extensive empirical literature on the impact of Europeanization on the civil service in EU member states, we need much more empirical work on the effects of globalization and internationalization upon the work and careers of national civil servants. There is a contradiction between the need for states to invest in the capacity to be an effective player in a globalized world and the current tendency to, under fiscal pressure, cut costs and to defer investments in administrative capacity to the future. The risk of such an approach is illustrated throughout this chapter. In the case of EU states, a lack of investment in capacity to operate in a multi-level and multinational system can lead to marginalization as well as missing out on the benefits of EU membership (painfully illustrated by the recent cases of Romania, Croatia, and also Greece). In the case of lower- and middle-income countries, it impacts their ability to select and make effective use of the advice and support provided by multilateral and bilateral partners. It requires adequately skilled officials to be able to ‘translate’ advice to context and to avoid costly mistakes by taking on board ill-suited models of advice (see the point on NPM reforms above). In the case of high-income global players there is less risk of marginalization, but a lack of attention to the knowledge and skills requirements of a globalized economy can lead to countries punching well below their weight. In contrast, those countries that invest, even selectively, in building some of the capacities that generate better performance in international and multinational systems, tend to be rewarded with resources and relative influence (e.g. the case of the Baltic States in the EU), with an ability to secure international support and advice to generate economic development (e.g. Rwanda and, further in past, South Korea and Malaysia), and with influence and an impact on major international agendas, such as climate change, global health challenges, etc. Unfortunately, the connection between investment in new skills for public administrations and the kind of benefits outlined above is not always obvious, and, in a period of fiscal conservatism, hard to argue. Yet it is an issue that leaders will ignore at their peril. Finally, as we set out at the start, the question of how globalization impacts career civil servants is under-researched, regardless of its growing relevance; suggestions for further research have been made above. A specific subset of questions for further research lies in the use and application of internationally established performance benchmarking systems. In relation to the third aspect of this chapter—evidence-based research on how globalization affects patterns of engagement in advanced economies—we identified a serious gap that needs filling. Only by having further data and information on all three of these elements, can firmer conclusions on changing patterns of engagement be made.
56 Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Tony Verheijen
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Chapter 4
The P otentia l a nd L im its of Adm i ni st rat i v e Sovereig nt y Karl T. Muth
4.1. Introduction This chapter suggests how our definitions—and understanding—of administrative sovereignty have adjusted as administrative, legal, and geopolitical realities have been transformed. Whilst recognizing a need for regional and international law, efforts to date—and similar efforts in financial regulation (Dolzer, 2005; Wessel, 2007), criminal prosecution (Brabyn, 1988; Parry, 2010; Muth, 2013), and other areas (Zaring, 2013)— are hobbled by antiquated and binary conceptions of ‘administrative sovereignty’ and non-sovereignty. Whether considering environmental regulation (Bodansky, 1999), the policing of piracy in Somali waters (Muth, 2013), the management of oil refining and exporting in Sudan and South Sudan (countries both intermittently in conflict and symbiotically in the oil business together) (Reuters, 2011), or the monitoring of money- laundering in Curacao or Macau, the pertinent questions quickly focus on the efficacy (or impotence) of the controls exercised by the relevant government’s executive and administrative appendages. Too often, intrastate initiatives and interstate cooperation are defeated ab initio by incorrect assumptions about a given government’s capabilities, independence, or impartiality in administering or executing the plan at issue. A more nuanced taxonomy of administrative sovereignty would recognize unique strengths and challenges as characteristics of a government defined by function, rather than simply as features presumed by identification. This investigation enhances our nascent conceptualizations of transnational administration by dismantling the simple state versus non-state binary conceptualizations of sovereignty and by constructing a spectrum of sovereign capabilities illustrated through historical and contemporary cases in four clusters of commonly-administered functions.
60 Karl T. Muth Concepts and principles of sovereignty are tied to the question of what is a ‘country’ or ‘nation’. While there is agreement as to whether certain entities are sovereign and capable of the sovereign administration of state-like functions, there is a disagreement as to whether an entity should be considered a state simply because it performs state-like functions. The question of statehood through administrative orientation is of particular interest to development studies scholars and development economists because many of the contested cases are in the developing or recently-developed world. Hong Kong, for instance, presents a disputed case. Even if one accepts that its ‘Special Administrative Region’ status (and the ‘one country, two systems’ approach) is viable in the long-term, there are valid arguments as to whether—or to what extent—Hong Kong can be considered or studied as a ‘national’ entity and whether its actions, particularly with respect to China, are transnational or intranational. While Hong Kong is unique, and each place has its own geography, history, and politics, ambiguity as to an entity’s separation from a nearby entity is not unique. Except when at war, countries generally do not lay claim to the same physical territory. Most legal writings on the topic establish that not only control, but exclusive control, is what countries exert over the territories they govern. For most of Occidental legal history, which is to say Roman-derived legal history, the power to enforce administrative rules and legislative laws emanated from the country that promulgated those rules and laws. This power only existed to the extent that its administrator’s or executive’s highest executive was the head of state of a country. As a result, much historical, legal, policy, and political debate centres on, ‘What is a country?’ Few modern scholars retreat to the reciprocal legal framework of treaties and statehood recognition. Instead, most prefer to deal in terms of some sort of functional independence or behaviours symptomatic of nationhood. And the focus is often on the mechanism that allows a ‘country’ to perform various tasks, the administrative aspects of sovereignty. Yet this notion of ‘administrative sovereignty’ and its application and relevance require further elaboration
4.2. Administrative Sovereignty ‘Administrative sovereignty’ is an assertion of control over recognizable administrative mechanisms of a government separate from the comprehensive operation of a nation. While this phraseology is not used in the literature, the concept has been discussed in detail for a century (Boggs, 1915; Harriman, 1909; Shortt, 1913). This can be thought of, not as an example of but in tandem with, the concept of governance without government (Czempiel and Rosenau, 1992); administrative sovereignty is a narrower concept than government. Administrative sovereignty can be as tiny as the running of a lone parcel office representing the hyper-local government in its immediate area on the road between the cities of Berbera and Hargeisa in Somalia in 2012. In the limited context of delivering packages, this lone parcel office’s control is
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 61 comprehensive, uninterrupted, exclusive, notorious, and widely respected (Gardiner, 1997). Similarly, this idea of administrative sovereignty must coexist with the idea of the negotiated state (Menkhaus, 2006/07), that the level of authority and presence of administration is negotiated contractually rather than simply promulgated legislatively or constitutionally. To understand this distinction, consider DHL. Package carrier DHL operates with the codified and actual authority of the state in Germany, where it is part of the national postal service, but operates merely as a private carrier of goods in America, where its authority or credibility comes from its contractual obligations to customers, relationships with lenders or creditors, and its history of reliable service provision. The parcel office in Somalia, above, is more like DHL operating in America than it is like DHL operating in Germany, but administering a postal function with or without state authority. While illustrative of this narrower point, the example does not reach the larger question of what ‘administrative sovereignty’ means or why it is important for the present discussion. The concept of administrative sovereignty requires one to dismantle what sovereignty means (Migdal and Schlichte, 2005), to consider that ‘molecular sovereignty’ may be made up of atoms and quarks of sovereignty, little ingredient bits that can be noticed and named and interrogated. ‘Sovereignty’ in the administrative sense cannot be the binary categorization (sovereign versus not sovereign) that has lived for too long as a legal fiction, surviving four millennia of treaties and wars. Instead of being fully sovereign (a ‘state’) or not sovereign (something less than a ‘state’), many places in the world are governed through mechanisms that display some, but not all, of the features of a traditional sovereign state. Importantly, administrative sovereignty is a distinct functional capability that an actor has developed, not a determination of that actor’s broader legal sovereignty or absolute legitimacy or ‘state-ness’. My use of ‘state-ness’ is carefully-chosen. ‘Statehood’ suggests that statehood is like adulthood, a state that non-adults inevitably ‘grow into’. ‘State-ness’ recognizes that the state is a series of historically and diagnostically relevant attributes, not all of which may be present in each case, and which contribute to, but do not guarantee, the recognition aspiring states seek. Administrative sovereignty is, by its nature, defined by the behaviours and capabilities of the entity (objectively) rather than being defined by the (subjective) opinions of others or the entity’s perceived legitimacy as a ‘state’ or ‘nation’, or the entity’s standing in the world diplomatically or otherwise. To understand the concept of administrative sovereignty, one must first examine and address its two components: administration and sovereignty. Administration is the mechanism of government, its animation, its verb. Sovereignty is the freedom of a government from other governments, its autonomy, its privacy; it is defined in the negative. Administration is a cousin of administrative law (administration being the activity, administrative law and executive orders being its guideposts) and embraces within its ambit executive and judicial functions of government. Sovereignty is a concept of both arrangement and circumstance, meaning its genesis is not ex contractu but rather de
62 Karl T. Muth facto and hence vulnerable to interpretation. This means sovereignty can be, and often is, a locus of dispute. Administrative sovereignty is a function that a state, state-like, multiple-state or other actor can maintain with a reasonable measure of autonomy, credibility, and reliability over time. Examples might include administrative functions for a port, an administrative and regulatory apparatus for the country’s oil and gas exploration efforts, or a system to issue identification cards to residents. If this function can be maintained without assistance from a foreign state, this feature is an example of administrative sovereignty. If it relies upon a foreign state or is achieved in concert with another state, then it may be transnational administration. In any event, it is no longer ‘sovereign’ administration. After the armed conflict in South Sudan, local entities within the newly-formed Juba- based South Sudan government attempted to create an identification scheme for people in the trans-border region that includes parts of South Sudan and parts of northern Uganda. Several schemes failed. A privately-run scheme administered by hyper-local, sub-regional agricultural cooperatives (a scheme which recognized local farmers’ need to identify themselves to receive seed deliveries, petition for credit with agricultural lenders, and use granary or storage facilities) prevailed. This identification system was a micro-form of transnational administration in the absence of sovereign or state-derived authority.
4.3. Entities That Are Not States Though the issues discussed in this section are not particular to colonial life, colonies and colonists are in a particularly, perhaps uniquely, unusual position in terms of the administrative sovereignty of the lands they inhabit. Under the colonial framework, the administrative functions of government are partitioned according to the political convenience (and, often, economic interest) of the parent state rather than at the behest of the colony’s residents. This, historically, often leads to the rise of black markets (ships’ cargo sold in the Caribbean’s tax-free coves), criminal activity (secondary markets controlled by Hong Kong’s triads), and other socially undesirable solutions that partially cure, or somehow exploit, the poor alignment of administrative design with local market conditions. In essence, colonies often suffered from involuntary privatization of lucrative industries through corruption, crime, graft, and the evolution of informal economies. While the traditional, binary idea of ‘achieving’ sovereignty focuses on ‘state-building’ toward ‘statehood’ and common constellations of state-run institutions, a more nuanced and gradual view of administrative sovereignty allows for only some (or only a few) of these institutions and functions to exist—symptoms of ‘state-ness’ separate from aspirations of ‘statehood’.
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 63 In essence, the concept of administrative sovereignty allows the observer to view administration in the absence of standardization as valid (Hobbes, 1651; Locke, 1694; Rousseau, 1763; Mann, 1986). Simply because there are rival sets of ‘rules of the game’ in a territory does not destroy all arguments for, or claims to, administrative sovereignty (North, 1990). The following somewhat-state-like, somewhat-administratively- sovereign jurisdictions outlined below suggest a nuanced approach as to how actors might weigh the factors and functions associated with sovereignty. Perhaps, then, sovereignty is an accumulation of administrative capabilities rather than a template or bright- line standard.
4.3.1. Post-Britannia (Sub-Roman Britain) In Roman Britain, Rome dictated many of the rules and behaviours that the Han had dictated in China two centuries earlier. These were the standards that we associate with sovereign state-like actors today; for example, types and weights of coinage, measures to be used in commerce, and approved construction methods for roads and irrigation. Most controversially, however, the defence of Roman Britain required a garrison force of three veteran legions. The troops were compensated, conscripted, controlled, and provisioned directly by Rome. This defensive force swelled and waned, subject to faraway political winds, eventually suffering enough attrition to be ineffective in repelling invaders. With weakened defences, it was only a matter of time until Roman Britain fell prey to invaders. In the wake of this dismantling of what we now think of as colonial Roman society, hyper-local regional warlords established areas of control and functions of administrative sovereignty. These functions included the maintenance of infrastructure, the protection of markets (including heterogeneous markets with constituent merchants of different ethnic and linguistic origins), and basic dispute resolution. These administrative designs were organic and grew out of necessity, limiting their expansion into areas of pecuniary administration—for instance, none of the warlords of the post-Britannia period created coinage or printed notes or issued debt. In contemporary times, this resonates in places like Detroit where, due to fiscal scarcity or other factors, the administration of government is pruned back to its essential parts (City of Detroit, 2017). In this process, certain administrative functions are chosen and escalated in importance, while other functions are jettisoned or de- prioritized. The concept of administrative sovereignty is that this selection process is, itself, an important piece of administrative decision-making. The decision by Costa Rica not to have a military, for instance, is not a sign of lesser sovereignty, but rather a sign of administrative sovereignty itself: the making of the decision, not its result, is the symptom of administrative control. These decisions need not be made according to scarcity—they may be elective and political: more traditionally-liberal (libertarian) regimes may pare back government to its administrative necessities
64 Karl T. Muth while other regimes may embark on administrative paths where the state plays a central and immutable role.
4.3.2. Macau (circa 2017) At the time of writing, in a given week, for every dollar put at risk on the tables of the Las Vegas strip, far more is gambled in Macau. Formally, Macau is a Special Administrative Region of China, the emphasis being on ‘special’. Yet Macau’s popularity with the Chinese Communist Party is, and has been, fragile. Each Special Administrative Region enjoys a measure of administrative sovereignty, but the nature and degree of these administrative departures from mainland Chinese policy differ between Hong Kong and Macau. Perhaps most notably in Macau’s case, casino table games are illegal in China, while they are a primary driver of the Macanese economy (as well as a driver of secondary, beneficiary economic activities such as hospitality, transport, and both legal and illegal sex work). A beneficiary of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy (originally crafted in light of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, but applied to Macau by analogy), Macau enjoys administrative sovereignty over the gambling industry (including online gambling), criminal law and police, court rules and procedure, transportation (including maritime and aviation), and import/export regulation. However, Macau has no army, cannot execute trade agreements, cannot invoke conscription, and cannot adopt accords with other nations. It enjoys none of the autonomy of action in war or treaty that administrators of a traditional state might exercise.
4.3.3. Curaçao (circa 2009) In 2009, Curaçao was part of the Netherlands Antilles, which was, in turn, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Despite this, it promulgated and enforced laws regarding gambling, controlled substances, and sex work that were—to varying degrees and in varying directions—in conflict with Dutch law (and mainstream Dutch policy). This divergence from Dutch law emerged, and continued, with an understanding that Curaçao’s administrative sovereignty would be respected so long as it did not interfere with Dutch relations (by contract and treaty) in the region. Curaçao, however, was not a ‘Special Administrative Region’ of the Netherlands (unlike Macau’s relationship to China) and the bounds of its relationship with—and extent of its independence from—its parent Kingdom endured constant testing. The Netherlands Antilles (Nederlandse Antillen), which was itself a country, was created in 1954 and controlled Curaçao and other islands in the Dutch Caribbean (such as Aruba and portions of St. Martin). Because the Netherlands Antilles acted as an intermediary for funds from the Netherlands, local politics was constrained by its patronage.
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 65 For instance, though Curaçao was able to legalize sex work decades before the Netherlands took similar administrative (and, simultaneously, legislative) action, it was not given the same latitude in the legalization of controlled substances, the regulation of professions and pharmacies, or the regulation of imports and exports. Some argue this exacerbated an already heavy skew of the island’s economy toward tourism and hospitality and away from other goods, services, and industries (for instance, given the choice between a new hospital and a new cruise ship terminal, the latter was selected).
4.3.4. Hong Kong (the Post-War Colonial Period) In the wake of Japanese occupation during WWII, Hong Kong was re-established as a British colony. Notably, the administrative powers of its post-war chief executive were unusual for a colony. At least partly in reaction to Hong Kong’s flimsy resistance to the Japanese invasion, post-war Hong Kong enjoyed significant administrative authority— unusual for a colony—over peacetime and military assets (to be used only for selfdefence), including ships in port at Victoria Harbour if the city was under attack. Post-war colonial Hong Kong also made innovative and significant decisions (Migdal, 2001) regarding infrastructure (including the construction of an ambitious subway system), built a unique body of administrative law (in the process of hearing significant maritime disputes), and radically departed from British tradition in areas from building codes (owing to the region’s seismic activity) to policing best practices (unarmed London-style policemen being no match for Kowloon’s heavily armed, highly organized street gangs). The question of Hong Kong’s administrative sovereignty is no doubt complex, but it is—by measures of administrative sovereignty—the Crown Colony that best approximated a sovereign country. If there is a spectrum drawn from having only a handful of the features of the independent state on the left, to having a cornucopia of the attributes of administrative sovereign control on the right, post-war colonial Hong Kong would mark the rightmost end of that line. Few empires in history have granted a colony anything comparable to the autonomy Hong Kong enjoyed for decades. Hong Kong printed its own currency, enacted laws different from and even irreconcilable with (particularly in the case of taxes) British law, and exerted administrative control over extraordinarily complex modern mercantile functions (for instance, the regulation of one of the region’s most important stock exchanges and one of the world’s busiest ports).
4.3.5. Monaco (circa 1963) Though ethno-linguistically French, Monaco adopted its own modern constitution in 1962 and established its own Supreme Court (preventing any appeals from Monaco to France). It resisted bureaucratically, and threatened to resist militarily, a French naval
66 Karl T. Muth blockade attempting to exert French authority to tax those living in Monaco (Saige, 1897; Bézias, 2007). Unlike France, Monaco does not levy an income tax. Monaco asserted the blockade violated its ‘[administrative] sovereignty’ (that is, the power to tax, or refuse to tax, being an administrative policy function). French actions may have been an act of war (as the French are obligated by treaty to protect Monaco militarily, although some argue the use of French ships against Monaco may have been a breach of contract rather than an act of war), and with certainty violated the spirit of the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861. Though Monaco maintains its own military of a few hundred soldiers (unlike Macau or Curaçao) and in the 1960’s possessed two boats, it did not attempt to break the blockade by force. However, Monaco has historically maintained that it can use its limited military assets without blessing from, and even contrary to, the wishes of France. While recognized internationally as a sovereign city-state (like Singapore), the limitations of its administrative and military abilities, along with its symbiotic relationship with France, may effectively limit its administrative sovereignty.
4.4. State-L ike Associations with Limited State-L ike Aspirations The idea that administrative functions generally associated with sovereignty form a natural taxonomy of what is and is not a state, is disputed in this chapter. By examining the range of functions a governmental, quasi-governmental, or regional body administers, scholars can inform the observer not only about these functions’ origins but also about the source (and scope) of authority for the body itself. Consider the following examples of regional control regimes and their different attempts to exercise administrative control over services to achieve the appearance of statehood, or at least regional legitimacy as a source of governance.
4.4.1. Somaliland and Acholiland (Present Day) Somaliland is the northernmost third of Somalia and is governed from Hargeisa. Acholiland is a central (east–west) northern portion of Uganda and its largest town, and the de facto capital is Gulu. Somaliland is formally geographically bounded, while Acholiland is contained within a more flexible ethno-linguistic cordon, its curtilage shared by other groups. Both had existing societal (normative) rules (Migdal, 1988) that were not integrated or codified during Anglo-Italian and British colonial rule, respectively. Common to Somaliland and Acholiland is a genesis in uncertainty regarding future statehood, diplomatic recognition, and administrative capability (Moe, 2010).
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 67 Somaliland, not a distinct region under Italian colonial rule, evolved into a quasi-self- governing state after a period of uncertainty around issues ranging from border controls to infrastructure to human rights to security. Acholiland, was once a semi-distinct tribal region before being subsumed into Uganda. It re-emerged as an entity during and after the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency destabilized the northern portion of the country. Some argue these post-conflict periods of instability are fertile ground for state- making (Luttwack, 1999). Yet, they also provide a postbellum period for retrospection and consideration regarding the administrative functions the new entity should endeavour to provide (and those which should be ‘outsourced’ or ‘privatized’ to aid agencies, private militias/mercenaries, fee-for-service providers, and other organizations). This period is often a temporal occasion for discussions of the role of the state, including discussions of governance (Kauffman, 1999), policing (Pouligny, 2004), taxation (Bräutigam, 2008), and other administrative functions commonly associated with territories exhibiting what one might call governance without government. Somaliland and Acholiland do not aspire to be Weberian autonomous states (Weber, 1919). Even their strongest supporters would (and do) quickly acknowledge their administrative incompleteness in the Weberian sense. Instead, these state-like associations embrace hybrid political orders and provide utilitarian administrative assistance to their constituents while providing frameworks upon which privatized or quasi-state functions can be erected, utilized, and defended (for instance, mercantile rule systems). While Somaliland and Acholiland enjoy local recognition of their borders, they do not enjoy universal recognition of their administrative structures as sovereign governments; hence, their territories are often not viewed as sovereign or self-administering states. As a result, some requests customarily granted between governments may not be heard, for instance demanding an audience for a proposed trade agreement or demanding the extradition of a criminal residing abroad (Muth, 2013). Despite substantially more evidence of administrative sovereignty in Somaliland than Acholiland (for example, the coinage of currency, control of local interest rates, a separate flag), neither place enjoys widespread recognition as separate from Somalia or Uganda, respectively. The effect of international recognition can be examined in the example of South Sudan, west of Somaliland and north of Acholiland.
4.4.2. South Sudan (Prior to Independence from Sudan) Linked to Acholiland by two major roads, South Sudan has had an extraordinarily short and difficult formal history. The country has only existed since 2011 and has already endured substantial, persistent internal and border conflicts. South Sudan ranks at the very top of the Fragile States Index (Messner, 2016). However, prior to its recognition as a separate state, South Sudan enjoyed substantial administrative sovereignty relative to Sudan. From 1972 until the summer of 1983, this area had been known as the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region and it was both administratively distinct and—in some respects—self-governing. Its rejection of Shari’a
68 Karl T. Muth law in 1983 can be seen as the genesis of a ‘critical transition’ (Alston, 2016). Previously, the ethno-linguistically identifiable region now known as South Sudan engaged in traditional state-like administrative tasks like the improvement of roads, the commissioning of major civil engineering contractors (including using complex public–private partnerships, special purpose investment vehicles, and other sophisticated mechanisms), the collection of fees and taxes, and the policing of substantial portions of its geography. Also, and perhaps more relevant to the daily lives of those in the region, it engaged in the building of schools, the drilling of potable borehole water sources, and the erection (or, in some cases, excavation) of subsidized irrigation and flood control mechanisms (particularly through the use of retention ponds) in areas near the Nile. It also maintained practices and positions irreconcilable with Sudan’s policies (for instance, allowing the brewing and consumption of alcoholic beverages). In the 2000s, what is now known as South Sudan was not yet recognized as independent other than by residents, regional political partisans, and academic commentators who saw Juba as a legitimate peer to Khartoum politically (if not militarily or administratively). With South Sudan’s Independence Day in July of 2011, changes were small but noticeable: ‘Republic of South Sudan’ had replaced earlier ‘South Sudan’ in the labelling of buildings, goods, and vehicles; the South Sudanese flag flew proudly in Juba, rather than hanging semi-privately in community centres and compounds. Within six months, the visa process had been formalized. A few days after Independence Day, the Republic of South Sudan joined the United Nations; it then joined the African Union. But did it really enjoy abilities or qualities of administrative sovereignty different from those it possessed a few months earlier in April? For this question, it is necessary to turn to a scenario that has played out hundreds, if not thousands, of times in human history: the non-recognized nearly complete exposition of administrative sovereignty. The historical case of Chicago’s Taylor Street exemplifies the concept.
4.4.3. Taylor Street William Foote Whyte’s now-famous text, Street Corner Society (1943), observes the conduct of street gangs in the North End slum in Boston during the 1930s from a contemporary viewpoint. At that time, from Chicago’s Taylor Street to New York’s Queens to London’s Hackney, gangsters were ready to provide types of security, dispute resolution, and even business subsidies that local governments could not or would not offer. Nowhere was this administrative mechanism as sophisticated as in Taylor Street. Taylor Street is an Italian enclave in Chicago that was controlled by Al Capone’s gang, simply referred to as ‘The Outfit’. Many have argued (Kobler, 2003; Schoenberg, 1992) compellingly that The Outfit exhibited many attributes often associated with administrative sovereignty. It asserted and defended geographic borders, promulgated rules for mercantile trade (in both legal goods and contraband, nationally and
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 69 internationally), rejected rules imposed by rival sources of authority (including the prohibition against commerce in alcohol and certain firearms), and even imposed fees (which one could interpret as ‘taxes’) in a relatively sophisticated and uniform way. The Taylor Street example is a concrete historical example which helps elucidate contemporary understandings of administrative sovereignty being undertaken by unofficial (non-governmentally sanctioned, extra-judicial) sources of authority. In the transnational context, border towns and shipping yards often have mechanisms that more closely resemble those of The Outfit than the familiar Customs House of a Commonwealth port city or the Tariff Office of colonial outposts. This is not because border towns are full of anarchists or outlaws; it is because, as was the case on Taylor Street in Chicago, private actors are able to provide alternative, efficient conduits for payments, political favour, protection, and services. The efficiency of cartel cooperation between pairs of private actors, groups of states, or states and non-state actors is administratively advantageous, economically appealing, and politically useful in the same sense that FedEx is an appealing alternative to most governments’ other options for a parcel service.
4.4.4. Associations and Affiliations Surrounding the United Kingdom During the summer of 2016, a referendum in the United Kingdom triggered Article 50. This Article can be thought of as the clause within the Treaty on the European Union that interrupts, indeed potentially terminates, transnational administration. The European Union is perhaps the most ambitious structure for transnational policy administration ever undertaken, particularly when viewed in concert with the adoption of the Euro currency (central banking and inflation policy) and the ratification of the Schengen Agreement (immigration policy). Brexit is interesting in that it is a formal cessation of interstate policy cooperation. While many efforts at transnational policy administration experience variation in the level of cooperation over time (the cooperative effort between the United States and Mexico to police illegal immigration across their shared border, for instance), short of armed conflict or termination of the diplomatic relationship, it is rare for cooperation to suddenly and completely cease. In the case of the United Kingdom, a sudden administrative separation is, from a policy perspective, particularly difficult. This is in part because the immigration, work permit (work visa), and other systems created by the United Kingdom during the 1990s and 2000s were frameworks that assumed a long-term, or even permanent, relationship with Continental Europe. While the re-assertion of physical borders will be costly and difficult, even more challenging will be the decisions regarding the large number of foreign citizens—many of them highly skilled and in important roles—living and working in the United Kingdom (and particularly in Greater London).
70 Karl T. Muth More problematic, perhaps, than the contemporary questions of administrative sovereignty are those being examined through the ex ante lens. For instance, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was a trade deal under consideration that would have required the United Kingdom’s government to submit to the jurisdiction of special trade courts wherein it could be sued by unhappy corporations or participants in international trade. While there is precedent for such submission to private actions in Continental law, the vulnerability of the state to such suits is largely alien to the British and Commonwealth legal tradition. The TTIP raised the question of ‘forced’ administrative cooperation, as do other treaties. Any type of forced cooperation violates the basic legal concept of freedom to contract (which includes, implicitly and crucially, the ability to say ‘no’), and erodes one of the key shorelines of sovereignty. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), for instance, is a trade agreement between the EU and Canada currently approved but not implemented. If CETA had been adopted and put into force prior to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union being complete, the UK would be bound by CETA and forced to trade with Canada on a nearly-tariff-free basis, substantially constraining its ability to negotiate its own tariff-and-trade posture as an independent entity. While administrative sovereignty is functional in its definition, it comprises not only a panoply of affirmative actions but also a chain of constraints. An entity forced to cooperate with, co-administrate with, trade with, or police with another entity, for instance, is not able to craft the nature of its administrative sovereignty to the same extent as an entity with fewer constraints; in other words, to the extent that administrative cooperation is mandatory, administrative sovereignty is absent.
4.4.5. Increasingly (or Decreasingly?) Independent Hong Kong In the wake of the elections of 2016, it remains unclear whether Hong Kong will be more or less independent from mainland China’s political and administrative machinery. While many newly elected members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (the ‘LegCo’) were quick to announce plans that invoked words like independence and autonomy, the mechanisms by which these measures of autonomy would be created or enjoyed are inexorably intertwined with mainland administration. This raises the question of what a ‘Special Administrative Region’ of China is and how special or separate its administration can possibly be when it must be tethered to, and largely consistent with, mainland administrative procedures, administrative rules, and legislative promulgations. Hong Kong has long asserted—including in the first proceedings of its legislative body following its 1997 independence from British colonial rule—that it will maintain its own administrative institutions, which regulate its major port (Victoria Harbour), its stock exchange (the Hang Seng), its roadways and bridges, its subway system and over-ground
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 71 trams, and its licensed professionals (attorneys, pharmacists, physicians, and so forth). However, this administrative ‘sovereignty’ is at the same time transnational, in that it is intertwined with Chinese administration of many of the same (or similar) functions. For instance, consumer product safety and securities regulations have been promulgated at record pace in China since 2000 and many of these standards are now applied in Hong Kong. So has Hong Kong ‘achieved’ sovereignty from China in the administrative sense? Or has China merely outsourced the administration of a troublesome southern island to local bureaucrats? Both arguments can—and do—coexist in the Chinese political discourse. Hints as to the extent to which Hong Kong might engage in transnational administration of key functions may lie in its relationship with Macau. For example, Hong Kong engages in tandem administration of customs enforcement matters, co-administrates a high-tech jet turbine hydrofoil service between the two islands, and handles immigration and right-to-work disputes in cooperation with Macau. This suggests Hong Kong has the capability, even if it occasionally lacks the political will, to engage with other states and state-like entities in the cooperative administration of key functions.
4.5. Conclusion: Characterizing Administrative Sovereignty The assertion of sovereignty, the adoption of the discussed attributes, and the paths toward (or, indeed, away from) sovereignty are all gradual and mutable. All interact with, or hinge upon, national policy decisions and decisions of policy administration; the best interrogative lineages originate in one question: What does the state or quasi-state do and does it do these things exclusively, effectively, and continuously? In particular, several categorizations arise from this analysis. Rather than simple binaries—state and non-state—this chapter shows some state- like entities engaging in the administration of policies and the application of laws in ways that lie on a spectrum between complete and recognizable sovereignty versus comprehensive and dependent submission. Noting that this spectrum exists, and that the points that anchor its ends are no more valid or merit-worthy than the points in between, is the first step toward considering an entity’s posture, appraising its sovereignty, and thus inquiring intelligently as to what variety of functions fall within the ambit of its administrative scope. The four-part distinction laid out in this chapter is intentionally simple: (a) warmaking, peacemaking, and territorial control, (b) tax, commercial, and fiscal control, (c) executive credibility and judicial consistency, and (d) civil rights and civil society. But few entities affirmatively cede control over even one of these functions to a neighbour, rival, or colonizer and then claim comprehensive sovereignty. To illustrate the flexibility of
72 Karl T. Muth this analytical framework, take, for instance, Britain’s involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and dependence upon foreign powers for defence which might impair the first point. Britain’s participation in—and exit from—the EU might affect the second point. Its vulnerability to the jurisdiction of Brussels as to human rights issues might be said to impact the penultimate and final points. Despite this arguable weakening on all four sides of the framework suggested here, no one would argue that Britain is anything less than a sovereign nation, as the (EU-driven) compromises to its ‘administrative sovereignty’—its administration of core functions—are mild, predictable, and well defined. The scope of administrative functions that an entity chooses to administer is highly relevant to the determination of sovereignty, as is the comprehensiveness and exclusivity with which the entity administers the chosen functions. Only secondarily are the efficacy or competence of those administering particular functions weighed, as this is extremely vulnerable to misinterpretation, mis-appraisal, and arbitrary determination. A small, young, impoverished state like South Sudan may have an enormously ambitious initial list of functions to administer, but what is most important is whether it performs this administration separate from—sovereign from—the interventions of others. To the extent that the entity being analysed forfeits its control, through action or inaction, over any of the four core functions, it endangers its subsequent claims to sovereignty. A head of state who only takes action with the blessing of a foreign power is a clear compromise, but in the real world lines are more blurry. For instance, what effect does the incomplete, but persistent, meddling in elections by state-sponsored hackers have on the target country’s democratic process and, in the end, sovereignty over the administration of its own electoral processes? While co-administration is a valid strategy, particularly in cases of states and state- like entities with limited resources or special challenges, the finding of administrative sovereignty is most credible in cases where administration is exclusive. This is particularly true in areas like taxation and treasury functions, which are historically managed by states exclusively and individually. The selection of co-administrated functions (like immigration in the case of the Schengen zone) should be cautious as regional arrangements to delegate or co-administer are often difficult to modify or unwind. Examples of multi-state administrative arrangements that have proven more costly or cumbersome than anticipated include CARICOM (a multilateral Caribbean organization instituting currency mandates, labour market regulation, and immigration controls) and the African Union (which has administrative, political, and military roles in increasing intra-continental cooperation). Generally, the co-administration or delegation of administrative functions core to statehood, like defence, justice, and treasury tend to weaken administrative sovereignty arguments. In sum, sovereignty is best determined by a wholesale appraisal of a nation or alleged nation’s features rather than, for instance, an inventory of its past treaties or an examination of lists on which its name may or may not appear. It must be an administrative inventory of factors suggesting ‘state-ness’ rather than a pronouncement or impeachment of ‘statehood’. As the ascension to sovereignty is recognized as more gradual,
The Potential and Limits of Administrative Sovereignty 73 more subtle, and more intricate, our understanding of administrative sovereignty must become more analytical (as opposed to simply descriptive) to reflect and interpret the ever-changing phenomena of sovereignty. Perhaps then we, as scholars, will correctly and unanimously identify the functions of administrative sovereignty as the very operation of the sovereign state and not simply as inchoate fragments hinting at its existence. The making, changing, and enforcing of policy mechanisms administered across borders has, for most of human history, posed unique challenges. This is especially true where the degree, or flavour, or appearance of sovereignty over administrative matters that one entity enjoys is different from another. Only by first noticing and understanding the nuanced differences in the way administrative functions are controlled, delegated, or solved through cooperation can one then consider the transnational administration of functions with neighbouring or allied entities.
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74 Karl T. Muth Locke, J. (1694). Two Treatises of Government. London: Churchill. Luttwack, E. (1999). Give War a Chance. Foreign Affairs, 78 (4): 36–44. Mann, M. (1986). The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menkhaus, K. (2006/07). ‘Governance without Government in Somalia – Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping’. International Security, 31 (3): 74–106. Messner, J. et al (2016). Fragile States Index, Washington, DC: The Fund For Peace. Migdal, J. (2001). State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Migdal, J. and Schlichte, K. (2005). ‘Rethinking the State’. In K. Schlichte (ed.). The Dynamics of States – The Formation of Crises of State Domination. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1–40. Migdal, J. S. (1988). Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moe, L. W. (2010). Addressing State Fragility in Africa: A Need to Challenge The Established ‘Wisdom?’ Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Crisis Management Initiative. Muth, K. (2013). ‘A Case Study in Extradition: The Isidore Case’. Journal of Transnational Legal Issues, 1: 110–30. Muth, K. (2013). ‘Maritime Security: Does Controlling Piracy and Other Criminal Activities Require Systematic State Interventions?’ In Haas and Hind (ed.). Controversies in Globalization. CQ Press, Chapter 8. Available at https://www.amazon.com/ Controversies-G lobalization-C ontending-Approaches-InternationalRelations/d p/ 160871795X. North, D.C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, J. (2010). ‘International Extradition, the Rule of Non-Inquiry, and the Problem of Sovereignty’. Boston University Law Review, 1973. Pouligny, B. (2004). ‘Les Anciens Combattants d’aujourd’hui Désarmement, Démobilisation et Réinsertion— The Politics and Anti- Politics of Contemporary “Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration’ Programs, Paris: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI—Sciences-Po/CNRS). Reuters (2011). South Sudan to link to Kenya oil pipeline. [Online] Available at: http:// af.reuters.com/article/sudanNews/idAFLAE63689720110706. Rousseau, J.-J. (1763). Du Contrat Social Ou Principes du Droit Politique. Amsterdam: Chez M. M. Rey. Saige, G. (1897). Monaco, ses origines et son histoire d’apres les documents originaux. Monaco: Imprimerie de Monaco. Schoenberg, R. (1992). Mr. Capone. New York: William Morrow & Company. Shortt, A. (1913). The Relation Between the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Canadian Government. American Political Science Review, 7 (2): 181–196. Weber, M. (1919). Politics as a Vocation. In Owen, D., Strong, T., and Livingstone, R. (eds), The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers. Wessel, J. (2007). ‘Financial Action Task Force: A Study in Balancing Sovereignty with Equality in Global Administrative Law’. Widener Law Review, 13: 169. Zaring, D. (2013). ‘Sovereignty Mismatch and the New Administrative Law’. Washington University Law Review, 91: 59.
Chapter 5
State Frag i l i t y, Internat i ona l Devel opment P ol i c y, and Gl obal Re sp onse s Derick W. Brinkerhoff
5.1. Introduction Among the issues on the global policy agenda is maintaining the benefits from the circulation of global ‘goods’ (commodities, trade, finances, people, and so forth) while reducing the risks of the flows of global ‘bads’ (trafficking, illicit weapons, narcotics, terrorism, disease outbreaks, climate change, and so on). Spurred on by the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in the United States, the resulting interventions and ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and violent civil strife in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, Western governments have identified failed and fragile states as being implicated in the production and circulation of many of these global threats (Fearon and Laitin, 2004). Current conventional wisdom considers failed and fragile states, and the poverty, instability, and ungoverned spaces that characterize them, to pose real and significant dangers to the global community (Patrick, 2006, Burns et al., 2016). This chapter examines international development policy, largely centred on the United States, as it relates to states categorized as conflict-affected, fragile, and/or failed where the overall policy objective is to help these countries to move away from conflict, fragility, or failure. What this means practically is subject to ongoing debate. How state fragility and failure have been problematized has had implications for which international actors are called upon to intervene, the scope and nature of the interventions, and the outcomes achieved. US policy makers, their counterparts in other Western nations, and their interlocutors in fragile states are conjoined actors, sometimes willingly, at other times not, whose combined commitment and efforts are required to manage the
76 Derick W. Brinkerhoff challenges that failure and fragility pose. These actors increasingly recognize the need to develop contextually grounded policy responses to fragile states that take into account how global and country-specific dynamics intersect. However, Keohane and Nye (1989), describing the complex interdependencies that characterize international relations, dispute the idea of an ordered hierarchy of issue priorities in any policy domain. Societies have multiple connections across borders and pursue varied agendas; states are not unitary actors with a clear set of prioritized interests. In such situations, agenda setting, policy making, and intervention are subject to a range of often conflicting domestic and international pressures. Further, the choices made do not necessarily aggregate to yield a coherent and internally consistent set of priorities, directives, and actions. International development policy directed at failed/fragile states exemplifies these complexities and inconsistencies, as the discussion below reveals. The chapter begins with a retrospective on successive generations of policy response to failed/fragile states to ground today’s approaches in an historical perspective. Discussion then turns to definitions of fragile states, and associated measurement frameworks, followed by debates and controversies. The analysis next summarizes the most recent conceptualizations of fragility and of the dynamics that reinforce or mitigate the factors associated with fragility. Policy responses and intervention strategies that seek to account for sophisticated understandings of transnational as well as state- centric fragility drivers and dynamics are reviewed. The conclusion maps some pathways out of fragility toward resilience; and, in looking to the future, offers a cautionary note regarding the likelihood of more coherent and coordinated global policy responses to the problem of fragile and conflict-affected states.
5.2. International Development Policy and Failed/Fragile States The roots of US international development policy and assistance programmes lie in foreign policy decisions made following the conclusion of World War II. These found expression in the Marshall Plan, which supported the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan, and in the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. International development as an arena for policy making and intervention was born out of the US desire to reconstruct post-war Europe as a counter to the growing Communist threat posed by the Cold War. This first generation of post-conflict nation-building deemed to be in the national interest set the stage for future policy and associated interventions (Dobbins et al., 2003). The 1950s and 60s saw a massive wave of newly independent post-colonial countries in the global South, which expanded the geopolitical competition for influence between the West and the Soviet Union beyond Europe. Nation-building targeted poor countries
State Fragility 77 of the so-called Third World (to distinguish it from the first and second worlds: the West and the Communist nations), and aimed to create modern Weberian states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the image of the West (Weber, 1946; Brinkerhoff, 2008). During this period, the war in Vietnam was a watershed for combined US military and foreign policy objectives that sought societal transformation and modernization to stem the spread of Communism (Picard and Buss, 2009). The failure of that endeavour sent ripples through the military and foreign policy communities that lasted for decades. The second generation of post-conflict interventions emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and focused on humanitarian intervention in countries suffering from political strife, violence, conflict, and instability. The US participated directly in peacekeeping, stabilization, and reconstruction efforts in places like Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in cooperation with the United Nations and NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was during this period that the terms failed, failing, and fragile states began to enter the foreign policy lexicon. Historically, Western powers have been concerned with weak states for many years. For example, the US war in the Philippines in 1899, and its invasion and occupation of Haiti, 1915–34, were both justified as efforts to stabilize weak states and protect their citizens, as well as to safeguard American interests. European colonialism demonstrated similar justifications, as well as the rationale of bringing the benefits of more ‘advanced’ civilization to populations living in ‘barbaric’ and ‘primitive’ societies. However, the second generation of interventions saw the mobilization of both military and civilian resources in response to these humanitarian crises. Civilian international development agencies increasingly recognized the need to address the role of violent conflict in pushing countries into crisis and in shaping paths back to stability, and created dedicated units in response. For example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) established the Office of Transition Initiatives in 1994 and the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management in 2002. The World Bank created its Post-Conflict Unit in 1997. The attacks in New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001 launched the third generation of post-conflict policy and intervention, which combined regime change, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism in stabilization and reconstruction efforts. The Bush Administration’s neoconservative policy of projection of US power swept aside the hesitation to intervene bred by the Vietnam ‘quagmire’. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US-led coalition placed the military in the lead role in nation- building, dwarfing the civilian agencies, which struggled to take their seat at the three-D (defence-development-diplomacy) policy table in the face of the resource imbalances. The US (and European) international policy debates shifted away from a major focus on the humanitarian danger that failed/fragile states posed to their own citizens to include the security menaces they created beyond their borders for their neighbors and for the West. Strategies and metrics for international development were strongly propelled by concerns for national and global security, which competed with humanitarian rationales (Duffield, 2001). The US remained the dominant actor, but Western policy responses more systematically included transnational collaborations.
78 Derick W. Brinkerhoff Today, a fourth generation of conflict-sensitive international development policy and intervention is emerging, based on a reaction to the misplaced faith (some would say, hubris) in the tenets of third-generation nation-building. This generation involves increased recognition of the transnational nature of the forces influencing state failure and fragility, and the rise of non-state actors as drivers of conflict, violence, and instability. Security remains a high priority on the policy agenda, and in some cases competes with humanitarian concerns. The current worldwide refugee crisis and a spate of terrorist incidents in Europe, the Middle East, and the US are drivers pushing the primacy of the security agenda. As a policy objective, nation-building has fallen from favour in light of the cautionary lessons of failed transformations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and the recognition of the limits of external actors’ influence. US policy toward fragile states aims more at containment and mitigation rather than transformation, with deep divisions within the various foreign and domestic policy communities regarding priorities and ways forward. While the individual country-to-country focus that reflects international relations in the global system remains the basic modality for bilateral engagement, current policy perspectives look beyond the borders of individual fragile states to transnational drivers of fragility. Responses to these transnational drivers are themselves more firmly grounded in transnational policy perspectives that engage multiple partners drawn from the three-D communities of both advanced and developing countries. For example, in West Africa, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, the United Nations, plus the diplomatic and military arms of France, the US, the United Kingdom (UK), and ECOWAS members have intervened jointly in various combinations to seek an end to violent conflicts and civil strife in the region (Annan 2014). These present-day viewpoints and interventions reflect evolving understandings of the multiple meanings of fragility (and of its posited polar opposite, resilience) and of the local and transnational dynamics that exacerbate or mitigate fragile situations.
5.3. Conceptualizing State Fragility and Failure With the emergence of state fragility and failure as a distinct policy and intervention arena, efforts at definition have proliferated. While there is no single widely accepted definition of fragile states, all share a common focus on the inability of a state to fulfill basic functions that respond to the needs and desires of its citizens. Among donor definitions are the following, which illustrate both the parallels and the variation in this common perspective. USAID’s definition focuses on vulnerability and crisis. States vulnerable to becoming fragile are ‘those states unable or unwilling to adequately assure the provision of security
State Fragility 79 and basic services to significant portions of their populations and where the legitimacy of the government is in question’ (USAID, 2005, p. 1). States in crisis are ‘those states where the central government does not exert effective control over its own territory or is unable or unwilling to assure the provision of vital services to significant parts of its territory, where legitimacy of the government is weak or nonexistent, and where violent conflict is a reality or a great risk’ (USAID, 2005, p. 1). The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) defines fragile states as ‘those where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people, including the poor. The most important functions of the state for poverty reduction are territorial control, safety and security, capacity to manage public resources, delivery of basic services, and the ability to protect and support the ways in which the poorest people sustain themselves’ (DFID, 2005, p. 7). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s definition is close to that of DFID: ‘States are fragile when state structures lack political will and/or capacity to provide the basic functions needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of their populations’ (OECD/DAC, 2007, p. 2). While these definitions provided a general picture of state fragility and its extreme form, state failure, policy makers were keen to develop better understandings of causality, to be able to track changes in fragility over time and compare countries with each other, and to avert crises by recognizing warning signs of deterioration. To respond to these needs, academics, donor agencies, and practitioners developed a variety of analytic frameworks and measurement instruments. These efforts led to several indexes and taxonomies. Among the most widely used indexes is one that predates the concern with measuring fragility, having been initiated in the mid-1970s as a tool for determining country reform needs and the allocation of loans and assistance. This is the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), which rates the quality of a country’s policies and institutions in four areas: economic management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and equity, and public sector management. In 2002, the Bank established cut- off scores below which countries were categorized as fragile (or in Bank terminology at the time, Low Income Countries Under Stress—LICUS). The CPIA methodology and indicators have been refined over the years, and since the Bank made its scores public in 2006, the CPIA ratings have been used by other donors and by analysts in their own determinations of country performance and fragility. Another frequently cited set of metrics is the Fragile States Index, launched in 2005 by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. This index is calculated annually for 178 countries based on twelve categories of indicators: demographic pressures, refugees and internally displaced persons, uneven economic development, group grievance, human flight and brain drain, poverty and economic decline, state legitimacy, public services, human rights/rule of law, security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention (Fund for Peace, 2015). With the accumulated scorings over the years since 2005, a key focus of the Fund for Peace’s annual report is changes in relative rankings over time, either for the better or the worse. Other examples of efforts to measure and monitor state
80 Derick W. Brinkerhoff fragility include Carleton University’s Country Indicators for Foreign Policy, funded by the Canadian Government (Carment et al., 2010); and the Brookings Institution’s Index of State Weakness in the Developing World (Rice and Patrick, 2008).
5.4. What’s in a Label? Debates and Controversies The labelling of states as fragile or failed has been criticized from a number of perspectives (Di John, 2010). The first criticism is that the terminology is analytically flawed for a host of reasons. Among those frequently cited are: it is imprecise and subjective, lacks analytic rigour, conveys a pejorative ‘blame-the-victim’ judgement, conceals the vast variation and uniqueness in countries beneath a homogenizing set of categories, and encourages simplistic and one-size-fits-all solutions to fragility issues (Call, 2008). Relatedly, the methodologies used to construct the various indexes and measures of fragility have been similarly condemned as subject to various weaknesses and flaws. Frequently mentioned methodological complaints include the following: • Analytic frameworks combine indicators within categories to reach summative scores that disguise the variation in performance of individual countries. • The use of universal indicators decontextualizes country experience and ignores historical circumstances and influences. • Many of the indicator ratings in the indexes rely upon expert judgements, and are therefore subject to individual interpretation and bias. • The scoring methodologies create artificial and arbitrary categories of fragility that encourage false assumptions that countries included in the same category share comparable problems that can be solved with similar interventions. The second criticism is that the label is normative and ideological. Underlying the terminology, according to this criticism, is the notion that what makes states fragile is the dearth of features that characterize the Western ideal of a Weberian bureaucratic state as the desired institutional architecture for socioeconomic development (Lemay-Hébert, 2013). These critics contend that the aim of peacebuilding and reconstruction interventions in fragile or failed states is to put in place liberal democratic institutions and processes that replicate Western models and—as noted below— reinforce existing global power relations (Pugh, 2005). Further, the specialists who focus on analysis and measurement of fragility and fragile states share a common perspective on the problem, and a common vocabulary, which reinforces a viewpoint that privileges replication of both the Weberian ideal and the science underlying it. As Nay (2014) argues, transnational networks of policy analysts, academics, consultants, activists, and practitioners replicate and spread these normative visions of the
State Fragility 81 fragile states problem and its solution, thereby strengthening their dominance and authority. The measurement metrics enforce these norms to the extent that various actors use them for monitoring and policy decisions. The third criticism is that, beyond being simply normative, the label and its associated frameworks and measures are inherently political and serve the dominant interests of the global North. The power and resources of Western governments and of international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the United Nations lie behind the label and the indexes, translating rankings and categorizations into resource allocations, technical assistance, and, under certain circumstances, military intervention. The science-based authority of indicators-based models of state fragility that Nay (2014) describes serves to buttress the hegemony of the Northern foreign policy and international development communities in their relations with poor countries. Countries deemed fragile or failed have little choice but to accept the labels and ratings applied to them, and given their ‘pathologized’ incapacities, intervenors from the global North are empowered to administer remedies (Hughes and Pupavac, 2005). However, in some cases the dependency and helplessness of fragile states masks an ability of actors in those countries to ‘game’ donor relationships to their advantage in ways that are not always apparent (Brinkerhoff, 2014). Further, some changes in North– South relations between donors and recipient countries have emerged that represent shifts toward a more egalitarian assistance partnership. These have emerged from the series of High Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness, beginning in Paris and more recently in Busan. The 2011 Busan New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States led to the creation of the so-called G7+ group of fragile and conflict-affected countries, which has spearheaded a global effort to counter Northern domination regarding international development policy and assistance directed at fragile states. The G7+ is part of a larger International Dialogue, co-led by the Minister of Finance and Economic Development of Sierra Leone and Sweden’s Minister for International Development Cooperation, with a secretariat hosted by the OECD, that supports implementation of the New Deal (INCAF, n.d.). While most observers agree that the changes in power relations are modest, such transnational forums are slowly modifying the policy dialogue and terms of engagement between donor agencies and their governments, and officials in poor countries. One sign of this change has been a decrease in the use of the fragile states label, and its replacement by ‘countries in fragile and conflict-affected situations’. The term, ‘resilience’, emerged several years ago as an addition to the lexicon and to the conceptualization of the dynamics of fragility. In essence, resilience is posited as fragility’s opposite (OECD/DAC, 2008; Martin-Breen and Anderies, 2011). As the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) become the transnational policy framework for the post- 2015 future, the international development community’s conception of fragility has taken on a universal character, and is seen as something that can affect all countries around the world, not just those in the global South (OECD/DAC, 2015). To some extent, then, the derogatory ‘sting’ in the label is diminishing in tandem with shifts in the policy paradigm.
82 Derick W. Brinkerhoff
5.5. Behind the Label: Unpacking Fragility In light of the global threats that fragile states are perceived to contribute to, urgent questions revolve around a better understanding of the causes and consequences of fragility, and identifying how its effects can be predicted, mitigated, or reversed. An extensive academic and applied literature has emerged in response, offering various explanations of how and why states become fragile and/or fail, and suggesting options to reduce or avoid fragility, avert failure, and restore or rebuild states in crisis (Di John, 2010; Gisselquist, 2014, 2015). This section reviews the main analytic streams in this literature. These streams have significant areas of overlap, though for presentational purposes their distinctiveness is highlighted here. One dominant stream, where much comparative econometric analysis has been undertaken identifies the links between economic dependence on natural resources and risks of intrastate conflict, violence, and crisis. These studies find that countries that are highly dependent upon natural resources and ‘lootables’ (minerals and precious stones) are especially prone to these risks (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Ross, 2004). This work has identified greed and grievance as major explanatory factors. The relatively easy availability of natural resources motivates greedy state actors to capture economic rents to maintain power, and of anti-state actors to seek rents to finance rebellion. Grievance factors derive from economic and social exclusion, ethnic/religious hatred and dominance, repression, and inequality (Brinkerhoff, 2011). A second stream focuses on the interactions between the state and society, and the interpenetration between these two domains (Migdal, 1988, 2001). Explanations of fragility in this stream emphasize political settlements, elite pacts, neopatrimonialism, and patronage as creating states with innate weaknesses. These include reliance on clientelism, rent-seeking, and corruption as a means of maintaining power and control, and predatory and authoritarian relations with citizens. Such states—which North et al. (2012) call limited access orders—have dysfunctional political, economic, and public administration systems that rely on exclusive access to resources and rents controlled by a dominant elite. As Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) argue, they are inherently fragile and ultimately sow the seeds of their own destruction. A subset of this stream in the applied literature looks at state–society relations in terms of the social contract to help to explain why some states are fragile and others are stable. The social contract, the OECD/DAC argues, is a product of three interconnected components (2008, p. 17): • expectations that citizens have of the state; • state capacity to provide services within a secure environment, and to obtain sufficient resources from its population and territory to provide these services; and • political will to direct resources and capacity to meet citizens’ expectations.
State Fragility 83 When these three components are in harmony—that is, when citizens’ expectations align with state capacity and political will—then state–society relations demonstrate responsiveness and resilience. Resilience leads to stability, not in the static sense of a balance that never changes, but rather, enabling the state to adjust to changed expectations, shifts in capacity, new external conditions, and variations in political will. As Kaplan (2014) points out, however, the nature and quality of relations across societal groups (what he calls the social covenant) matter as much as the relations between society and the state in establishing conditions conducive to stability and resilience. A third analytic stream takes a functional approach to explaining fragility that looks at the core functions that all societies need in order to survive and prosper, and assesses the extent to which a given country faces deficits in fulfilling them. (Functional approaches to analysing states and government are not new in policy studies: Max Weber’s classic work is perhaps the most well-known example, but see also Rose, 1976). These include (Brinkerhoff, 2007; Stewart and Brown, 2009): • Authority gaps. These include failure to provide security and basic protection for citizens and property, and the inability to project authority throughout the state’s territory. • Service gaps. These concern the failure to provide basic services, such as health, education, water, and infrastructure, as well as economic opportunity and well- being for the majority of citizens. • Legitimacy gaps. Failure here is inability to provide responsive and accountable government, protection of basic rights through some form of justice, representation, and inclusion of all citizens. This stream connects to the social contract notion in that the core functions concern how states relate to their citizens. Whaites (2008), for example, distinguishes between a state’s ‘survival’ functions (ability to maintain security, raise revenue, and govern through the rule of law) and ‘expected’ functions (ability to meet citizens’ expectations for services, infrastructure, etc.). States whose governments perform poorly in fulfilling these functions (whether survival or expected ones) risk becoming victim to a vicious cycle of diminished capacity and authority, reduced confidence in state institutions, loss of legitimacy in the eyes of some segments of the population, and diminished faith in the social contract (World Bank, 2011). The result is increased fragility, and a heightened probability of renewed conflict and violence (Goldstone, 2008). Analyses here link the quality of governance to fragility. For example, Gisselquist (2014, p. 10) notes that, ‘the failure of a state to fulfill basic functions may stem both from weaknesses in state institutional capacity and from the characteristics of the regime or the functioning and priorities of the government’. Another stream has focused on answering the how and why of fragility by exploring the relationship between individual countries’ degrees and manifestations of fragility and failure, and various global threats. Primary among these are terrorist groups, particularly those associated with radical Islamism (Patrick, 2006). These are closely
84 Derick W. Brinkerhoff followed by transnational criminal networks, dealing in drugs, human trafficking, weapons, and other illicit commodities (Duffield, 2001; Berdal and Serrano, 2002). These external sources of stress tend to weaken already feeble institutions in fragile states. For example, police, military, and the judiciary become mired in corruption as a function of the illicit financial flows generated by transnational criminal organizations, which undermines citizens’ trust in the state (World Bank, 2011). Fragile states are often victims of the ‘bad neighborhoods’ phenomenon. When adjacent states are undergoing violent conflict, civil war, or are home to criminal enterprises, the resulting negative dynamics create spillovers that can increase fragility. Because many fragile states have weak border security, they have difficulty controlling or mitigating these spillovers. Resource shocks are another transnational source of stressors. Fragile states are often highly dependent upon food imports, so are vulnerable to increases in commodity prices and to shortages (FAO, 2010). Evidence is growing that demonstrates the impact of climate change and environmental shocks (e.g. drought and water scarcities) in increasing pressures on fragile states. For example, Burke et al. (2009) found significant historical links between temperature rises and civil war in Africa, and their climate model suggests a possible 54 per cent increase in the incidence of armed conflict on the continent by 2030. What, then, is today’s view of state fragility? Current understandings of what lies behind the fragility label include the following, although there is not universal agreement. First is recognizing the diverse and multifaceted nature of fragility and its causes. Fragility cannot be attributed solely (or even chiefly) to the resource curse, outbreaks of violent conflict, lack of economic development and poverty, ethnic tensions, exclusionary institutions, poor governance, failure to fulfill basic functions, or transnational spillovers of one sort or another. All of these elements, in various combinations, are likely to play a role in a particular state’s trajectory toward fragility, and, if their impacts are unchecked, into failure. In response to this recognition, Grävingholt et al. (2015) have developed a fragility measurement framework that incorporates its multidimensional character. However, one issue with broader measurement frameworks is that the more indicators that are included, the more difficult it is to distinguish the particularities of fragility from the general conditions associated with poverty and low levels of development. Second, states are not uniformly fragile or strong. A state may be critically weak in some aspect of state functioning (or statehood however conceived), and relatively strong in others. As Carment et al. observe (2010, p. 17), ‘few states suffer catastrophic failure in all areas of “stateness” simultaneously’. The OECD/DAC (2015) view referenced above—that all states contain some features that hold risks of fragility—reflects this understanding. Myanmar is a good example: decades-long ethnically based insurrections, a central authoritarian government capable of exerting control, and recent steps toward partial democratization. Third, paths to (and from) fragility and failure are a function of both structural conditions and agency. While structural and institutional endowments have significant influence, they are not necessarily determinant. Human intentionality and action are
State Fragility 85 important as well. Today’s understanding of agency recognizes that actors play important roles in endogenous institutional change, whether in directions that may increase the likelihood of fragility—e.g. by promoting repression—or reduce it—e.g. by fostering inclusion (Mahoney and Thelen, 2009). For example, the country cases in Barma et al. (2014) take an agency perspective and detail how country actors were successful in negotiating institutional reforms in fragile states.
5.6. Pathways to Reducing Fragility This review of models that have sought to unpack, measure, and assess fragility offers a broad-brush picture of past and current thinking. That picture understates the diversity of perspectives and the disputes among members of the foreign policy and international development communities regarding fragility, peace- building, and state-building (Paris and Sisk, 2009). Both the hypothesized and practical pathways to reducing fragility have been diverse and contested, and the discussion here cannot do justice to the variety and differences. Highlighted here are selected themes and arguments that have influenced policy and practice. To oversimplify, the arc of the ‘story line’ on pathways out of fragility is the demise of the hegemony of liberal peace- and state-building, with its normative, top-down, externally determined technocratic prescriptions for what the state should do (Chandler and Sisk, 2013). In contrast, the shift is toward an evolving hybrid approach, where pathways take a local turn that emphasizes politically infused state– society bargaining— confronting top- down with bottom-up—and leads to situation-specific solutions that are endogenously determined. Through a focus on resilience, this frame recognizes the impacts of global forces beyond individual state boundaries on fragility, while accepting the limits of external intervention, the inherent uncertainty surrounding emergent outcomes, and the primacy of politically driven contestation.
5.6.1. Blueprint Routes out of Fragility and Failure: Liberal State-Building Dead Ends? Two core principles supported the first three generations of international development policy and post-conflict intervention outlined above. First, the road to achieving development and stability, and to avoiding fragility, lay in poor countries emulating the trajectory of industrial nations and creating a state based on democratic modes of governance (Brinkerhoff, 2008). Second, how to reach the destination at the end of that road could be broken down into operational guidelines and linear steps that could be successfully applied across a wide range of individual situations. While this blueprint thinking was most evident in the US military’s approach to stabilization and reconstruction operations, codified in the US Army’s Stability Operations Field Manual (2009), it has for
86 Derick W. Brinkerhoff years suffused the premises and practices of civilian international development agencies as well, and more recently penetrated so-called ‘whole of government’ approaches to civilian–military collaboration in post-conflict intervention (Brinkerhoff, 2008; OECD/DAC, 2006). The debate regarding blueprinting interventions in fragile states has replicated the ongoing conversation among international development specialists about the extent to which foreign assistance can successfully be delivered in pre- programmed projects. An early discussion of this topic can be found in Brinkerhoff and Ingle (1989); the latest terminology in the debate refers to problem-driven iterative adaptation as an alternative to international development assistance blueprints (Andrews, 2013). While experienced practitioners undertook adaptations on the ground to match the particularities of a given fragile situation and informally recognized local political dynamics, the universality of the liberal Weberian state ‘under construction’ with external assistance remained unquestioned (Lemay-Hébert, 2009, 2013). The result on the ground was often the creation of government institutions that resembled, in form, their lookalikes in developed countries, but lacked the actual fulfillment of their espoused mandates and were bereft of the societal embeddedness that accorded them legitimacy, a condition referred to as ‘isomorphic mimicry’ (Andrews, 2013). As the preceding discussion of the fragility label noted, a rising chorus of criticism from practitioners, analysts, and researchers challenged liberal peace-and state-building on conceptual and operational grounds. As Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s stabilization and reconstruction blueprints failed to create stable, well-functioning states, the US and its allies’ appetite for long-term, resource-intensive societal transformations waned. Policy makers and academics rethought the pathways out of fragility and the means to pursue them. Besides the top-down linear reductionism inherent in their design and implementation, the flaws of blueprints, in the eyes of most critics, resulted from narrowly focusing on formal government structures and processes, favouring technocratic solutions while disregarding political realities, ignoring the importance of local informal practices and institutions, and overestimating the capacity of external actors to exert influence to achieve their aims (for example, Booth, 2012; Brinkerhoff, 2008 and 2011; Chandler, 2013).
5.6.2. Beyond State-Building Blueprints? What policy and operational frameworks for reducing fragility have emerged that go beyond universal blueprints? Both the World Bank and the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee offer conceptualizations and guidance that inform the fourth generation of policy and intervention in conflict-affected states sketched above. The World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report (WDR) delineates a dynamic pathway out of fragility that targets building resilience to violence and conflict through successive iterations of restoring confidence followed by transforming institutions. The model is visualized as a spiral of multiple transitions where, ‘as one set of immediate priorities is resolved, other risks and transition moments emerge and require a repeated cycle
State Fragility 87 of action to bolster institutional resiliency’ (World Bank, 2011, p. 103). Critical steps to bringing countries ‘back from the brink’ of fragility/failure include restoring confidence in key institutions via building broadly inclusive coalitions of state and non-state actors, and ‘getting the basics right’ by providing citizens with security, justice, and jobs. The WDR cites South Korea and Ghana as historical examples of countries that followed this pathway, and notes the rebuilding efforts undertaken in Indonesia’s post-conflict Aceh region as a recent case. The OECD offers a related framing to assess fragility that incorporates variation in individual country situations through the visual image of a Venn diagram with five overlapping fragility clusters (OECD/DAC, 2015). The clusters specify intervention targets for each: violence reduction; promotion of justice and rule of law; effective, accountable, and transparent institutions; increased resilience; and renewed/strengthened economic foundations that focus on inclusion and youth. The clusters model links to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 in specifying how each of the fragility clusters poses risks for countries achieving the goals. Both of these frameworks go beyond blueprints in that they take country-specific political, social, and institutional factors into account. In the case of the World Bank’s spiral, these contextual factors drive the iterative transitions, subject to global influences, positive and negative. In the OECD/DAC model, these factors influence the prominence of one cluster over the others, which creates identifiable fragility patterns. Neither framework prescribes a standard sequence of actions or interventions to be applied in all situations, and opts for attention to context as the determinant of what international donors can and should do to support country actors in reducing fragility. Located beyond blueprints, then, is a menu of strategies and associated interventions, where what to choose relies upon features of the particular context. Gisselquist (2015) points out that paying attention to context does not mean treating each country’s context as unique. She argues that contextual factors affecting aid effectiveness can be categorized, which provides guidance for choosing policies from the menu. The menu, however, includes many items that figured in earlier blueprints. For example, the institutional and governance reforms that the World Bank (2011) promotes as helpful in moving countries along the spiral away from violence and toward resilience are firmly grounded in Weberian principles. Thus the extent to which current policy and practice has moved beyond reductionist blueprints remains contested, as the ongoing debates on liberal peace-and state-building summarized above reveal. An evolving stream of investigation and discussion in international development policy and academic circles concerns the application of systems thinking as a way to move beyond reductionism and the inherent linearity the lies behind blueprinting. Ramalingam et al. (2008) explore how systems concepts can be applied to international development and humanitarian aid, focusing on complex adaptive systems, which exhibit unpredictability, non- linearity, emergence, adaptation, and self- organized learning. These applications lead peace-and state-builders in new directions. Instead of context being simply the starting point for deciding upon where external interventions will be effective, a complexity-informed perspective sees that reducing fragility
88 Derick W. Brinkerhoff and building resilience can only emerge from the dynamics of the context itself, where local actors and institutions interact and self-organize to solve problems. If international donors intervene too much, they interrupt the feedback and learning processes in the local system. As de Coning (2016, p. 10) argues, ‘the result is a missed opportunity to contribute to the development of self-organisation and resilience; such interruptions [also] build dependency’. The jury is out on whether international development policy and practice, both as applied to fragile states and elsewhere, can meaningfully take on board systems thinking. Pessimists argue that the political economy of Northern donors, in particular the need to demonstrate results and account for funds, militates against abandoning the primacy of liberal interventionism in favour of non-linear strategies that privilege local actors, local ownership, and emergent processes where outcomes are contingent and uncertain (Pugh, 2005; Chandler, 2013, 2014). Cautious optimists point to the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, the creation of the G7+ and the International Dialogue, along with the SDG process as signs of a new transnational architecture of North–South engagement that will lead to shifts in development cooperation and intervention in fragile and stable states (Manuel, 2014; OECD/DAC, 2015; Whaites, 2016). In between are what might be termed hopeful sceptics, who document lessons learned and experimentation with approaches and tools that have potential for better cooperation and outcomes while acknowledging the barriers, both internal to the agencies involved and transnational (Andrews, 2013; Brinkerhoff, 2014; Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff, 2015; Gisselquist, 2014, 2015; Rocha Menocal, 2013). These sources align in arguing for politically informed problem-solving approaches that privilege local agency while recognizing that donor-fragile state relations inevitably involve top-down dynamics, and that international development agencies continue to have difficulty in dealing effectively with politics (Booth, 2012).
5.7. Conclusion: Looking Forward The international development architecture that emerged to support the Millennium Development Goals, and now the SDGs, has integrated reducing fragility and building resilience into these global targets and related indicators. For example, SDG 16 directly reflects the lessons of the past regarding the importance of effective institutions. This goal is: ‘Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.’ However, despite the new SDG platform, achieving a coordinated global response to fragile states is problematic, and likely to remain so. As the discussion in this chapter has shown, the debates on defining and categorizing fragility continue, as do arguments on how best to assist poor conflict-affected countries to navigate pathways out of fragility toward resilience. Transnational management of such assistance must confront the policy inconsistencies and cross-purposes that Keohane and Nye (1989)
State Fragility 89 identify as well as the inherent complexity of these pathways. Recent multi-actor civilian and military interventions in West African conflict-affected countries are a case in point (Annan, 2014). Because fragile states constitute a wicked problem set, no single policy perspective, and associated intervention strategy, will successfully address the transnational challenges that fragile and failed states pose (Brinkerhoff 2014). The emergence of new international development donors, China in particular, introduces additional complexity into global responses. In practice, the priorities of the more prominent voices at the policy table are the ones that will most likely prevail. Especially since 9/11, the strongest and most well-resourced voices in the US and Europe have been the security community and the military. Combining objectives that address the situation-specific particularities of fragility in a given country with the global goals of maintaining security and stability (countering the impacts of global ‘bads’) risks relegating the development and resilience objectives to second-class status in the event of perceived or actual conflicts and trade-offs between the two. Resilience itself has become increasingly defined and operationalized within a national security policy framework (Fjäder, 2014). While the security agenda remains paramount, both military and civilian members of the US and European foreign policy communities recognize that effectively confronting the challenges of fragile states must look beyond short-term security and stabilization to address the root dynamics that contribute to state fragility. The report of the Fragility Study Group is one recent example of rethinking policies focused on fragile states that seeks to incorporate the research and practical lessons summarized above (Burns et al., 2016). The report proposes a policy framework with four key principles: 1. be strategic (prevent or mitigate future crises, address trade-offs, strengthen international partnerships); 2. be selective (align interests with local actors and aspirations, apply leverage to motivate locally driven change, recognize and build on complementarities among partners); 3. think systemically (address security, politics, and capacity issues as interconnected, be sensitive to unintended consequences, adapt); and 4. sustain effort over time (keep plans and objectives realistic, avoid intervening too late and leaving too early, build on successes). The authors recommend applying these principles in three policy arenas to develop shared agreements: domestically, within the US government; transnationally, among regional and global partners; and locally, in the fragile state where intervention is intended or underway. In light of the complex interdependencies and conflicting policy priorities that Keohane and Nye (1989) detail, as well as the bureaucratic and operational barriers that the other studies cited here document, the prospects for successfully navigating these arenas are daunting. The forces that have contributed to state fragility will endure around the globe for the foreseeable future, and will require concerted, long-term efforts
90 Derick W. Brinkerhoff by national, transnational, and local actors. Policy frameworks such as the one proposed by the Fragility Study Group may offer potential avenues to shape formal interactions among these actors. However, informal connections, particularly channels that link non-state actors at all three levels, need to be recognized as an important factor in mobilizing and maintaining effective commitments and action to confront state fragility.
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Chapter 6
Internationa l P ol i c y Transfe r Between the Global and Sovereign and between the Global and Local Mark Evans
6.1. Introduction This chapter provides an assessment of the development and current use of the concept of policy transfer as it has evolved in the study of public policy. Its purpose is to evaluate the character of this interdisciplinary approach to international policy development and to assess its strengths, weaknesses, and potential theoretical and methodological development. The study of policy transfer remains important for understanding the dynamics of global policy development and/or transnational administration for three main reasons. First, policy transfer is one of the first modalities of transnational policy making undertaken by governments, international organizations, and other transnational policy actors. Second, policy transfer analysts were also amongst the first within public administration and policy studies (broadly defined) to consider the international dimension of policy development at the transnational level of governance. And, third, policy transfer analysis provides insights into cultural styles of learning and how the practice of policy transfer might be changing in response to austerity and the impact of digitization. The chapter is therefore organized around three central research questions. What is studied when policy transfer is studied? How do the critics of policy transfer analysis think it can be improved? And, third, what new directions in the study and practice of policy transfer exemplify these improvements?
International Policy Transfer 95
6.2. What Is Studied When Policy Transfer Is Studied? Policy transfer is a generic concept that refers to a process in which knowledge about institutions, policies, delivery or regulatory systems at one sector and/or level of governance is used in the development of institutions, policies, delivery or regulatory systems at another level of governance in a different country (Evans, 2004, 2009, and 2016). Different forms of policy transfer such as band-wagoning (Ikenberry, 1990; Jinnah, 2011), convergence (Bennett, 1991 and Holzinger and Knill, 2008), diffusion (Majone, 1991; Marsh and Sharman, 2009), emulation (Howlett, 2000; Karo, 2010), policy learning (Kwon, 2009; Carroll and Common, 2013), social learning (Hall, 1993; Dunlop, 2009), lesson-drawing (Rose, 2005; De Jong, 2009), and transnationalization (Stone, 2012) have been identified in a burgeoning literature. It has attracted increasing academic attention from European Union specialists (Bulmer et al., 2007), geographers (McCann and Ward, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2001; Prince, 2010), international relations experts (Stone, 2012), political scientists (Marsh and Evans, 2012), and social policy experts (Hulme, 2005). The contemporary study of policy transfer originates from policy diffusion studies, a subset of the comparative politics literature. Research in this area focused on identifying trends in timing, geography, and resource similarities in the diffusion of innovations between countries and, in the United States, between states in the federation (see Walker, 1969). However, these studies reveal little about the process of transfer, apart from the identification of mechanisms of diffusion, and are focused exclusively on the study of policy transfer between or within developed countries. The latter preoccupation continues to characterize much of the contemporary literature on policy transfer. This includes a focus on studying voluntary policy transfer between and within developed countries as a process in which policies implemented elsewhere are examined by rational political actors for their potential utilization within another political system (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). In more recent times, however, we have witnessed a heightened interest in transnational sources and processes of policy transfer (see Stone, 2000 and 2012). The literature on policy transfer analysis may be organized into two discernible schools: one which does not use the term ‘policy transfer’ directly but deals with different aspects of the process using different nomenclature; and one which uses the concept directly. Three approaches can be highlighted: process-centred approaches; ideational approaches; and, diffusion studies. While there is inevitably some overlap among these approaches (for instance, all engage in some form of comparison) they each have a distinctive focus of inquiry. Process-centred approaches encompass lesson-drawing and policy learning. They focus on the process of policy transfer directly as facilitated through networks to explain
96 Mark Evans the voluntary or coercively negotiated importation of ideas, policies or institutions. Those following this approach argue that organizational learning is based largely on the interpersonal interaction between agents of transfer, bureaucrats, and (sometimes) politicians within inter-organizational decision settings (see Evans, 2004 and 2010; Rose, 2005). In these decision settings there exists a pattern of common kinship expressed through culture, rules, and values. Hence, an emphasis is placed on analysing the structures of decision-making through which policy transfer takes place and relationships between agents of transfer and their dependencies. Ideational approaches are united in arguing that it is systems of ideas which influence how policy makers learn how to learn. They all address the problem of when and how transfer agents learn how to learn. Stone’s (1996 and 2012) work, for example, is particularly useful in helping policy analysts to determine how policy makers acquire and deploy knowledge and it provides compelling evidence of the internationalization of policy paradigms (see also Huerta-Melchor, 2006). Ladi’s (2005) research on the role of think tanks in mediating policy transfer in the European Union (EU) emphasizes the influential role of the discourses of globalization and Europeanization in processes of policy transfer. By contrast, policy diffusion studies explore why some states adopt certain policies or innovate and others do not (see: Karch, 2007; Malinson, 2016; Weyland, 2004). They seek to make sense of the geographic and temporal patterns of policy diffusion. What is the process through which one state’s policy activity influences current or future activities among other states? And why do certain policies diffuse more rapidly than others (see Boushey, 2010)? EU scholars ask similar questions in relation to the diffusion of policies across EU member states (see Füglister, 2012). More recent studies have observed ‘back-sliding’ and ‘reversions’ of policy transfer in response to austerity. International relations scholars investigate the diffusion of innovations across different types of regime (Betskill and Bulkeley, 2004).
6.2.1. Agents of Policy Transfer The study of policy transfer analysis should be restricted to action-oriented intentional learning: that which takes place consciously and results in policy action. This definition locates policy transfer as a potential causal phenomenon: a factor leading to policy convergence. However, there is also a need to distinguish policy transfer from policy convergence in that the latter may occur unintentionally, for example due to harmonizing macroeconomic forces (Carroll, 2012). The element of intentionality in this definition of policy transfer makes an agent essential to both voluntary and coercive processes. Intentionality may be ascribed to the originating state/institution/actor, to the transferee state/institution/actor, to both or to a third-party state/institution/actor. For example, if the agent of a particular transfer is the state which first developed the policy, or a third-party state (Country C) seeking to make Country B adopt an approach by Country A, it is likely that there are coercive processes at work. Alternatively, there may
International Policy Transfer 97 be a series of agents at work either simultaneously, or at different points in the process. A necessary, but insufficient criteria for identifying policy transfer is therefore to:
1. 2. 3. 4.
identify the agent(s) of transfer and the policy belief systems that they advocate; distinguish the resources that they bring to the process of learning; specify the role they play in the transfer; and, determine the nature of the transfer that the agent(s) is/are seeking to make (Evans and Davies, 1999).
The agents of transfer identified in the literature are diverse. Transfer agents seeking to influence nation-state agendas include individuals such as politicians, bureaucrats, policy entrepreneurs, academicians, and other experts. Governmental organizations (central, subnational, local) are key agents of transfer as are non-state actors including think tanks and other knowledge institutions such as universities and pressure groups. Likewise, international organizations (for example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—OECD, see Pal in this volume for a discussion), international financial institutions (for example, the International Monetary Fund—IMF) and regional regimes such as Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the European Union (EU) (see Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996; Stone, 2000) are often key interlocutors in policy transfer. Stone (2012, p. 494) highlights four (often overlapping) types of international policy intermediaries: international organizations (e.g. Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank); global policy partnerships (e.g. the World Bank’s Global Animal Health Initiative or Global Donor Platform for Rural Development); soft law and private regulatory actors (e.g. International Organization for Standardization); and non-state actors and evidence transmission through agents such as think tanks, business coalitions, universities, philanthropic foundations, and NGOs. Each intermediary is often a ‘policy transfer entrepreneur’ facilitating exchanges between actors in several countries, and often operating through transnational networks. The role of these agents of transfer will differ depending on the cultural styles of learning present at different spatialities of governance, dominant norms and values, the role that they have been asked to play, and by the resources that they bring to the process of policy learning (e.g. knowledge, social, economic, and political capital). For example, Andre Broome (2010) evaluates the role of the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), an international training organization affiliated to the IMF, in diffusing economic policy ideas (e.g. global policy norms) through the architecture of global governance. He argues that the Institute plays an important role in socializing national officials to accept new norms of national economic governance through the development of an interactive learning environment that facilitates three micro-processes of socialization: mimicking, social influence, and persuasion (Johnston, 2008, pp. 23–6). The JVI has played an important intermediate role in influencing the policy practices of the 23,000 policy makers and officials who have participated in policy-oriented economic training since the early 1990s and by helping to foster a transnational policy network among participants.
98 Mark Evans More generally, international organizations operate as venues for both the socialization of policy elites (Greenhill, 2010) and for stronger forms of policy transfer to occur. Bulmer and Padgett (2005), in their ground-breaking study of policy transfer in the European Union, for example, develop hypotheses about the linkages between institutional variables and transfer outcomes, assessed on a scale from emulation to influence. Hypotheses are set against empirical evidence drawn from a variety of policy areas. They find evidence to support the general hypothesis that stronger forms of policy transfer occur in more highly institutionalized governance regimes. The evidence also points to micro-institutional variables shaping transfer outcomes: the powers accruing to supranational institutions; decision rules; and the density of exchange between national actors.
6.2.2. Forms of Policy Transfer Policy analysts deploy the policy transfer approach as a generic concept that encompasses quite different claims about why public organizations engage in policy learning. Typically, policy transfer analysts refer to three different processes of transfer: voluntary transfer, lesson-drawing or policy learning (three concepts that can be used interchangeably); negotiated transfer; and direct coercive transfer. The first is a rational, action-oriented approach to dealing with public policy problems that emerge from one or more of the following: the identification of public or professional dissatisfaction with existing policy as a consequence of poor performance; a new policy agenda that is introduced due to a change in government, minister, or the management of a public organization; a political strategy aimed at legitimating conclusions that have already been reached; or an attempt by a political manager to upgrade items of the policy agenda to promote political allies and neutralize political adversaries. For example, relatively radical aspects of administrative reform, particularly in the performance management area, have been formulated in China with the technical support of the European Union outside the purview of the Communist Party. This was achieved through a process of de-politicization orchestrated by skilful administrative entrepreneurs (see Zhang and Marsh, 2016). The second and third processes of transfer involve varying degrees of coercion and are common in developing countries. Negotiated policy transfer refers to a process in which governments are compelled by, for example, influential donor countries, global financial institutions, international regimes, international organizations, or transnational corporations, to introduce policy change to secure grants, loans, or other forms of inward investment. For example, developing countries within the OECD (Mexico, for example) are obligated to introduce a range of governance reforms as part of tacit rules of membership. This process is negotiated and, though an exchange process does occur, it remains a coercive activity because the recipient country is often denied freedom of choice. Lal (2001, pp. 253–6), identifies five characteristics of negotiated policy transfer: (1) inducement—getting governments to enact policies they would otherwise
International Policy Transfer 99 not have initiated; (2) selectivity—aid is only given to those countries exhibiting a ‘good’ policy environment; (3) paternalism—donors attempt to get aid spent on the goods and services that they favour; (4) restraint—donors seek protection against policy reversal that may occur with a new government; and (5) signalling—aid is used as a device to signal ‘good’ policy behaviour by the recipient. These characteristics can be found at work with regard to developing areas in receipt of EU aid. For example, Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme (2003–10) was partly funded by the EU on the condition that the programme focused on pro-poor growth and achieved various gender equity targets; that is the programme featured elements of European (or Western) paternalism (Evans, 2012). The political economy of most developing countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s was also characterized by the implementation of these conditionalities through structural adjustment programmes that brought in investment from the IMF, or the World Bank (see Stiglitz, 2002). Another form of indirect policy transfer can be identified when governments introduce institutional or policy changes due to a fear of falling behind neighbouring countries. For example, Japan’s economic miracle in East Asia proved inspirational to countries such as Singapore and South Korea. Singapore is presently viewed as the development model for Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. John Ikenberry (1990, p. 102) termed this process ‘band-wagoning’. Direct coercive policy transfer occurs when a government is compelled by another government to introduce constitutional, social, and political changes against its will and the will of its people. This form of policy transfer was widespread in periods of formal imperialism and its implications can still be seen today in post-colonial states (see Common, 2001). However, even in developing countries recent literature has tended to focus on increased processes of voluntary policy transfer as a consequence of the scope and intensity of processes of transnationalization (see Balme and Bridges, 2008; Carroll, 2013). In developed countries, the majority of policy transfer activity centres on voluntary transfer or lesson-drawing. Even so, negotiated processes of transfer can be identified with regard to majority decision-making in the European Union (see Bulmer et al., 2007) and conditionalities associated with the acquis communitaire and European Union enlargement (Wallace et al., 2015).
6.2.3. Processes of Policy-Oriented Learning Four different processes of policy-oriented learning emerge from the process of transfer (Evans, 2004). The first and rarest form of policy-oriented learning is copying where a governmental organization adopts a policy, programme, or institution without modification. For example, Zhang and Marsh (2016) observe that the policy culture within Chinese government focuses on copying administrative policy systems from international exemplars, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom in terms of performance management, but then adapting them during the implementation process. They term this activity ‘learning by doing’. Second, there is emulation where a governmental
100 Mark Evans organization accepts that a policy, programme, or institution overseas provides the best standard for designing a policy, programme, or institution at home. For example, United Kingdom policy has proved the standard against which digital public service delivery is being designed in Australia (see Dunleavy et al., 2016). Hybridization or what others have relabelled bricolage (McGann and Ward, 2013) is the third and most typical form of policy-oriented learning in developed countries. This is where a governmental organization combines elements of programmes found in several settings to develop a policy that is culturally sensitive to the needs of the recipient. For example, the United Kingdom’s welfare programme ‘New Deal for Young People’ was a product of lessons drawn from initiatives in Australia (‘Lone Parents and Partners’, ‘Working Nation’ and ‘single gateway/one stop shops’ programmes), and also from Sweden (‘Working Nation’), from the Netherlands (‘single gateway/one stop shop’ programmes), from Canada (the ‘Making Work Pay’ scheme) and from over fifty state- based or city-based ‘Welfare to Work’ schemes in the USA. Fourth, there is inspiration, where an idea inspires fresh thinking about the treatment of a policy problem and helps to facilitate policy change (Chapman, 2006). For example, the concept of an ‘income contingent loan’—in which repayment depends on the future income of the recipient of the loan—has been used to address a range of other social and economic problems such as meeting the escalating costs of higher education, drought policy, white collar crime, and ‘R&D’ funding. Micro-finance has similarly been influential in diffusing innovative forms of finance and advancing pro-poor growth projects in developing areas (Evans, 2004). Diane Stone’s (2004 and 2012) research on agents of transfer, translation, and transnationalization of policy formulates a similar concept to inspiration which she terms ‘soft transfer’. She observes (2004, p. 545) that in contrast to the nation state domain, international organizations and non-state actors play a key role in facilitating ‘soft’ forms of transfer—such as the spread of norms—as a necessary complement to the hard transfer of policy tools. Indeed, transnational networks themselves are identified as a strategic instrument for the spread of policy and practice not only cross-nationally but in the institutions of global governance. In 2012, Stone observed that: . . . the ‘soft’ transfer of ideas and information via networks whether they be personal, professional or electronic is rapid and frequent. It is rather more infrequent to see such ideas structure governance and become institutionalised. Knowledge transfer is more extensive than policy transfer. (2012, p. 494)
Examples include the advocacy of the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank in facilitating the development of conditional cash transfer programmes through closed transnational policy networks with ‘borrower governments’ (Teichman 2007). Similarly, the IMF training institutes provide courses for developing country policy elites, mostly economists, which are not simply about conveying information and providing training in techniques, but also about inducting participants into a particular way of thinking about policy.
International Policy Transfer 101 Other international organizations like the OECD use a comparative evidence base to diffuse common policy responses in specific fields to its membership. This encompasses critical governance issues from anti-corruption and public sector productivity to public trust and gender equality and best practice guides to affect innovation, better governance, and regulation.
6.2.4. Barriers to Policy-Oriented Learning The proof of policy transfer lies in its implementation. In other words, it is not possible to identify the content of a transfer, and by implication whether transfer has occurred, without adopting an implementation perspective. So what factors can constrain or enable policy transfer and learning in the process of implementation? Three broad sets of variables can be identified from a meta-analysis of the case study literature (Evans, 2006): ‘cognitive’ barriers/enablers in the pre-decision phase; ‘environmental’ barriers/enablers in the implementation phase; and, increasingly, domestic or international public opinion. I refer to barriers/enablers as the absence or presence of these variables, which can either undermine or enhance processes of transfer. They can also interact in complex and often unexpected ways. ‘Cognitive’ obstacles/enablers refer to the process by which public policy problems are recognized, understood, and defined in the pre-decision phase, the breadth and detail of the search conducted for ideas, the receptivity of existing policy actors and systems to policy alternatives, and the complexity of choosing an alternative. The most significant cognitive barriers/enablers for agents of policy transfer to overcome at this stage of policy development are normally issues arising from the prevailing organizational culture and the need for effective cultural assimilation of policy alternatives. For example, does the recipient country possess the institutional capacity (capability, receptivity, financial appropriation, institutional venue) to implement the change? The inability of successive Greek governments to implement EU law, particularly in the regulatory space, is testimony to the limits of transnational agents of transfer in influencing policy outcomes on the ground. Policy is made and remade in the process of implementation and transnational agents of transfer may have limited influence in this sphere. ‘Environmental’ obstacles/enablers refer to the absence of effective cognitive and elite mobilization strategies deployed by agents of policy transfer, the need for the development of cohesive policy transfer networks to ensure successful policy-oriented learning, the broader structural constraints (institutional, political, economic, and social) that impact and shape the process of lesson-drawing, and the normal technical implementation constraints that inhibit or facilitate the process of policy transfer. The latter would include the following potential barriers/enablers: coherent and consistent objectives; the incorporation of an adequate causal theory of policy development from idea to impact; the sensible allocation of financial resources; hierarchical integration within and among implementing organizations; clear decision rules underpinning the operation of implementing agencies; the recruitment of programme officers with adequate
102 Mark Evans skills/training; sufficient technical support; and the use of effective monitoring and evaluation systems including formal access by outsiders. These potential barriers/enablers to successful policy transfer demonstrate that the transfer process is often a site of contestation between competing conceptions of good policy. This is likely to be even more complex at the transnational level where interest group intermediation and competition for resource allocation is more complex and challenging to manage. Malik and Cunningham (2006) examine a number of attempts to transfer innovation policies in Europe and present a range of factors that can potentially inhibit transnational policy learning. The practical constraints mentioned include budgetary limitations and language difficulties. For example, in Poland there is concern that EU policies to stimulate innovation capacity are simply too expensive, making the policies difficult to implement in an austerity climate. With respect to language barriers, Malik and Cunningham (2006, pp. 269–70) note that ‘there are a number of instances in countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Germany and France, where policy makers find it difficult to access innovation policy documents from other nations’. In addition, capability in innovation methods, the absence of an overall evaluation culture, and lack of time for policy makers to develop understanding of foreign experience can all undermine efforts. An interesting insight from Belgium (Malik and Cunningham, 2006, p. 270) shows that transnational policy learning is not given priority in the country for linguistic reasons. The Flemish authorities look to the Netherlands as a point of comparison and the Walloon authorities look to France. Hence it is difficult to promote transnational policy transfer in innovation policy when geographical regions within the country have established processes of learning with specific countries.
6.2.5. Outputs from the Process of Transfer Using Peter Hall’s (1993) terminology, the outputs from processes of policy transfer can include: first order change in the precise settings of the policy instruments used to attain policy goals (marginal adjustments to the status quo such as new performance metrics for measuring the quality of governance); second order change to the policy instruments themselves (such as the development of new institutions and delivery systems such as international regulatory bodies for monitoring climate change); and third order change to the actual goals that guide policy in a particular field (ideas, attitudes, and concepts) such as Millennium Development Goals. Of course, negative lessons can be drawn for each form of policy change. Much of the work on policy transfer treats learning as a dependent variable; a process that needs to be understood/explained. However, policy transfer can be, and has been (see Benson and Jordan, 2011 and Dussauge-Laguna, 2012,) treated as an independent variable, where the focus is upon the relationship between policy transfer and policy outcomes. In this vein, Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) pose the question: Under
International Policy Transfer 103 what circumstances is policy transfer likely to result in a ‘successful’, as distinct from ‘unsuccessful’ policy? Unfortunately, this contribution and subsequent work often fails to address an obvious question: What do we mean by a ‘successful’ policy? This is a particularly important question if we are to understand and evaluate the outputs from policy transfer.
6.3. Future Directions in the Study and Practice of Policy Transfer It has been argued by certain academic critics that policy transfer analysts fail to advance an explanatory theory of policy development (James and Lodge, 2003). Most approaches to policy transfer are unclear in their specification of independent and dependent variables and clumsy in their theorization of the relationship between variables and between levels of enquiry. This is largely because most explanations of policy transfer emerge from inductive case study reasoning rather than deductive formal modelling. This is an inevitable corollary of applying heuristic models of policy development. Although it is accurate to criticize policy transfer analysts for failing to clearly stipulate their critical variables, it is incorrect to argue that all policy transfer analysts do not advance explanations for policy change. What are the explanatory claims of policy transfer analysis? If a process-centred approach is deployed, then the mobilization capabilities of the agents of transfer and their ability to capture the political imagination and the quality and cohesiveness of transfer networks are often central to any explanation. If an ideational approach is deployed, then it is the systems of ideas which influence how policy makers learn how to learn; although Stone (1996 and 2012) would also emphasize the role of transfer agents in mobilizing ideas and the centrality of networks in diffusing those ideas. Both approaches use qualitative methods and demand excellent access to what are often informal processes of learning. Diffusion studies stand in stark contrast because they seek to make sense of the geographic and temporal patterns of policy diffusion and identify and quantify patterns of diffusion that are germane to the process of policy transfer itself. Peters (1997) for example, in a seminal article, examines the diffusion of administrative reform policy transfers through the member countries of the OECD. He argues that policy learning in public management is a common activity for governments around the world but that there are differences in the rates at which countries are able to learn and adapt. He attributes these differences to structural factors such as economic, ideological, cultural and institutional similarities. Those states that share common features are more likely to engage in policy transfer with one another. Moreover, scholars from all three approaches claim that policy transfer activity is on the increase due to one or more of the following sources of policy change: global,
104 Mark Evans international and/or transnational forces (Carroll, 2013, Stone, 2010); state-centred forces (Rose, 2005); the role of policy transfer networks in mediating policy change (Evans, 2004; 2010); micro-level processes of policy-oriented learning (Common, 2004); or the emergence of new modes of governance (Benson and Jordan, 2011 and Dolowitz and Marsh, 2012). From the perspective of those in practice—whether that be in national ministries or international organizations—there are three main shortcomings with the academic account of policy transfer. The first is that it does not provide rigorous tools for evaluating whether a lesson has been drawn or transfer has taken place (Evans, 2010). Additionally, finding the evidence that a lesson has been drawn demands excellent access to key informants in informal decision-making processes. Such access is not often possible. Second, the framework would benefit from research on how traditional organizations can become learning organizations (see Carroll and Common, 2013). Rose (2005, pp. 104–5), for example, argues that the strategic direction of public organizations are path dependent and characterized by ‘inheritance rather than choice’ in the sense that ‘past commitments limit current choices’. Hence a set of recommendations on how to break from the ‘wicked context’ problem would be extremely useful for practice. Third, a more detailed identification of potential barriers to successful transfer would provide important insights for practitioners into how to develop: (1) the type of learning organization conducive to the facilitation of successful lesson-drawing and (2) how to develop a model of prospective evaluation to guide effective lesson-drawing. Several writers have sought to identify new directions for the study of policy transfer (Benson and Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz and Marsh, 2012; Dussauge-Laguna, 2012; Evans, 2010; Marsh and Evans, 2012; and McCann and Ward, 2013). This includes efforts to make sense of the increased internationalization and transnationalization of policy as a response to austerity economics (Krugman, 2008). A frequent focus is on refining the linkages between the literatures on policy transfer and governance, evidence-based policy making, and policy innovation.
6.3.1. Policy Transfer and Governance As Benson and Jordan (2011, p. 374) argue: ‘Evidently a concept like policy transfer has an innate capacity to combine with many different theoretical toolkits.’ One theoretical framework that seems potentially fruitful, as they acknowledge, is the concept of governance. In particular, it seems important to examine how policy transfer relates to differing modes of governance. Indeed, if we do so, we can see that ideas about the dominant mode of governance in contemporary polities are related to different approaches to policy transfer. Most of the governance literature distinguishes between hierarchy, markets, and networks as modes of governance and argues that these different modes coexist within late modernity. Nevertheless, the main focus of contemporary work on governance is on networks, which are viewed by their proponents as more appropriate than other
International Policy Transfer 105 hierarchical arrangements. By implication, policy transfer will play a different role and evolve into unique forms depending on whether hierarchy or networks are the dominant mode within a political system. Where hierarchy is the dominant mode, one would expect policy transfer to be a more ‘top-down’ process, which fits with a rationalist approach to policy making, although, of course, there will still be ‘translations, mobilities and mutations’ as McCann and Ward (2013) put it. By contrast, where networks are the dominant mode at all levels of governance from the local to the transnational, the process is likely to be a more negotiated or contested one, with translation, assemblages, and mobilities even more crucial. Of course, the nature of the mix of modes of governance in a given political system is, in part at least, an empirical question. Pluralistic processes of policy transfer are rare (Evans with McComb, 1999). Policy transfer tends to be the preserve of elite actors. Whether the networks that are created for formulating and delivering policy transfer are more or less pluralist in different modes of governance is an interesting empirical question particularly if issues of power and who governs are of central concern.
6.3.2. On Policy Transfer, Evidence-Based Policy Making and Innovation At a lower level of abstraction, any discussion of policy transfer also clearly relates to discussions about evidence-based policy making. Those discussions, like ones about policy transfer, are imbued with the ontological and epistemological positions of the researchers involved (Davies et al., 2000; Pawson, 2002). As such, the mainstream, positivist, approach sees evidence-based policy making as a complex process, but one which will allow practitioners and academics to evaluate the success, or otherwise, of policy transfer as long as the correct methods are utilized in a skilled and systematic manner. A number of authors (e.g. Evans and Stoker (eds), 2016) reject this rationalist, positivist approach and instead argue that policy making is an inherently political process. Consequently, in many cases, governments and international organizations select/produce the evidence that supports the decision which they have already decided to take, often for political reasons—that is, ‘policy-based policy making’. Even in the context of action-learning networks where academics are involved in policy transfer networks geared towards fast policy change, an emphasis is often placed on engineering a specific outcome (Marsh and Evans, 2012). There is evidence, however, partly because of the need to respond to declining public trust in government and politicians (see Dalton and Welzel, 2014 and Evans et al., 2016), and partly in recognition that most public policy problems require co-produced solutions with citizens and stakeholders, of the development of more inclusive methodologies for transferring policy. These include fast policy transfer projects using co- design and accelerator innovation methods (see Evans and Terrey, 2016). For example, in Australia, projects funded under the ‘Try, Test and Learn Fund’ and the National Innovation and Science Agenda are required to: (1) demonstrate ‘proof of concept’
106 Mark Evans through evidence of successful implementation overseas; (2) involve international agents of transfer in the design of an experimental intervention in Australia; (3) co- design prototype interventions with target groups; and (4) use experimental methods to identify what does and doesn’t work with the target group (e.g. random controlled trials or quantitative case study analysis). In the case of the ‘Try, Test and Learn Fund’, the target groups include young carers, young long-term job seekers and young people who have failed to complete tertiary education. Each are considered vulnerable groups in the Australian welfare system and are most at risk in perpetuating intergenerational disadvantage. Intuitively, this approach should lead to better outcomes because the process of transfer itself should have broader ownership and legitimacy, better citizen/user understanding and better overseas understanding and proof of concept through the use of experiments and action-learning evaluation methods. The approach insists on evidence-based practice, the direct integration of user experience in programme design, and cultural assimilation.
6.4. Conclusion: Democratizing Policy Transfer Policy transfer analysis can only be distinctive from the analysis of normal forms of policy making if it focuses on the remarkable movement of ideas between international and transnational systems of governance through transfer networks mediated by transfer agents. This should involve the study of different forms of voluntary and completed soft and hard transfers, failed transfers and ‘in process’ transfers. Moreover, while policy transfer analysis remains vulnerable as an explanatory theory of policy change if used in isolation from other theories of policy change, this chapter demonstrates that transfer analysts are busy developing new heuristics and methods from which lessons can be drawn and hypotheses developed. Policy transfer analysis thus presents a valuable field of study for integrating some common research concerns of scholars of domestic, comparative and international politics insofar as it provides a lens for observing both the changing nature of the nation state and the role of state and non- state actors and institutions in promoting new forms of global, or at least international, policy making which is in itself another driver of complex globalization. In terms of practice, policy transfer can be a progressive learning activity but only if the policy that is transferred is compatible with the value system of the recipient organization or is culturally assimilated through experimental methods and comprehensive evaluation, and the policy that is transferred builds on existing organizational strengths. Locally sensitive solutions must be found to local problems. This requires opening-up and democratizing closed transfer networks and underpinning processes of policy transfer (where appropriate) with co-design and experimental methods. Fundamentally, the key stumbling block to implementing this more democratic
International Policy Transfer 107 approach in practice lies in gaining the support of policy elites. Experimental methods and co-design challenge the established ways in which policy is made and services are delivered, monitored, and evaluated. Most significantly they question dominant public sector cultures and values.
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110 Mark Evans Stone, D. 2012. ‘Transfer and Translation of Policy’. Policy Studies, 33 (6): 483–99. Teichman, J. 2007. ‘Multilateral Lending Institutions and Transnational Policy Networks in Mexico and Chile’. Global Governance, 13: 557–73. Walker, J.L. (1969). ‘The Diffusion of Innovations among American States’. American Political Science Review, 63: 880–99. Wallace, H., Pollack, M., and Young, A. 2015. Policy- Making in the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weyland, K. 2004. Learning from Foreign Models in Latin American Pension Reform. New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Zhang, Y. and Marsh, D. (2016). ‘Learning by Doing: The Case of Administrative Policy Transfer in China’. Policy Studies, 37 (1): 35–52.
Chapter 7
Internationa l P ol i c y E ntreprene u rsh i p Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens
7.1. Introduction Over recent decades, scholars have started documenting and analysing the actions of individuals in the international agenda-setting and policy making space (Keohane and Nye, 2001 [1977]; Risse-Kappen, 1994). Coupled with theories and evidence from the International Relations literature, the concept of policy entrepreneurship lends itself to analysing how actors at the international level draw attention to problems, advance workable proposals, and link outcomes to symbolic values. The international space is a challenging arena for policy advocacy, as it lacks the oversight and well-established systems of policy development commonly found at the national or subnational level. Policy entrepreneurs acting in the international space face obstacles and opportunities different from their domestic counterparts, particularly in the realms of policy initiation, mediation, and compromise. This chapter begins with an overview of research into policy entrepreneurship. The chapter then discusses the international context, noting the importance of distinguishing the actions of international policy entrepreneurs from the international engagements of state-based, government actors, the actions of international organizations, and those of civil society advocacy groups. Two examples of international policy entrepreneurship are then given. One pertains to efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The other to preventing sexual violence in conflict. These examples set the scene for introducing an analytical framework to guide research on international policy entrepreneurship. The framework sets forth attributes of international policy entrepreneurs and the advocacy strategies they employ. Particular attention is placed on networking strategies needed to negotiate the operating environment and the challenges faced in achieving sustained and effective policy change.
112 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens In coming years, political scientists will face an expanding array of opportunities to analyse and compare forms of international policy advocacy. Rich potential exists to adapt extant concepts, and develop and test new theories of politics through the analysis of international policy advocacy. The concept of international policy entrepreneurship is a highly serviceable tool in this regard. Our analytical framework offers a systematic guide for effective identification, interpretation, and critical scrutiny of the actions of international policy entrepreneurs across a range of organizational contexts and substantive policy areas. The chapter concludes with suggested directions for future theory-driven, empirical research on policy entrepreneurs and the diffusion of policy innovation at the international level.
7.2. Researching Policy Entrepreneurship The concept of the policy entrepreneur was introduced into the public policy literature by John Kingdon in his influential book, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1984 [2011]). There, Kingdon presented a multiple streams framework to explain the emergence on legislative agendas of particular public policy proposals. The multiple streams comprise problems, politics, and policy ideas. Kingdon noted that policy entrepreneurs are actors who identify ‘windows of opportunity’ whereby they can take advantage of emerging problems and contemporaneous political settings to promote particular policy ideas—ideas that may well have been floated before, and even adopted elsewhere. Kingdon observed: ‘The communication channels between those inside and those outside of government are extraordinarily open, and ideas and information float about through these channels in the whole issue network of involved people, somewhat independent of their formal positions’ (2011, p. 45). In his description of policy entrepreneurs, Kingdon said they ‘could be in or out of government, in elected or appointed positions, in interest groups or research organizations. But their defining characteristic, much as in the case of a business entrepreneur, is their willingness to invest their resources—time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money—in the hope of a future return’ (2011, p. 122). Following Kingdon, many scholars have sought to explore the broader application of the multiple streams framework. At the domestic level, the multiple streams framework has been applied across a range of contexts such as public transport reform in the United Kingdom (Dudley, 2013), climate change in Australia (Beeson and Stone, 2013), urban poverty in China (Hammond, 2013), and policy implementation in Africa (Ridde, 2009). At the international level, the multiple streams framework has also been applied. Evidence of this can be seen in Huitema and Meijerink’s (2010) study on water policy entrepreneurs, Ackrill and Kay’s (2011) focus on sugar policy reform in the European Union (EU), and Copeland and James’ (2014) exploration of the EU’s economic reform agenda.
International Policy Entrepreneurship 113 The multiple streams framework has become increasingly popular as a means for analysing policy change owing to the complexity and ambiguity characterizing the international arena. In analytical processes, there has been a tendency to focus on broader political processes and shifting agendas rather than on the practices of those actors central to the promotion of particular ideas for policy change. This is especially true in scholarship on transnational advocacy networks. In order to advance the concept, it is necessary to untether policy entrepreneurs from the multiple streams framework. While the multiple streams framework was integral to the initial study of policy entrepreneurs, the discovery and analysis of policy entrepreneurs operating outside of Kingdon’s initial legislative context suggests the importance of other factors. In the transnational space, for example, the idea of policy entrepreneurship is of limited value if it remains bounded to Kingdon’s initial conception. Since Kingdon’s introduction of the concept of policy entrepreneurship, many scholars have confirmed the importance of policy entrepreneurs as agents of policy change. (For recent reviews, see Aflaki, Petridou, and Miles, 2015; Cohen 2016; Gunn 2017; and Mintrom and Norman 2009.) A series of detailed studies have tested the empirical validity of the concept of the policy entrepreneur. The best of these have assessed the degree to which observed policy changes have been influenced by the actions of policy entrepreneurs, while taking account of alternative contextual explanations of those changes (Brouwer and Biermann, 2011; Huitema and Meijerink, 2010; Mintrom, 1997a; Roberts and King, 1991). It is now settled that the most important activities of policy entrepreneurs include identifying problems, networking in policy circles, shaping the terms of policy debates, and building coalitions to support policy change. Policy entrepreneurs display high levels of social acuity in their ability to scan and interpret their operating environment with an eye to achieving policy change (Mintrom, 2000). Many advocacy strategies deployed by policy entrepreneurs are not novel. Other political actors—politicians, interest group leaders, and the occasional over-reaching public manager—often deploy the same strategies. Policy entrepreneurs distinguish themselves by being prepared to promote policy ideas that are new within specific contexts. They do this in ways that frequently span (or transgress) institutional and organizational boundaries that other actors tend to work within. They often promote policy innovations by telling new causal stories, creating new frames of reference, or making arguments that break down traditional alignments of interests. In so doing, they display significant levels of political energy and dexterity. Many treat their own past experiences and their established networks of contacts as scaffolding to support new ventures in the advocacy of policy change. The framework we present below for analysing international policy entrepreneurship incorporates insights drawn from this now extensive research literature on policy entrepreneurship. To date, empirical contributions to that literature have mostly explored policy entrepreneurship at the national or subnational levels. Yet much in that literature can effectively inform research on international policy entrepreneurship.
114 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens
7.3. The International Context The concept of the policy entrepreneur has demonstrated high analytical value for those seeking to interpret and explain the advocacy and adoption of policy innovations, especially at the national or subnational level. For the concept of international policy entrepreneurship to have high analytical value, we need to be clear about the context in which it is used and the boundaries surrounding it. We need to state what forms of transnational policy advocacy constitute international policy entrepreneurship and what forms fall more appropriately into alternative categories. We suggest it is vital to keep the focus on the policy entrepreneur as an individual, while altering our portrayal of the contexts in which such actors operate. In doing so, we draw clear conceptual boundaries and distinguish the actions of international policy entrepreneurs from the business-as-usual international engagements of state-based, government actors, the actions of international organizations, and the actions of civil society advocacy groups. To focus on the individual invites the obvious response of incredulity. How could credit ever plausibly be given to one individual for making fundamental change amidst the complexity of the international context? Our primary response is that individuals can and do make change happen. Counterfactual thinking is useful here. We can ask: In the absence of the work of this designated policy entrepreneur, would the observed levels of interest in policy change have arisen? Significantly, while we can identify individual policy entrepreneurs who made a difference, it is obvious that they never act alone. Always, they take actions that catalyse others into coordinated action. In the process, it can often happen that the actions of the catalysing individual can become obscured. Yet, in this, the actions of international policy entrepreneurs parallel those of policy entrepreneurs operating at the national or subnational level. Indeed, in the business world, spotting the entrepreneur is rarely a straight-forward task. Nonetheless, it is a task that can yield important insights into the processes by which new products and services (and often whole new markets) emerge. The same holds true for the study of policy entrepreneurs—be they operating at the level of domestic or international politics (or somewhere between the two). Seeking to identify and interpret the practices of individual international policy entrepreneurs promises to enhance our understanding of policy development and the diffusion of policy innovations at the international level. With respect to the international context, we note that recent discussions of governance have risen to prominence in close relation to the perceived decline in the institutional strength of the nation state and the increase in societal interdependencies (Kooiman, 2001; Pierre, 2000). As a result of this shift, authority and interests are no longer either viewed as strictly public or private. With the dividing lines between public and private sectors becoming increasingly blurred, a growing awareness has emerged that governments are only one of the many potential actors active in addressing societal issues. The forces of globalization—particularly technological change and economic
International Policy Entrepreneurship 115 and political liberalization—have fundamentally transformed conditions for effective and legitimate governance in the contemporary era. The accelerating forces of globalization have fuelled demand for new policy solutions to problems recognized as having broad, transnational significance. Many of these problems are not new. Rather, greater global interactions and the expansion and democratization of media outlets have enhanced knowledge-sharing and transparency. The political dynamics surrounding these problems are distinct from those that tend to surround problems at the national or subnational level. Traditional forms of domestic governance have resulted in systems of policy development and public management that are stable and hierarchical in form. Lines of authority and accountability are well demarcated. However, traditional bureaucracies often lack the knowledge and flexibility to react to today’s complex and fast-moving global problems. The traditional instruments of international policy making—international treaties, institutions, and agencies—have also proven insufficient to meet the challenges of an increasingly globalized and entangled world in a timely and efficient manner. At the global level, the lines of authority and accountability are fluid. One indicator of this is the proliferation of venues and events for discussion of global issues. Yet, moving from discussion of problems to agreement on their causes and appropriate ways to address them is typically a highly contested process. Despite the presence of apparently powerful peak organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union, the implementation of practical responses to acknowledged global policy problems still relies on ratification and action by national or subnational governments. These conditions are unlikely to change, despite globalization. In this emerging global order, rights and responsibilities are frequently unclear and roles are blurred. No one appears fully in charge. That said, as Biermann and Gupta (2011, p. 1856) have observed, ‘the complexities of globalisation have also given rise to a stronger political role for actors beyond the nation state, from multinational corporations and transnational advocacy groups to science networks and global coalitions of municipalities’. Meanwhile, Rischard (2001) has claimed that international policy entrepreneurs use global public policy networks to achieve ‘activation of reputational effects’—effects intended to influence the behaviours of leaders operating at the international or domestic level, and in both the public and private realms. In this space, appropriately skilled policy entrepreneurs can identify issues, outline a vision, options, and an action plan, and launch a concrete effort in pursuit of sweeping policy change. Moreover, through the political energy and urgency that they create, such international policy entrepreneurs can put pressure on traditional institutions to respond in a quicker and more efficient manner. Those seeking to promote global responses to global challenges must establish and coordinate forms of advocacy that work simultaneously at the global level and the national level (and often the subnational level too). We might reasonably anticipate that global policy challenges will continue to be met with the under-provision of adequate policy responses, simply because those responses will rely upon domestic political processes
116 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens for ratification and implementation. That said, these conditions present strong grounds for believing that globally coordinated forms of policy advocacy will become increasingly important as processes of globalization, economic integration, knowledge-sharing and transparency continue to advance. It is useful to distinguish between international policy entrepreneurs and coordinated forms of transnational advocacy. This clarification is important because policy entrepreneurs may engage in coordinated forms of advocacy and advocacy coalitions may exhibit entrepreneurial characteristics but they remain fundamentally different concepts. While the strategies employed by both transnational advocacy coalitions and international policy entrepreneurs may be similar, policy entrepreneurs are not issue-bound. Nor are they driven specifically by the development and spread of economic norms and common policy responses. Policy entrepreneurs employ means beyond intellectual argumentation, moral judgement, and direct lobbying in their efforts to promote policy change. Their flexibility and fluidity is critical in order to navigate the ‘disorder and unpredictability’ of the global policy milieu (Stone, 2008 p. 29).
7.4. International Policy Entrepreneurship We next discuss specific policy advocacy efforts of two international policy entrepreneurs. In choosing cases for discussion, we faced a range of possibilities. In narrowing our choice set, we followed four criteria. First, potential cases had to have been already well documented. That documentation needed to at least include media coverage from the period when the individuals of interest were most active in their policy entrepreneurship. Second, potential cases had to have been previously featured in peer-reviewed scholarly publications. That created a higher standard of evidence, which we considered important for an intendedly agenda-setting discussion. Third, potential cases had to contain plausible evidence of success on the part of the international policy entrepreneurs in their agenda setting and policy change efforts. Fourth, potential cases had to involve issues that we considered strongly indicative of the kinds of issues that will continue to be prominent in international policy discussions over the decades ahead. After following these choice rules, we selected two cases that struck us as containing interesting contrasts, while also containing some striking similarities. We were reluctant to present two cases containing extreme contrasts because we did not wish such contrasts to detract attention from our broader goal of using the cases to illustrate common practices of policy entrepreneurs, and indicate how such practices can be effectively deployed to influence policy agendas on the international stage. The cases here focus on two prominent British politicians—Ken Livingstone and William Hague. Their personal attributes and their advocacy strategies illustrate what we mean when we talk of international policy entrepreneurship. Ken Livingstone
International Policy Entrepreneurship 117 (b. 1945) served as Leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 to 1986. He then served as a Labour Party Member of Parliament in Britain from 1987 to 2001. Within the Labour Party, he was deemed ideologically of the hard left. He identified himself as a democratic socialist, and earning the nick-name ‘Red Ken’. Livingstone subsequently served as the Mayor of London from 2000 until 2008. Our discussion of him as an international policy entrepreneur reviews his actions on climate change while serving as Mayor of London. The discussion draws extensively from a lengthier treatment provided by Mintrom and Luetjens (2017). William Hague (b 1961), known formally as the Lord Hague of Richmond, served as a Conservative Party Member of Parliament in Britain from 1989 to 2015. He served as a Cabinet Minister from 1995 to 1997 under the Prime Ministership of John Major. After the electoral defeat of the Major Government, Hague served as Leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001, during the party’s period in opposition. Under David Cameron’s leadership of the opposition, Hague served as Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2005 to 2010. When the Conservative Party gained power in 2010, Hague became Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs during David Cameron’s Prime Ministership, a position he held until 2015. Our discussion of Hague as an international policy entrepreneur reviews his efforts while serving as Secretary of State to prevent sexual violence in conflict zones. The discussion draws extensively from a lengthier treatment provided by Davies and True (2017).
7.4.1. Ken Livingstone and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group International discussion of climate change and appropriate responses have largely been dominated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process and its ‘global deal’ approach. Until the end of 2015 and the Meeting of the Parties in Paris, this was a relatively stagnant and largely symbolic process, beleaguered by its inability to generate agreed actions and drive the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the face of this stagnation, a window of opportunity arose for changing the locus of climate change governance. Myriad forces, actors, and strategies emerged across multiple levels to contribute productively to climate governance. Ken Livingstone, as Mayor of London (2000–08), aimed to position London as a global city. The London Plan, released under his mayoralty in 2004, focused on the integration of urban governance and advanced Livingstone’s ambition to make London a green city. Livingstone has said climate change, and how to avert it, consumes him. This informed his mayoral decisions on transport, social housing, and new business developments. Livingstone called for London to get 25 per cent of its power from more efficient local sources and reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent within twenty years. He pledged significant resources to these efforts. In 2005, Livingstone hosted the World Cities Leadership and Climate Summit in London. Representatives from eighteen large cities were invited to London to discuss
118 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens actions they could take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Livingstone’s problem framing strategy involved representing cities—rather than nation states—as central agents in the response to climate politics. By forging these partnerships and framing climate change as a fundamental issue facing urban populations, cities were able to assert themselves as key players on the international stage (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007). As the symbolic ‘voice of London’, Livingstone emphasized that cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Cities are also extremely vulnerable to climate change, as 75 per cent of urban settlements are at risk from sea-level rise (McGranahan et al., 2007). At the 2005 summit, Livingstone argued that cities should take ‘practical action on the ground’ and not fuss with brand new approaches to sustainability. Claiming that there was no time for ‘more studies or surveys’, Livingstone sought to learn from other cities that were using innovative means to reduce their emissions. By focusing on building requirements, insulation, solid waste, energy efficiency, traffic congestion, and water systems, Livingstone suggested the group could have an immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions. He recognized that pooling existing knowledge and resources was essential to approaching climate issues (Lee and van de Meene, 2012). The Summit showcased the leadership capability of cities in the global governance of climate change while simultaneously underscoring the central role played by global cities as key hubs for population, commerce, and environmental public policy. By playing up the agency of cities as both source and solution for climate change, Livingstone argued for more extensive interconnection of an already established capacity. Following the 2005 Summit, the cities that had been represented there formed the C20 Partnership. The partnership quickly grew to comprise forty members, and was re-named C40. Under Livingstone’s leadership, the group installed a London-based Secretariat, appointed a Steering Committee, and introduced an issue-specific workshop programme. In 2006, the group partnered with the William J. Clinton Foundation to use the newly created Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) to implement C40 initiatives. This partnership resulted in a set of collaborative sub-networks, organized and overseen by CCI. CCI also developed a database of member city jurisdictional capacities, authority, and actions to create a platform for inter-city sharing of ideas, information, and data. Through partnerships and collaboration, C40 increased its ability to leverage the potential for inter-city transfer of knowledge, expertise, and experience, and to empower local officials and citizens to drive local changes. C40’s influence has continued to grow. It has now formed partnerships with Bloomberg Philanthropies, Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute. Through these collaborations, C40 has produced a global guide for accounting and reporting community-scale greenhouse gas emissions that can be used across multiple platforms. The guide is set to become the first internationally accepted framework for city-level greenhouse gas inventories. This case is significant in terms of international policy entrepreneurship because it illustrates the catalysing effect of Livingstone’s actions. Livingstone was able to use his positional power and influence to connect and focus the leadership of major cities
International Policy Entrepreneurship 119 around the world in a way that had never been done before. The emphasis on learning from each other and achieving a common goal was critical to attainment of this focus and the local actions it has prompted. It is unlikely that such dedicated, coordinated action would have been achieved in the absence of Livingstone’s ambition, credibility, vision, and tenacity. For more discussion of this case, see Mintrom and Luetjens (2017).
7.4.2. William Hague and the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative Sexual violence during war and conflict is not a new phenomenon. However, its use in contemporary war and conflict appears to have increased—certainly, documentation of it has increased. Since the mass rapes that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda in the 1990s, the widespread and systematic use of sexual violence has been documented in many conflicts. In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted its first resolution on Women, Peace and Security. Resolution 1325 recognized the impact of armed conflict on women and girls. In 2010, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1960. This called for detailed reporting within the UN on situations and perpetrators of sexual violence, to be monitored by the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict. As British Foreign Secretary (2010–14), William Hague incorporated international recognition and implementation of Resolution 1325 into the daily functions of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Hague framed sexual violence as a problem that could be addressed through his foreign policy making. While visiting conflict zones as Shadow Foreign Secretary, Hague came to view sexual violence in conflict as a significant concern for the UK Government. Once ensconced as Foreign Secretary, he gave a series of speeches setting forth his vision for a foreign policy ‘that promotes our national interest while recognizing that this cannot be narrowly or selfishly defined’. Hague (2010) noted the power of global networks cutting across traditional sovereignties. He argued that contemporary global politics demands greater focus on Britain’s core values: ‘[t]he networked world requires us to inspire other people with how we live up to our own values rather than try to impose them’. Hague mobilized the UK Government and the international community around his Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI), which he launched in 2012. The launch took place at a screening of Angelina Jolie’s film In the Land of Blood and Honey. The US actress was at the time Special Envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Launching the Initiative, Hague described his shock that only thirty individuals had been prosecuted when at least 50,000 rape crimes were committed during the Bosnian war. He said the Initiative was central to his foreign policy goals and to the pursuit of international peace and security. Hague sought to prioritize sexual violence as a pressing issue for the international community. He argued for leadership on the matter both inside and outside the UN Security Council.
120 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens Hague’s Initiative set in motion three streams of activity. First, a UK team of experts was created to be deployed to armed conflict areas to prevent and respond to sexual violence, working with UN agencies and international humanitarian organizations to treat survivors, collect evidence, and assist with developing justice systems to prosecute perpetrators. Second, the Initiative was integrated across the work of the FCO to inform all diplomatic relationships. Hague harnessed the organizational platform of the FCO and its network of embassies to generate widespread support for the Initiative. Third, a diplomatic campaign was led on preventing sexual violence in conflict. As a prelude to Britain’s Presidency of the G8 in 2013, Hague deliberately built momentum around the Initiative. Such summits were generally focused on the global economy and traditional barriers to growth and prosperity. Placing the issue of sexual violence as a threat to international peace and security on the G8 Summit agenda was unprecedented. However, with his novel framing and personal embrace of the issue, Hague was able to generate a statement of commitment from G8 leaders to ending sexual violence in conflict. Since 2012, over twenty million pounds have been allocated to the Initiative (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2015). These resources have supported programme delivery by local grassroots and human rights organizations around the world. They have also contributed to international initiatives such as the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims. Hague’s leadership of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative demonstrates how a well-positioned individual can act as an international policy entrepreneur and have major impact. His foreign policy helped operationalize an international regime increasing the likelihood of criminal prosecution for perpetrators and recognition, justice, and practical support for survivors. In the absence of Hague’s actions, these ‘on the ground’ changes would not have occurred as rapidly. Past UN Security Council Resolutions recognized sexual violence in conflict situations as matters of international security. But it was only when Hague dedicated himself to the cause of ending the impunity for sexual violence in conflict that unprecedented attention, commitment, and action occurred. For more discussion of this case, see Davies and True (2017).
7.5. Analytical Framework Here we present a framework for the analysis of international policy entrepreneurship. The framework comprises two parts: (1) attributes of international policy entrepreneurs; and (2) strategies of international policy entrepreneurs. The framework draws on insights from the literature exploring the work of policy entrepreneurs, which to date has focused mainly on their activities at the national or subnational level. As with any framework, we acknowledge that the general points made here will not map perfectly to individual instances of international policy entrepreneurship. Nor do we suggest that what transpires at the domestic level will necessarily work in an international
International Policy Entrepreneurship 121 arena. Nonetheless, the elements of the framework are expected to sharpen and provoke analytical thinking about the practices of actors seeking to promote policy change on an international scale. They also offer a set of starting points for identifying individuals who appear to fit the description of international policy entrepreneurs. We suggest this framework could be applied and adapted in many instances where the goal is to identify international policy entrepreneurs, discuss their actions, and explore key differences with their domestic cousins. More theory-driven empirical research informed by this framework holds the promise of improving our understanding of many elements of international policy advocacy both now and in the future.
7.5.1. Attributes of International Policy Entrepreneurs Those fitting the description of an international policy entrepreneur are likely to be ambitious in pursuit of a cause, to exhibit social acuity, to be able to pass a relevant credibility test, to display sociability, and to be tenacious. Domestic policy entrepreneurs exhibit similar attributes. The key difference is the context and space in which they operate, as well as the potential magnitude of their efforts. In their distinctive ways, Ken Livingstone and William Hague embodied all of these attributes in pursuit of the policy goals we mentioned earlier. Ambition: Pushing a major policy agenda at the international level takes great commitment and energy. Those who do this must be driven by a bigger vision for a better future. This is what we mean by ambition. Earlier, we noted Kingdon’s argument that policy entrepreneurs are defined by their willingness to invest their resources—‘time energy, reputation, and sometimes money’—in the hope of a future return (2011, p. 122). Ken Livingstone and William Hague were each driven by a broader vision and ambition. This attribute is vital for getting others to believe in what you are seeking to do and to join your efforts. Ambition for a particular cause supplies the ‘why’ that explains everything else policy entrepreneurs do. Social acuity: The essential actions of policy entrepreneurs—problem framing, building teams, and leading by example—all call for deployment of high levels of social acuity, especially in the international arena. Windows of opportunity do not come along with labels on them—they need to be perceived within complex social and political contexts. This claim is consistent with Israel Kirzner’s classic portrayal of entrepreneurs in the marketplace as actors who are ‘alert’ to opportunities, who make ‘discoveries’ through their everyday practices, and who are continuously ‘learning’ so as to improve their success in brokering profit-making deals (see Kirzner, 1997, esp. pp. 71–2). Through their social acuity, international policy entrepreneurs discover how different people are thinking about problems. They come to appreciate the concerns and motivations that drive others. And they develop ideas about how to construct effective advocacy efforts, how to make most use of networks of contacts, and what kinds of political support, policy arguments, and evidence will serve them best in particular policy making venues.
122 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens Credibility: Policy entrepreneurship, be it undertaken at the international level or the national and subnational levels, involves pursuing novel policy goals by building coalitions of support. To attract others to pursue their goals, policy entrepreneurs must be deemed highly credible. Others will invest their own time, energy, reputation, and money in a cause only where the leading figure strikes them as having what it takes to make a difference. William Hague displayed credibility with the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative through his position as the UK’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. From that position, he was able to advance the Initiative by forging alliances among traditional foreign policy ‘insiders’ and a range of other players who were not part of the usual foreign policy establishment. Few others could have done that. Sociability: Although they fix on particular policy ideas to advocate, policy entrepreneurs must always consider how others will respond to what they have to offer. In this sense, the development of innovative policy initiatives is always a social process. Policy entrepreneurs must possess the ability to empathize with others and understand other people’s needs. This calls for high levels of sociability. Sociability is both conceptually and operationally different from social acuity. For politicians, of course, sociability is the life blood. It grants them the ability to go from discerning points of common interest between themselves and others to engaging with others in ways that make those others feel appreciated. Effective policy entrepreneurs use their sociability to expand their networks and build advocacy coalitions. In the process, they often help others to see how their specific efforts can contribute to the bigger vision for policy change. Tenacity: Martin Luther King Jr, a central figure in the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, displayed vision and tenacity, and he conveyed them both with eloquent words. Among other notable expressions, he said: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ This statement points to an untenable present and the desire to reach an alternative end state. It acknowledges that the path to change may be incremental but the walk will be worthwhile. We define tenacity as the willingness to keep working towards a bigger goal, even when that goal seems nowhere in sight. This quality is especially important for international policy entrepreneurs, where the operating context is highly complex and the chances of achieving success can often seem slim. Conveying the historical significance of an advocacy effort can assist international policy entrepreneurs as they seek to maintain the focus and commitment of those working with them.
7.5.2. Strategies of International Policy Entrepreneurs The literature on domestic policy entrepreneurship has now established that policy entrepreneurs often pursue a particular set of strategies. We list them here as framing problems and redefining policy solutions, using and expanding networks, creating a guiding advocacy coalition, leading by example, and scaling up the advocacy effort
International Policy Entrepreneurship 123 and supporting policy change. While the strategies of policy entrepreneurs operating in the domestic and international spheres are similar, they will be pursued and achieved using means specific to their context. In our earlier examples, the efforts of both Ken Livingstone and William Hague demonstrate the value and applicability of these strategies in the international arena. Framing problems and redefining policy solutions: The literature on problem framing has often suggested that advocates of policy change can improve their chances of building winning coalitions if they portray problems in new ways (see, e.g. Stone, 1997). Dewulf and Bouwen (2012) emphasize the interactional nature of problem framing. This interpretation casts policy entrepreneurs as conversationalists who construct the meaning of situations through discussion with others, rather than as architects, who establish frames in advance of discussion with the intention of using rhetorical skills to persuade others to adopt them. Ken Livingstone’s terrain was local governance. He understood that the key concerns facing cities were immediate. He did not seek to enforce an internationally agreed upon regime of cap and trade systems. Rather, by grouping individual cities together, he created a system which facilitated learning and sharing across previously disparate spaces. In so doing, he also indicated that many policy solutions could address climate change, not just those that relied upon international agreements. Using and expanding networks: Policy entrepreneurs understand that their networks of contacts represent repositories of skill and knowledge that they can draw upon to support their initiatives (Burt, 2000; Knoke, 1990; Mintrom and Vergari, 1998). In the case of William Hague and the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, the major challenge involved building networks that were external to those in the traditional foreign policy space. Hague showed himself to be masterful at using both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ networks to support his policy goals. Indeed, at the launch of the Initiative, he teamed up with celebrity outsider Angela Jolie to make common ground. This signalled a willingness to go beyond established networks and engage others in non-traditional ways. In his efforts to address climate change, Ken Livingstone was also highly strategic in his use and expansion of international networks. Creating a guiding advocacy coalition: Like their counterparts in business, policy entrepreneurs must be team players. Individuals are often the instigators of change, but their strength does not come from the force of their ideas alone, or from their possession of superhuman powers. Rather, their real strength comes through their ability to work effectively with others. The team-building activities of policy entrepreneurs can take several forms. First, policy entrepreneurs often work in tight-knit teams composed of individuals with different knowledge and skills, who are able to offer mutual support in the pursuit of change (Mintrom, 2000; Roberts and King, 1996). Second, policy entrepreneurs make use of their personal and professional networks. Finally, policy entrepreneurs recognize the importance of creating and guiding advocacy coalitions to promote policy change (Mintrom and Vergari, 1996; Mintrom, 2013). The size of these coalitions can be crucial for demonstrating the degree of support enjoyed by a proposal for policy change. Also, the composition of a coalition can convey the breadth and diversity of
124 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens those supporters. Used effectively, the composition of a coalition can help to deflect the arguments of opponents of change (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). Leading by example: Risk aversion among decision-makers presents a major challenge for actors seeking to promote significant policy change. Policy entrepreneurs often take actions intended to reduce perceived risks for decision-makers. A common strategy involves engaging with others to clearly demonstrate the workability of a policy proposal. Such pre-emptive actions reduce the ability of opponents to block change by engendering fears about possible consequences. The creation of working models of the proposed change serves to generate crucial information about programme effectiveness and practicality. When they lead by example—taking an idea and turning it into actions themselves—policy entrepreneurs signal their genuine commitment to improved social outcomes. This can do a lot to win credibility with others and, hence, build momentum for change (Kotter, 1996; Quinn, 2000). Further, when policy entrepreneurs take action, they can sometimes create situations where legislators look out of touch (Mintrom 1997b). When this happens, the risk calculations of legislators can switch from a focus on the consequences of action to a focus on the consequences of inaction. In their own distinctive ways, both Ken Livingstone and William Hague demonstrated leadership by example in pursuit of their policy goals. Scaling up the advocacy effort and supporting policy change: Leadership by example is vital to demonstrating credibility and making the pursuit of policy change believable. However, those seeking to affect broad change at the international level must pay careful attention to scaling up their advocacy efforts and supporting policy change. How this is done will differ from case to case. Ken Livingstone supported the scaling up of policy change by focusing on the pooling of knowledge and the dissemination of ideas for how cities could mitigate and adapt to climate change. William Hague supported scaling up by ensuring that the UK took a range of actions consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 1963. In both instances, these well-chosen actions had cascade effects that prompted further change actions led by others in other contexts around the globe. The international sphere offers a multi-dimensional, fragmented, and ambiguous space of diffused authority. It is highly connected and entangled. This, along with other factors mentioned earlier, makes identifying international policy entrepreneurs difficult. While the attributes and strategies of international policy entrepreneurs may bear some semblance to their domestic cousins, there are significant differences. First, to operate effectively in such a space, policy entrepreneurs benefit from having already attained success in other areas and gained respect for doing so. This was the case for both Hague and Livingstone. Each was a well-established political figure who used his position as a platform to catalyse significant policy changes in the international arena. Second, to bolster credibility and achieve international recognition and awareness, international policy entrepreneurs engage in strategic partnerships with other well- known entities. We see this in both cases. Hague launched the PSVI with Angelina Jolie; Pitt and Livingstone and the C40 Group partnered with former American president Bill Clinton’s Climate Initiative (CCI). This is important given the enhanced contestation
International Policy Entrepreneurship 125 present at the global level. Finally, it is likely that the scale of international policy entrepreneurs’ efforts will be greater given the context that they are operating within. We see this again in both cases. Livingstone’s C40 network has now spread to over 80 major cities across seven geographic zones. Hague’s efforts have led to an enhanced understanding of sexual violence in conflict and how it might be prevented.
7.6. Avenues of Future Research Outlining the concept of international policy entrepreneurship, the chapter has suggested that it offers much potential as a tool for analysing international policy change efforts. While we offer two cases of international policy entrepreneurship, we do not suggest that this is indicative of all instances of international policy entrepreneurs. Given the diversity and complexity of the international arena, we believe that international policy entrepreneurs may be positioned anywhere in the policy community. While there will be key differences as to how international policy entrepreneurs employ specific strategies, the common thread—and a useful starting point—between domestic and international policy entrepreneurs is the importance of ideas. The international space has always been a challenging arena for policy advocacy, as it lacks the oversight and well-established systems of policy development found at the national or subnational level. At the same time, this space is increasingly generating demands for policy initiatives that differ from those that have previously been addressed through state-centric domestic or foreign policies. As processes of globalization, economic integration, knowledge-sharing, and transparency advance, strong grounds exist for believing that globally-coordinated forms of policy advocacy will become increasingly important. In this context, demand will rise for policy entrepreneurs who can identify issues, outline visions, create action plans, and cooperate with others in pursuit of sweeping policy change. Moreover, through the political energy and urgency that they create, they can put pressure on traditional institutions to respond more quickly and efficiently to pressing problems than has been the case in the past. But we should not underestimate the importance of appropriate platforms, resources, and skills in allowing international policy entrepreneurs to pursue audacious goals. Many questions for future research arise here. We offer five observations primarily to indicate the breadth of the research opportunities on offer: • Given the crowded and complex nature of international politics, international policy entrepreneurs appear to need well-established power-bases and media profiles. What backgrounds appear most important? What are the patterns? • Policy advocacy of any kind is a team sport. We know of cases of ‘insider’ politicians teaming up with ‘outsider’ celebrities in pursuit of specific policy goals. How do such teams get formed and what elements of team dynamics can serve to advance or inhibit effective advocacy?
126 Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens • Leading by example appears to be an important aspect of policy entrepreneurship, both at the domestic and international level. What leadership practices are common here? Do the examples need to be based in, or sponsored from, a handful of rich countries, or can apparent geographical and actual resource disadvantages be overcome? • International policy entrepreneurship, like policy entrepreneurship at the national and subnational levels, often seems to focus more on agenda setting than on achieving legislative change or seeing desired policy changes implemented. When might an international policy entrepreneur be said to have achieved success? What implications would our answers hold for the interpretation of patterns of international diffusion of policy innovations? • Policy change often takes decades, and long periods of advocacy. Under such circumstances, it seems unlikely that a single policy entrepreneur (or team of policy entrepreneurs) could take a policy idea from development through to realization of broad policy change. Given this, how do international policy entrepreneurs ‘pass the baton’ to others in the quest for policy change? What patterns might be found across the trajectory of long-haul policy advocacy efforts? Many other observations could be made and questions asked, following along these lines. Looking ahead, political scientists, legal scholars, business studies scholars, and economists will face many opportunities to analyse and compare forms of international policy advocacy. Such opportunities will call for the application and adaptation of existing concepts, and efforts to develop and test new theories of politics. Indeed, a tantalizingly open space beckons theory-driven, empirical research on international policy entrepreneurs—how to identify them, what they do, how they do it, and the impacts of their work. In terms of advancing scholarship in both the fields of international studies and policy studies, the concept of international policy entrepreneurship offers an exciting, intellectually well-grounded starting point.
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Chapter 8
Ci t y Net work s a nd Par adipl omacy as G l oba l Public P ol i c y Heidi Jane M. Smith
8.1. Introduction Mayors, local legislators, governors, and other subnational elected officials have traditionally engaged in international activities for their own trade promotion and economic development through city-to-city exchanges, business study groups, and youth exchanges. These city-to-city exchanges are referred to as paradiplomacy. Paradiplomacy may mean simply a national-level foreign ministry working with ministries of cities or perhaps the mayors, local legislators, and city officials providing exchanges for the benefit of their local communities. It may also include the use of international organizations as interlocutors of the policy processes propelled by local public action. This chapter focuses on two major public problems that have galvanized a new global agenda for city-level paradiplomacy activities: urbanization and the localization of global problems such as climate change. While our global population has moved rapidly into cities, the city has increasingly become a contested local and global space for multiple public problems. This requires local governments to present solutions both on a local and global scale. One global policy issue that has stimulated public attention is climate change. Recent evidence suggests that cities are a major source of pollution. Cities are estimated to consume 60–80 per cent of global energy production, which represents an equivalent amount of global carbon dioxide (CO2) and greenhouse gas emissions from the use of electricity, heating and industrial fuel, industrial processes, ground transportation, aviation, and solid waste (Bouteligier, 2013; Hammer, 2011; Merk et al., 2012). With these alarming statistics, scholars and policy makers have reflected concerns about how these numbers will affect the societal well-being of city dwellers. One resolve is to
130 Heidi Jane M. Smith engage subnational actors, and in particular, subnational urban governmental and non- governmental actors in global public policy processes. In addition to climate change, many global public policy problems have local parallels such as crime, arts, health, and social welfare. Increased crime rates for city dwellers, for example, have become an immediate threat. This includes terrorist attacks in cities like Berlin, London, Nice, and Boston (Barber, 2013). For some policy specialists, the highest cause of concern is inequality within cities along with the poverty and social injustices born in displaced urban blight (Harvey, 1973). To combat these issues, the United Nations has encouraged a ‘rights-based agenda’ for cities in which scholars, international organizations, mayors, and local authorities consider cities and their local governments as places to revitalise local and global policy action (United Nations, 2014). Subnational global engagement can influence and change national diplomatic efforts while also increasing the administrative and management burden on cities. A city’s global paradiplomatic business is frequently conducted through global networks such as the World Conference of Mayors, or Cities Alliance, or more recently via topic-specific networks such the work of C40 and Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) on climate change and resilience. With the institutionalization of these international networks, efforts to increase a city’s internal capacity to implement and manage global policies have also risen. When urban, international relations, and public administration scholars discuss the increased global relevance of subnational actors like mayors and local authorities, they also bring in issues of representative democracy and question how urban development could be used to reduce inequality within and between the developed and the developing countries. As John Dewey (1927) notably wrote, ‘the public and its problems’ is a matter that applies to both the city and national and global governance (Davis 2006). Cities have become a global focus point, not only to highlight the acuteness of public policy problems, but also for providing additional sets of global actors to resolve these obstacles. Cities represent both a new place and paradigm for improving transnational problems. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on the rise of subnational actors in global policy making, their main functions, and associations within national government and international organizations. The chapter will also provide an overview of the theory of multi-level governance and present the concept of ‘paradiplomacy’ as a new analytical lens to address these engagements and to describe the increased participation of city networks within global policy and transnational administration. The chapter will conclude with the opportunities and drawbacks of the global subnational engagements and present prospects for further research.
8.2. Defining the Space: Sub-S overeign Actors and Networks Sub-sovereign actors are a diverse category. They include individuals—such as mayors, local authorities, municipal bureaucrats, state governors, and local representatives—or
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 131 groups—whether they work within interest groups, professional associations, or for lobbyists for local or state governments. In addition to specific institutions, such as international units in city governments, there are also local business leaders, civil society leaders, trade representatives, and others who are engaged in international trade promotion and economic development as explained further in the chapter. Networks are also a large part of paradiplomacy and they have evolved in three stages. Sister Cities International was one of the first civil society organizations to create institutional linkages between city counterparts around the globe and now has over 2,000 members in 136 countries. The organization was founded in 1956 to build city-to-city exchanges, business study groups and youth exchanges, arts exchanges, and the like. Most major airports, city portals, and bridges have signage that identifies which global cities partner with the home city. Another early organization is the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), a US-based organization that has evolved into global action. First established in Washington, DC in 1914 to network and promote the effective work of local governments in the United States, ICMA now has an international affairs office and associates its work to sharing public management techniques internationally. A second group of global networks includes the World Conference of Mayors (WCM), and also Metropolis as well as the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). Perhaps the oldest of these initiatives, the World Conference of Mayors was created in 1984 as a non-profit, non-political worldwide conference comprised of mayors, former mayors, and other elected and appointed local public officials. Metropolis (the World Association of Major Metropolitan governments) was created in 1985 to work exclusively with large cities around the globe. This organization manages the city-to-city exchanges of large metropolitan regional areas. A newer group, the UCLG network, was created in 2004 by over 2,000 cities and 112 national governments to promote networking of local government actions. Today, UCLG has over 24,000 towns, cities and county governments working together to drive policy. Each organization generally operates in a similar fashion. Members are individual actors, local bureaucrats, mayors, or governors who join to unify forces on specific policy areas. Sometimes these local officials act alone, other times they have support from their communities. For example, WCM and UCLG create city-to-city exchanges on a wide range of topics. The third driver of city-to-city action was pushed by international organizations for precise global policy issues such as climate change, cross-border crime, trade, arts, and cultural exchange among others. These newer, sector-specific global networks have formed, for example, around climate change and energy efficiency such as the C40 and the Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI). The C40 network, created in 2005 in New York, comprises sixty-three global cities and is one of the most visible, with the former mayor of New York City as President. Based in Bonn, Germany, ICLEI’s network includes over 1,000 municipalities and associations from eighty-four countries. ICLEI was established in 1990 to link cities, the environment, and the UN-led 1992 Conference on the Environment. ICLEI has worked since 1992 to focus on Rio’s encouragement of ‘Local Agenda 21’ statements. ICLEI provides climate change and energy efficiency
132 Heidi Jane M. Smith advocacy and is a major civil society actor helping to monitor the actions and compliance of cities that are engaged in global agreements related to climate change. As individual city programmes have had a significant impact on trade missions, student exchanges, and other diplomatic efforts, some national governments have tried to capitalize on such local successes. Several national governments have opened offices where state legislatures, mayors, and local authorities can report activities and potentially, liaise with other cities elsewhere in the world. For example, Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Itamaraty, liaises with its Ministry of Cities, Ministério das Cidades, over international cooperation. In 2012, the ministries invited several city governments in Latin America to visit Brazil to learn about how to build energy-efficient housing (Changemakers, 2012). In another example, the Mexican government has reorganized its foreign aid office, Agencia Mexicana de Cooperación para el Desarrollo (AMEXCID), to capture state and local assistance abroad. The office seeks to collect information when Mexican state and municipal government officials go on foreign missions, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, for its global reporting. Even the US Department of State has taken diplomatic missions by subnational governments into account by establishing in 2010 the Office of the Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs. The office reports directly to the Secretary of State, and its mission is to work with state and local leaders within the United States to reach their counterparts abroad. Within international organizations, several key offices have leveraged ministries and regional development offices to perform paradiplomacy. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) opened its Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development in which the office offered consulting services to cities in its members’ states (OECD 2009). These efforts came at a time when regional and urban development was cited as the new geography of economic growth (Rodríguez-Pose and Sánchez-Reaza, 2005). The Directorate works with cities to manage and promulgate the clean and fair growth agenda within the countries of the OECD. The World Bank followed suit with its 2009 annual report ‘Reshaping Economic Geography’ (World Bank 2009). Just before the World Bank reorganized in 2012, the urban development office analysed housing standards within slums and settlements, helped improve credit for purchasing homes and studied the impact of small-to medium-sized business investments for subnational growth (Feiock, Moon, and Park, 2008). Often its policy targets utilized theories of local economic development (Blakely and Bradshaw, 2002). Today, World Bank policies for understanding poverty alleviation are not viewed exclusively through the engines of growth in cities, but also by examining urban–rural linkages and the pockets of extreme poverty within developing nations. Within the United Nations, UN-Habitat’s work stands out as the first to focus on improving living standards for individuals through their homes and settlements. By identifying urbanization as a new global challenge, they work with cities and national- level ministries. These cities and ministries, in turn, become local or national governmental actors with global duties (see Legrand, this volume; see also Raadschelders and
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 133 Verheijen, this volume). For example, in the United States, the Office of Housing and Urban Development helps propagate the UN Habitat’s global agenda by organizing public events and funding countries’ exchange activities to share experiences about renters’ policies, how to create mortgage banks, and encourage home ownership. The Ministry of Cities in Brazil was yet another national ministry that promoted the use of credit for the poor to construct houses, as well as to encourage cities to build recreational facilities and public spaces for their residents. Leveraged by its local members, Cities Alliance has become a hybrid international organization. As a ‘global policy partnership’ initially created through trust funds funded by Nordic countries at the World Bank, Cities Alliance operates differently from the above networks, given that it has its own funding base and secretariat along with considerable autonomy to set its own global agenda to promote high-quality and equitable settlements for people in the global South. Members of the Board include national level government agencies (e.g. Ghana’s Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development or Switzerland’s State for Economic Affairs); international aid offices (e.g. the UK Department for International Development); non-profit organizations (e.g. UCLG, ICLEI and Shack/Slum Dwellers International); and international organizations (e.g. UN-Habitat and its Environment Programme). Philanthropic organizations have also supported several initiatives. The Ford Foundation has been instrumental in leading the follow-up of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals with seventeen new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. To meet the 2030 goals, cities will need to be involved and engaged with this agenda. The Ford Foundation sought to strengthen cities’ involvement to promote the UN’s Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. Frequently known as the Quito Habitat III meeting held in 2016, the Ford Foundation has sought to build support among city leaders for the SDGs. In summary, the multiple paradiplomatic actors include on the one hand, national- level foreign ministries that are working directly with the ministries of cities along with the mayors, local legislators, and cities officials who provide exchanges for the benefits of their local communities, as well as, on the other hand, numerous international organizations which promote growth and development from an urban, local, or regional perspective. Finally, there are global non-profit membership associations, or networks, and the philanthropic organizations who help link cities together to share information, to enact change, and to work together as a global lobbying body.
8.3. The Academic Development of Paradiplomacy Schiavon (2006) suggests two reasons why state and local governments (or subsovereign actors) are engaging in international affairs more today than in the past.
134 Heidi Jane M. Smith First, international agendas within national governments and international organizations have expanded to include topics such as trade, human rights, economic liberalization and other items that many local governments can respond to with local action (Kincaid, 1990). For example, local drug trade and organized crime can be managed by community policing but also by engaging neighbouring countries with shared borders. Recognizing this city-to-global linkage, domestic national agendas have responded by expanding their understanding of how local issues may have global impacts. Second, an element of the structural adjustment programmes common to international finance institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was a recommendation for governments to decentralize political, administrative, and fiscal authority to lower-level governments. Through decentralization and the expansion of global discussions, more local actors were engaged by and have become incorporated into global agendas like climate change or poverty alleviation. This has led subnational governments to scale up their efforts to promote economic development, manage subnational debt allocations and encourage public participation (Smith and Revell, 2016). Countries as different as Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and Peru have all made efforts to decentralize. Subnational governments have increased their agency to promote and implement public policy at the local level and to translate their local activities to the global level. This dynamic is also reflected in the literature on multi-level governance. The theory of multi-level governance (MLG) helps conceptualize the international engagement of national and subnational public policies (Hooghe and Marks, 2003; see also Ladi, this volume). Local government engagement is the result of a ‘centrifugal process in which decision-making is spun away from member states in two directions’, namely to the subnational as well as the supranational levels (Marks, 1993: 401–2). This literature often focuses on how the European Union was created and operates with little reflection on how cities can also drive global agendas and do so without being members of a larger institutional form, such as a federation or a group of nation states. To understand the subnational level, researchers must explore how mayors and local authorities are networking and unifying to recreate our understanding of global public policy and transnational administration. Scholars since the 1990s have studied the difference between federalism and MLG. Whereas federalism and comparative federalist systems have a layered government effect with one government leading as a higher-level authority—such as a central government that dictates policy as the sovereign authority—MLG does not necessarily require an authority at the nation-state level. Theories of MLG may also incorporate the interactions of networks and various forms of governance within the structure of government. To distinguish between typical governance arrangements and MLG, Hooghe and Marks (2003) created two categories. Type I MLG is a typical federal system with hierarchical governments, limited jurisdictional levels, and a quasi-permanent jurisdictional system of governance. By contrast, Type II MLG suggests a need for flexible task-specific jurisdictions without regard to traditional territorial spaces or levels of
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 135 government (Hooghe and Marks, 2003). By using this MLG definition, paradiplomacy may be characterized as a type II MLG because it encourages the use of networks to link groups of governments, non-profit organizations, and intragovernmental organizations to work together. Paradiplomatic activities may impact a broader policy arena than originally conceived in multi-level governance theory. This is mostly because it combines the two types of MLG together and is based on the benefits of a territorial space while at the same time linking actions of networks and other governmental and nongovernmental policies together to impact global public policy (Alcantara, Broschek, and Nelles, 2015). The paradiplomacy concept was first coined by Panayiotis Soldatos and Ivo Duchacek (Michelmann and Soldatos 1990). Paradiplomacy emphasizes how sub-sovereign actors are also capable of driving the global policy agenda and thus allows space for the entry of subnational actors into international diplomacy (Dickson, 2014; Kuznetsov, 2015; Duchacek, 1990). It is driven by the specific needs that cities may have, but also by the policy responses they provide. For example, how cities can treat climate change with adaptation policies, such as with regulatory policies to increase density within urban centres and to provide financing for infrastructure improvements of public transportation for local residents (Ramirez de la Cruz and Smith, 2016). Each is a specific local response to a global problem. Further scholarly development and engagement of the paradiplomacy concept occurred via the ‘world city’ hypothesis (Castells, 1977; Friedmann, 1986; Harvey, 1973). This hypothesis connects the historical movement of industrial capitalism of cities to modern International Relations theory. This presents cities as a modern link between the post-Fordist (e.g. assembly line) economy of mass production and post-war capitalism to a localized, deindustrialized era in which cities are centres of economic growth and creativity (Florida, 2003). Cities today are an important element of national and international economic development as they are the location of a majority of human and economic life. Sassen (2006) and Hall (2001) have suggested that cities are influential subnational actors of the state who can build, enhance, and strengthen international diplomacy. Sassen’s concept of the ‘global city’ is one where business elites travel from major city hubs such as in Mumbai, London, or New York without viewing a differentiated urbanization from one place to another, at least at an elite level. For example, the offices and working practices of large multinational consulting firms look similar from one country office to the next (see Morgan, Sturdy, and Frankel, this volume) and thus, attest to a unified global corporate culture that is relatively consistent around the globe. Likewise, transnational policy elites may criss-cross city locations as they move from a World Economic Forum, G20 summit, or some other global network dialogue while experiencing the same high- level delivery of professional infrastructure and support in each venue. Similarly, local public authorities, state legislatures, and bureaucrats working in metropolitan governments within these global cities may mirror the practices of non-state actors like global consultant firms by creating their own international networks of sub-sovereign state actors engaged in global public policy and transnational administration.
136 Heidi Jane M. Smith The dynamics of paradiplomacy allow new actors to engage in traditional tasks previously only performed by national governments and their designated representatives. This was first highlighted by development economists at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) who observed significant population increases in their analyses of megacities, megalopolises, and mega slums to demonstrate the importance of city size, location, and development and its effects on the environment, society, and the global economy (Lubell et al., 2009). For them, megacities are large cities, typically with a populations of over ten million people. Megalopolises are heavily populated cities or urban complexes that string many populated areas together, like the valley of Mexico, with Mexico City and Toluca in the State of Mexico. Mega slums have high unemployment, endemic poverty, and chronic low-level violence and crime like the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. When city actors work together to confront global problems, they create independent synergies that are different from national and international policy agendas. Paradiplomacy comes from individual cities and initiatives between local governments and consequently there is no natural venue or location for transnational administration, and often these activities may have little oversight by global watchdogs or by individual citizens that live in cities active in this type of global engagement. Furthermore, we cannot assume that certain ‘developed’ cities—for example, Geneva, New York, Tokyo, or Singapore—are not necessarily better at paradiplomacy than less developed cities such as Nairobi or Quito. Nor should we assume that large cities are better resourced for paradiplomacy than smaller cities. Thus implicit in this description is an analysis of inequality between the cities and their impact on global public policies. In this regard, New York is not inherently more of a ‘global city’ than Singapore, which is often depicted as both a state and a ‘regional hub’ in the ‘world city’ hypothesis. Instead, paradiplomacy perspectives include or equally valorize what Paris and Mexico City do for UCLG, for example, as being on similar footing to what Little Rock, Arkansas does as a member of ICLEI. What matters is the individual efforts by these local communities to drive policy responses to global problems. This allows the paradiplomacy concept to be different from a ‘world city’ hypothesis, as the former does not require hierarchy or categorization for actions made by local governments The ‘para’ prefix in ‘paradiplomacy’ means a parallel diplomacy; the subnational actor in foreign policy imitates national government action when representing the state. Nevertheless, subnational actors can also choose to be unaligned to their national government policy preferences and to chart a unique paradiplomatic course. Examples include Porto Alegre’s participative budgeting and Curitiba’s successful rapid bus transport innovation as examples for other cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, and Bogotá that formed the basis of city-to-city exchanges. These initiatives may also be classified as policy transfer and diffusion (such as the bus-rapid transit systems first used in Curitiba, Brazil, which have now been implemented in cities from Medellin, Colombia to Seoul, South Korea) or, more often, as simply sharing knowledge about effective ways to govern with counterpart municipalities. Another example of paradiplomacy is Rio de Janeiro’s ever-more active involvement in global events, from hosting the 2010 UN-Habitat World Urban Forum and the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) to events like the 2014 World
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 137 Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Rio’s global engagement was inspired by its efforts to lead and inspire other cities to engage in paradiplomacy. Furthermore, the UN’s Habitat III 2016 global meeting in Quito was a way to encourage subnational actors to engage in public policy making to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. This is a further realization of paradiplomacy because the international organizations are requesting that local governments be the implementers of global public policy (Graute, 2016). Although there is no specific SDG related to cities, it is clear that much of the 2030 agenda must be implemented by subnational actors and that cities must be stimulated to participate along with the signatory national governments. In terms of subnational engagements and treaties and their legality (Tushnet, 2000), scholars have concluded that treaties signed by national governments are the only ones that are legally binding (Bursens and Deforche, no date; Blindenbacher and Koller, 2002; Tatham, 2013). For example, signing a financial agreement with the World Bank or International Monetary Fund may only be done by member states. Cities are not member states of international governmental organizations. That does not mean that national governments may not sign on behalf of cities. They can. By contrast, in the United States as well as many developed nations, cities can access the capital markets, float bonds, and raise other monies separate and apart from their national government if allowed by the national legislation, although some academics are now putting into question who should regulate these subnational actors’ engagement with the international economy (Pagliari and Young, 2014; Pagliari, 2013). Mexico’s federal constitution, for example, does not allow subnational governments to join international capital markets (Smith and Benton, 2017). Instead, they have developed a local bond market to leverage institutional investments into sub-sovereign debt. These examples suggest that while cities may have limited legal capacity to agree to an international agreement, some national governments may allow their subnational actors to engage the global capital markets. Case studies of city engagement converging with national governments address how subnational actors are engaging in trade policy and regional integration across boarder initiatives (Schiavon, 2004; Aldecoa and Keating, 1999). Emmanuel Brunet- Jailly’s (2012) research on the cross-border regions of the United States and Canada analyses where city authorities are taking the lead to resolve interstate conflict through day-to-day cooperation between these governments. Furthermore, in cases of conflict between the US and Canada, they may approach local actors to resolve a local commerce or trade conflict instead of the World Trade Organization. Rafael Velázquez Flores’ (2006) research on US–Mexico border cooperation via the Merida Initiative, which confronts narcotics trafficking, has shown how security forces of the United States federal, state, and local governments interact with similar entities in Mexico (Schiavon, 2004). Other countries, such as the Netherlands and Belgium, have studied how local policies implement the distribution of local public goods like electricity storage, water conservation, or local sales taxes diverge from European Union interests (Bursens and Deforche, no date; Blindenbacher and Koller, 2002; Tatham, 2013). Cohn and Smith (1996) add regional integration between the Pacific-Northwest economic regions of the United
138 Heidi Jane M. Smith States and western Canada to this literature. Attention is often directed to the high politics of separatist proposals such as Santa Cruz in Bolivia, the Basque Country, or Cataluña in Spain, or even secessionist threats from California and Texas in the United States. However, secession is a rarity. By contrast, slower and more prosaic processes of subnational integration across border communities have a long history, especially in Europe, such as the Euroregion for joint economic development through local and regional cooperation promoted by the Nordic Council, the Council of Europe, and the European Union (Svensson, 2018). Finally, the research of Sharafutdinova (2003) for Russia and Nganje (2014, 2016) for South Africa describes how subnational governments use paradiplomacy as a process model that contributes to the democratization of foreign policy, for example, which can used for peace-building activities (Klatt, and Wassenberg, 2017).
8.4. Mapping and Measuring City Paradiplomacy The interdisciplinary nature of paradiplomacy research becomes important when seeking a common language to identify each paradiplomatic action and its effects. For example, the word city is a social construction of urban-conglomerated centres. When international organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the OECD measure cities, they use the words ‘subnational governmental units’. These units are often referred to as states, and sometimes municipalities or both combined. This unit of analysis is not necessarily related to one highly densely populated central location such as a city, but could be various jurisdictions combined to be considered a subnational unit for analysis. Policy makers are paying considerable attention to global city indicators and measuring city policy advancements. These measures help understand what types of actions paradiplomacy is confronting. The basic premise is to construct the comparability of cities’ quality, economic development, social well-being, and climate vulnerabilities, which together create a good definition of urban development. Many city mayors are willing to provide data about their cities in order to create baseline scales for measuring progress. City indicators abound, from the European Green City Index of the Global City Indicators Facility to hundreds of other indicators of sustainability. Prominent authors such as Sassen (2006) and Taylor (2004) have worked to index global cities regarding economic development (Amen et al., 2011). More recently, the World Bank constructed the Global Cities Indicators Facility (GCIF) and the United Nations formed the Global Compact Cities Program (UNGCCP) to evaluate climate factors produced by cities (James et al., 2015). This is not to mention the hundreds of city indicator projects among civil society organizations across the United States or the real-time visualization of data in places such as Dublin and Rio de Janiero (Kitchin, Lauriault, and McArdle, 2015; NNIP, 2017).
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 139 Data limitations may also encourage scholars to use different values for cities and metropolitan areas. Political economists frequently use data that is divided at the municipal level and not at the city level thus admixing policy answers related to traditional questions of public policy and public administration with new issues related to the new economy (Sánchez Reaza and Rodríguez-Pose 2002; Smith and Benton, 2017). This is further confounded by the use of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States. For example, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has defined 388 MSAs in the US as one or more adjacent counties or county equivalents that have at least one urban core area of at least 50,000. The European equivalent for measuring urban agglomeration comes from the European Union project on ‘Study on Urban Functions’ (ESPON), Eurostat. These metropolitan regions are measured as NUTS 3 regions or a combination of NUTS 3 regions (NUTS—Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) which represent all agglomerations of at least 250,000 inhabitants. Additional measures come from the United Nations and the OECD’s territorial development programme. These measures differ in different ways. First, in how researchers define the size of the metropolitan area and, second, in how they use this definition to draw implications about how capacity is enabled; for example, how fiscal capacity is measured in the tax authority of local governments. This is because the measurement criteria of European cities are different from the United States. Moreover, and the given the difficulty of data availability in developing country cities such as Nairobi or Sao Paolo, international organizations may measure fiscal decentralization by combining state and local governments to create a subnational unit of analysis. This mode of categorization would thus eliminate the wide variation of subnational governments such as are seen, for example, in the United States, which consists of fifty states, and more than 89,000 local governments that include general-purpose governments, 36,000 municipalities and the 3,036 county governments (Wooldridge and Smith, 2017; Miller, 1981). Projects to create uniform indicators create a good reference and framework for mapping how city officials are engaged and rank among their peers. The indicators also become a tool of public administration to engage in the process of paradiplomacy. Cities in the United States, for example, have adopted this public administration tool to evaluate their unique development and create a base line for citizens’ actions within the United States and abroad.
8.5. Paradiplomacy: Accountability, Challenges, and Opportunity Unexpected consequences may result when national and international organizations mobilize domestic civil societies, local governments, or regional associations to capitalize on city-to-city exchanges. Positive externalities of paradiplomacy already
140 Heidi Jane M. Smith outlined above may be broken into three subthemes—the diverse ways in which cities influence foreign policy, the multiple dimensions of urban policy development, and the methods of defining and measuring a city’s global impact. Much of this action has been proposed by global civil society organizations created through membership of individual cities, but also by citizens within communities wanting to make global change. Ultimately, these individual and group actions have helped to describe why and how paradiplomacy has unfolded globally. Unexpected consequences include negative externalities when global public exchanges are not creating optimal global public goods. Less analysed are the possibilities of negative externalities, inequality, and information asymmetries creating from conflict between parties, levels of government, and among governments. There is a potential ‘race to the bottom’ effect when different economic realities may address a particular global policy issue. In addition, conflict and division are conceivable especially between the coalitions of the willing, and those cities, countries or regions unwilling to join in the same cause. Finally, transparency and accountability concerns stem from these global policy efforts. There are cases where national governments can leverage local politics to influence global efforts. One case comes from the 2009 Copenhagen Accords when the United States would not sign on to the Climate Protocol also known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Several ICLEI members who were also local government authorities in the United States lobbied the international body to have their local government climate adoption activities taken into account as initiatives separate and apart from the US federal government. These local activities prompted the US Department of State to share how states and local governments were tackling climate change through local adaptation measures with their Chinese counterparts. This helped resolve the stalemate between China and the United States in their efforts to ratify the global climate agreement (The Guardian, 2016). This strategy led the United States to ask their local governments to sum up their actions to curb climate change. This effort changed the dialogue from what national governments were unable to do within an international body to what actions are undertaken at the subnational level (UCLEI, 2017). In other words, global networks of local actors can create coalitions of the willing to change national and international policy. These networks can create a balance of power whereby the local actors are stronger than their national counterparts on certain issues. This phenomenon is especially true in the developing world. The global competition for lowering greenhouse gas emission can also create a race to the bottom effect as noted in federalist studies (Davies and Vadlamannati, 2013, Volden, 2002). That is, when one city strives to improve, the efforts of others may be reduced (because of incentives to ‘free ride’), thus creating high global disparities for whoever enforces the virtuous mitigation and adaptation strategies. An example of this is the ‘competition’ between which city has the worst air quality: Beijing, New Delhi, and Mexico City are notorious for poor air quality and exchange positions each year for the lowest ranking (Kornei, 2017).
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 141 Information asymmetries and inequality may also be amplified when partisanship plays a role in whether or not a city or particular level of government adopts particular policy outcomes. Mexico City’s interaction within federal, state and local levels of government is a case in point. Where there are differences between political party leaders at the national and lower levels of government, policy challenges increase substantially. Since Mexico City held its first mayoral election in 1997, left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) leaders have led the city while the right-leaning National Action Party (PAN) has led the national government since democratization in 2000. Only recently, the once corporatist state and hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) returned to the win the presidency in 2012. Policy clashes have arisen between the PRD-controlled city and the nation-controlled government. This is especially important given that over a third of the country’s GDP comes from the valley of Mexico. If Mexico City grows so does Mexico, thus creating a huge interdependence of the mega cities on the development of the Mexican economy. Finally, transparency and accountability of these actors are very important (Fukuyama, 2013; Busuioc and Lodge, 2016). For example, when paradiplomacy was first discussed by UN-Habitat, the organization adopted the mantra of the ‘Right to the City,’ which was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, Le Droit à la Ville. Lefebvre’s study explored how social movements could push local policy agendas and work to improve urban spaces. The book inspired many local social movements, as well as NGOs working in urban spaces, especially in Brazil, where cities present some of the highest inequalities of public service delivery in terms of employment status, economic benefits, housing, and basic water and sanitation (Donaghy, 2013). Yet, this newfound understanding of the city has not always translated into more social pressure and, arguably, has not always been followed by the political establishment or nationally coordinated effort to create formidable public policy. The lack of engagement by civil society actors within cities might also alter what is or is not possible for cities through paradiplomacy. This oversight of subnational action is challenging the paradiplomacy agenda. While some civil society actors, as in the case of Brazil, are pressuring nation states to do more, other social movements pressure nation states to do less. For example, the Agenda 21 initiative (arising out of the 1992 UN Conference for the Environment) has created a global social movement to drive civic action to adopt the UN’s 2030 agenda. However, some nationalist groups in the United States and France have called into question the nature of such global action, preferring regionalism or local development to global action (Galuszka, 2012). Although paradiplomacy began as individual city-to-city exchanges, it has managed to expand into sophisticated global networks of local governments, and to transcend the global agenda-setting issues disseminated by international organizations. These trends have led to increased global activism, notably by three types of organizational structures: (i) civil society lead groups like ICLEI; (ii) mayor and elected leaders who are members of organizations such as UCLG; and (iii) international organizations like UN Habitat with specific missions to propel a global mission on an
142 Heidi Jane M. Smith international agenda. These trends create expectations around how to build accountability into city activism, whether it is a global organization or an individual local government. Nevertheless, when cities want to ‘rule the world’ (Barber, 2013) they will not necessarily abide or coordinate with the nation state’s economic, fiscal, and monetary policies. Promoting trade between global cities might also widen a population’s welfare and income gaps and create other disparities among regional areas within national boundaries. This can create tension and possibly conflict especially in countries where there exist strong vertical and horizontal imbalances among federal, state, and local governments.
8.6. Future Research on Paradiplomacy This chapter has outlined the potential for global public policy action and implementation via city-level public official efforts. However, there has been comparatively little attention given to the administrative structures of global megalopolises and their networks for global influence. There are approximately 125 multilateral arrangements among subnational governments (Tavares, 2016). Some are global like UCLG or UCLEI while others are regional like the Federation of Latin American Cities, Municipalities and Associations of Local Governments or even thematic like the European Forum for Urban Security. This network diversity has created ‘complex regimes’ whereby multiple civil society and subnational actors engage in global public policy (Held and Hale, 2011; Root, 2013). Through the analytic lens of paradiplomacy, global public policy and transnational administration scholars have an additional set of tools with which to reconsider and redefine the international engagements that many municipal governments now pursue. This includes tools that help describe how to manage the transformation of the city and its officials via international policy interactions and the development of its new global policy engagements. What is still unclear is how cities’ international relations offices will strengthen the technical capacity and management roles of the typical local government in the developing world. This includes practical public management options for how cities could finance sustainable investments for instance in housing, water, electricity, urban planning, and transport. To date, New Public Management scholarship (e.g. Light, 1998 and Kettle, 2000) has given limited consideration to strengthening the capacity and management of subnational public actors. While global governance scholars may wish to study these groups (Held and Hale, 2011), little systematic study has emerged from public administration. An important exception is Benjamin Barber’s 2013 book If Mayors Ruled the World. In his book, Barber proposed the creation of a global parliament of mayors to increase
City Networks and Paradiplomacy 143 participation. With the arrival of new networks, we must investigate whether cities have the internal capacity to implement and manage global policies. Who will pay for the organization? What are their global impacts? Which cities, small and large, should be included? To whom should they report? Related questions include: How will the successful implementation (or not) of international public policy by subnational actors lead to stronger national governments and economies overall? Alternatively, will these actions just create greater disparities between national, state, and local governments? One can, and perhaps should, question the intentions behind these cities’ actions. Are they nobly sharing best practices, such as bus rapid transport with one another, or are public officials seeking other lines of engagement? For example, could a developed country engage subnational actors to promote a policy or programme knowing that their national government disapproves? Are there instances in which a developing nation city would engage an international organization for support when it knowingly does not have the support of its national government? Perhaps the horizontal support of networks is implementing policies that may benefit the global interest and not national ones. Paradiplomacy creates multiple avenues of research for scholars. Capturing how cities or other subnational actors and their associations or networks interact across geographies and levels of government to encourage solutions to global collective action problems is and should continue to be an important part of global and regional affairs. Paradiplomacy has become an everyday practice for many mayors, local government officials, and city bureaucrats at the ‘street-level’ of global public policy and transnational administration.
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Chapter 9
Internationa l NG O s , Transnationa l C i v i l So ciet y, an d G l oba l Public P ol i c y Opportunities and Obstacles in the Twenty-First Century Kelly Ann Krawczyk
9.1. Introduction During the 1990s and into the turn of the Millennium, transnational civil society (TCS) became an increasingly important global governance actor, growing in size, power, and level of activity (Davies, 2014; Price, 2003). There are numerous examples touted as successful transnational civil society networks and coalitions, such as CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation (1991– 93), the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (1997), the World Social Forum (2000), and the Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness (2009–12). However, more recently, there is evidence that points to fissures in the ability of TCS to influence global policy. The purported rise of transnational civil society brings to light important questions about its role in global policy making: Is the relationship between transnational civil society and global policy making a collaborative effort between independent actors, or is transnational civil society coopted by transnational administration for its own policy purposes? How might transnational civil society use its strengths to shape global policy so that it is more inclusive, responsive, equitable, and ethical? What opportunities does transnational civil society offer to make global policy processes more visible and accountable to citizens who might be confined to national policy arenas? How might
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 149 transnational civil society actors help define social problems, and contribute to innovative policy solutions and implementation? In addition, it is also necessary to recognize and tackle the growing risks and challenges facing transnational civil society by asking: How does transnational civil society address vast variations in resources and power that span the multiple countries, regions, and actors in the global policy making arena? How might transnational civil society help rectify the competing interests, capacities, and expectations among various actors in the global policy process? How can transnational civil society become more accountable, transparent, and representative, promoting equitable and democratic norms and ideals, without mirroring the structures and institutions of the state that promote elitism and rigidity? How can transnational civil society avoid being coopted into representing only its own views, or those of actors in the global policy arena, versus those it represents? Harnessing the opportunities and addressing the challenges of TCS in the twenty-first century depends on understanding and addressing these issues. To explore these questions, this chapter is structured in the following manner. First, conditions driving the development of TCS are discussed, along with challenges inherent in TCS. Next, the role of TCS in the global policy making process is addressed, using specific examples that highlight the inherent strengths and weaknesses of TCS. Next, opportunities and challenges for TCS in the new Millennium are outlined. Finally, recommendations are put forth for harnessing the potential of TCS.
9.2. Conceptualizing Transnational Civil Society Scholars debate the precise definition and use of the term ‘transnational civil society’ (Khagram and Alvord, 2006). Some scholars use the alternate term ‘global civil society’, defined as the ‘process through which groups, movements and individuals can demand a global rule of law’ (Kaldor, 2003, p. 20). Others argue there is no ‘global’ civil society per se, as it does not yet reach every corner of the planet and is therefore not accessible to all citizens, and because national-level processes and ideologies still dominate the policy arena (Smith and Weist, 2005). The term ‘transnational civil society’ emphasizes both its cross-border and cross-boundary (local, national, regional, global) characteristics. Therefore, the term transnational civil society is utilized throughout this chapter. Batiwala and Brown (2006) conceptualize TCS as having three interrelated aspects: (1) the actual sector of civil society organizations; (2) the values, norms, and aspirations associated with a society governed by civil processes; and (3) the availability of spheres for public discourse about issues and ideas. In this way, TCS is normative, and embraces ‘norms of inclusion’ such as tolerance, cooperation, and respect (Batiwala and Brown, 2006, p. 3). Since the 1990s, scholars and practitioners have promoted the normative strengths of transnational civil society in the global policy environment, and lauded
150 Kelly Ann Krawczyk TCS for its diversity, flexibility, fluidity, and responsiveness (Batiwala and Brown, 2006; Naidoo, 2006). It has been claimed that transnational civil society influences both the policy environment and the actors within it, strengthening accountability by promoting democratic norms and ideals, and persuading policy actors in the global policy arena through network and coalition building, advocacy, and agenda setting, and by functioning in a watchdog role (Brown, 2008; Price, 2003). Recent scholarship has taken a marked turn, however, by warning of risks and challenges facing transnational civil society in the twenty-first century. Each risk may impede the ability of TCS to contribute effectively to global policy making. For example, while transnational civil society purports to promote democratic ideals and values, some contend that transnational civil society is itself undemocratic, and threatens to undermine formal systems and structures of the state, thereby undermining the legitimacy of government (Price, 2003; Castells, 2008). As transnational civil society progresses, it becomes prone to adapting the same rigid, hierarchical, and bureaucratic structures that mirror those of government (Batiwala and Brown, 2006). Transnational civil society is also in danger of being coopted by its own views, those of its funders, and even by those of transnational administrators and global policy makers (Batiwala and Brown, 2006; Davies, 2014). Such dysfunctional characteristics may lead to challenges of legitimacy and accountability (Brown, 2008; Castells, 2008), and to a lack of representativeness and transparency (Price, 2003; Hammad and Morton, 2011). Some argue transnational civil society actually reflects the power and resource structures of globalization, resulting in a ‘North–South’ divide in which participation is uneven, a power imbalance is present, and elite influence and participation are the hallmark of transnational policy spheres (Batiwala, 2002; Price, 2003; Naidoo, 2006). Finally, despite the optimism over the past few decades, there may be limits to the power of transnational civil society, especially in the global policy making arena (Kaufmann, 2012). Davies (2014) points to increasing regional divisions, and an inability of twenty-first-century transnational civil society to build upon the achievements of earlier coalitions. All of these shortcomings threaten to hamper the ability of TCS to contribute productively to global policy making. Notwithstanding scholarly disagreement over the characteristics, role, and effectiveness of transnational civil society, one area of consensus relates to the growth of TCS. There has been a sharp increase in the number of transnational civil society actors over the past three decades, contributing to the creation of a global civic space. This includes grassroots civil society organizations, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), international organizations, citizens’ groups, social movements, coalitions, campaigns, and networks all engaged in dialogue, debate, confrontation, and negotiation with each other, as well as with public and private actors (Anheiher, Glasius, and Kaldor, 2001; Batiwala and Brown, 2006; Castells, 2008). Salamon (1994) was one of the first to recognize that this ‘global associational revolution’ or ‘global third sector’ would permanently alter the relationship between citizens and the state. Yet Salamon also suggested that we should not assume TCS always acts as a positive, normative force. He cautioned that the global third sector would not automatically be responsive, flexible, and trustworthy, and could in fact become a ‘large, complex, cumbersome force that
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 151 struggles with issues of responsiveness’ (Salamon 1994, p. 118–19). Twenty-five years later, his words of caution aptly describe TCS in the twenty-first century.
9.2.1. Drivers of TCS Growth There are multiple drivers capable of explaining TCS’ exponential growth and development over the past three decades. One explanation is that the growth of TCS stems from three main forces: from ‘below’ in the form of citizens’ grassroots energies; from ‘outside’ through the actions of public and private institutions such as the church and aid agencies; and from ‘above’ via government and international organizations (Salamon, 1994, p. 112). Viewed from ‘below’, unprecedented developments in information and communication technologies, as well as access to quicker and more economical modes of travel, have facilitated grassroots activism that has accelerated the ‘globalization’ of civil society (Christensen, 2006; Naidoo, 2006). Individuals and organizations can exchange information, build transnational networks and alliances, and respond to new challenges and developments with unprecedented speed and ease. This has fostered the creation and expansion of a global civic space that even authoritarian states and regimes hostile to civil society cannot control (Christensen, 2006). But it is also important to acknowledge that technology has also hindered TCS, as it facilitates not only TCS but also its adversaries and is a tool for government to monitor and control TCS actors (see Davies, 2014, p. 10). Viewed from ‘outside’, the increasing openness of international organizations (IOs) to the participation of TCS has helped facilitate its growth. In addition, a shift towards recognition of a ‘global consciousness’, and increased education about social issues, has also shaped TCS (Davies, 2014). This shift has been led from ‘outside’, by aid agencies and Western actors. Viewed from ‘above’, the ‘hollowing out’ of the role of the state and subsequent erosion of trust in government is another argument for the rise of TCS: citizens prefer new, or at least additional public spaces over the traditional ones provided by government (Batiwala and Brown, 2006; Christensen, 2006). We can also look to globalization as a driving force in TCS growth. The interconnectedness of political, social, and cultural spheres; an increased integration of the world economy; greater recognition and articulation of so-called ‘wicked problems’ like climate change; and the fragmentation of spaces where global decisions are carried out has created new global public spaces for TCS (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor, 2001; Batiwala and Brown, 2006; Brown, Khagram, Moore and Frumkin, 2000; Christensen, 2006). Globalization has emphasized the growing gap between the space where issues arise (global) and the space where issues are managed (the nation state). Therefore, the growth in TCS may not be the result of globalization, but in fact, a response to it, in an effort to overcome the political and governance issues stemming from globalization (Naidoo, 2006). For example, globalization has highlighted a crisis of efficiency for government, as issues such as global warming and terrorism can no longer be adequately managed at the national level, and a crisis of legitimacy, given increasing distrust in government and its institutions.
152 Kelly Ann Krawczyk Globalization has also emphasized a crisis of identity, as people see their nation and culture increasingly disjointed from global decision-making networks, and a crisis of equity, due to increased inequity between nations and social groups within nations (Castells, 2008). As a result, TCS actors have become global (and local) advocates for the needs, interests, and values of people, which further undermines the role of government in responding to the challenges posed by globalization (Castells, 2008). TCS acts as a ‘process through which groups, movements and individuals demand a global rule of law, global justice, and global empowerment’ in order to democratize globalization (Kaldor, 2003, p 20). The inherent ‘interconnectedness’ of TCS becomes a vital characteristic that links individuals, grassroots organizations, coalitions, campaigns, and networks throughout this process (Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor, 2001). TCS connects the actors and their viewpoints from ‘below’, from ‘outside’, and from ‘above’ (Salamon, 1994).
9.3. The Role of Transnational Civil Society in Global Policy Making The rise of TCS over the past few decades has been accompanied by promising examples of early successes in the global policy arena, which served to further the idea that TCS could leverage its networks and resources to create a unique civic space that would drive meaningful policy change. One early TCS triumph was the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’ or the ‘Rio Summit’. Over 1,400 civil society organizations were officially accredited to participate in the Rio Summit, and another 9,000 gathered at the unofficial parallel NGO forum. The Rio Summit afforded the opportunity for civil society activists to engage fully in global decision-making spaces, and their involvement led to a seminal shift in the international community’s way of thinking about environmental issues (Clark, 2006). Another early example of successful TCS influence on global policy making was the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, lauded as an innovative example of TCS intervention that contributed to the negotiation of the 1997 Ottawa Landmines Convention. This campaign highlighted a new era of power, influence, authority, and legitimacy for TCS, and led to the recognition of TCS as an important player in global policy making (Anderson, 2009). TCS actors solidified their presence inside the negotiating rooms of treaties, international agreements, contracts, and development projects, and became accepted players in global governance and policy making. Yet despite these early successes, and the continued role of TCS in the global policy arena, presumptions about the normative characteristics and inherent ability of TCS to drive transformative change remain uncertain. Davies (2014) in particular calls into question the accomplishments of these so-called early successes of TCS. He analyses, for example, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, noting it was unable to alter the policy positions of major superpowers such as the United States, Russia, and China, who remain non-signatories to the Ottawa Landmines Convention.
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 153 While the long-term impact of TCS movements on global policy continues to be debated, transnational civil society organizations continue to attempt policy influence at the global, national, and local levels. The thickening network of global interconnectedness means that TCS is operating at multiple levels and with multiple actors. Some TCS initiatives have created organizations at the international level, and then built alliances with NGOs at the national and local levels. Another way TCS can attempt policy influence is through transnational advocacy networks. Transnational advocacy networks are defined as interactions of non-state actors that take place in networks beyond the domestic level, thereby blurring the boundaries between a state’s interactions with its citizens, providing recourse for citizens and states to move to the international arena, and transforming the practice of national sovereignty (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, pp. 1–3). Transnational advocacy networks concerned with the environment, corruption, and human rights, for example, have been launched by international NGOs that later joined with national and local partners. In other cases of transnational advocacy, national NGOs and social movements have built coalitions with international allies to influence national and international policy makers (Brown, Khagram, Moore, and Frumkin, 2000; see also Coleman, this volume). The International Rescue Committee, for example, works with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) to raise awareness of and prioritize humanitarian crises worldwide. At the local level, it acts in over forty countries as an implementing agency for UNHCR while simultaneously executing its own mission of restoring safety, dignity, and hope to millions of refugees (International Rescue Committee, 2018). To influence global policy, TCS organizations must engage in four mechanisms of ‘non-domestic policy influence’ (Balboa, 2014; Bernstein and Cashore, 2000). First, TCS organizations influence policy through mobilization activities such as protests and boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, and by validating and creating demand for certain policies (Auld et al., 2009). Second, they may lobby government representatives, participate directly in policy making fora, and use their capacity to join delegations that negotiate international rules (Charnovitz, 1997; Gunter, 2004). Third, they change international normative discourse through media campaigns and by generating research on issues (Myers, Mittermeier, et al., 2000). Fourth, and most importantly, TCS organizations can directly infiltrate the policy process (Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Hall, 1993). TCS organizations accomplish this direct infiltration only by engaging in the first three mechanisms of policy influence, which then grants them access to local policy arenas and allows them to expand their impact beyond influence to (directly) create and implement policy at the local level (Balboa, 2009). Unfortunately, however, TCS organizations often emphasize and prioritize global capacities over local ones, and the result is they function better in the global arena, versus the local one. While they may be capable of influencing global policy, they lack the skills to implement this policy at the local level. Furthermore, they frequently lack the ‘bridging capacity’ that helps them navigate between the global, national, and local spheres (Balboa, 2014). This deficit in local and bridging capacity means TCS organizations are often unsuccessful in making the jump from the first three mechanisms
154 Kelly Ann Krawczyk of policy ‘influence’, to the fourth mechanism of ‘direct infiltration’ that creates and implements policies on the ground. When TCS is able to directly infiltrate the policy process, this infiltration occurs in what has been called the ‘global agora’. The agora is the space where direct global policy making occurs, and is comprised of a transnational policy community with an array of actors and multiple authority structures composed of both public and private actors that stretch beyond the national level (Stone, 2008). Individuals, groups, organizations, networks, movements, and federations, working at the local, national, and global levels, all with different attributes, structures, and functions, come together to engage in activities and processes that impact global policy making. To understand where and how TSC organizations infiltrate the global agora, we can conceptually stretch and apply the conventional policy process cycle. This cycle includes problem definition and agenda setting, policy transfer and formal decision-making (which includes policy analyses and legitimization), policy implementation, and monitoring and evaluation (Stone, 2008). Current scholarship recognizes the role of TCS throughout all stages of the global policy making process (Price, 2003). However, evidence suggests the role of TCS is more prominent, and even more successful, in the agenda-setting, policy formulation, and monitoring and evaluation stages (Tallberg et al., 2013; on policy transfer, see Chou and Ravinet along with Evans, this volume; on monitoring and evaluation, see Wessal and Wescott, this volume). The involvement of TCS in each stage of the global policy process is elaborated below. First, TCS plays a critical role in identifying, articulating, and synthesizing issues across a myriad of value perspectives, helping to create shared norms and mobilize the public to address global concerns and problems (Christensen, 2006). The Global Network on Violence against Women, for example, helps identify common themes shared by violence movements around the world—everything from dowry deaths in India, to female genital mutilation in Africa, to spousal abuse in North America, to rape and torture of political prisoners in Latin America. Second, TCS shapes global policy formulation through articulation of the values and norms that guide and constrain international practice, and through articulation of and support for specific policy alternatives. TCS has the ability to create transnational alliances that advocate for otherwise ignored alternatives, and can even alter international institutions to respond to unmet needs. The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), for example, formed in 2004 to help end poverty and inequality, played an important role in persuading G8 leaders to double Official Development Assistance in 2005. A compelling critique of the GCAP, however, was the failure of G8 governments to deliver on this promise (Davies, 2014). Third, from a global policy perspective, TCS also has implementation and enforcement roles. TCS spreads ideas and facilitates the voice of marginalized groups, which can lead to changes in the political atmosphere, and impact regulation and law. The impact of TCS on implementation and enforcement of public policy manifests itself at various levels, including the local and national level, and/or international level (Christensen, 2006). One example is Transparency International (TI), created in 1993 to
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 155 combat international corruption through the pursuit of binding global conventions such as the 2003 UN Convention Against Corruption. Its Corruption Perceptions Index helps hold governments and businesses accountable in 120 countries. At the local level, TI offices in 100+ countries design and implement community-based programmes and services to monitor and curb corruption. While the role of TCS in policy implementation has been only moderately successful, monitoring and evaluation is a field of practice where many TCS organizations have developed enormous competence. TCS organizations play an important role in collecting and analysing data about the impacts of policies. This ‘watchdog’ role of transnational civil society organizations and networks is often cited as being a key part of successful transnational problem-solving (Mock, 2003). In the 1990s, for example, transnational civil society played important monitoring roles in campaigns to regulate and certify forest and apparel products (Bartley, 2003). More recently, this pattern has been evident in Transparency International, which can be viewed as most successful at holding government and businesses to account by exposing corruption through its monitoring or ‘watchdog’ activities. Lastly, TCS also plays an important role in policy learning. TCS helps develop and promote ideas that help shape international norms. These norms and ideas may lead to changes in the policies and practices of governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and civil society (Florini, 2000, pp. 10–11). In addition, these changes can also lead to binding international law, such as through the development of human rights law (Christensen, 2006). The Nestlé International Babyfood Campaign (NIBC) is an illustrative example of the substantive impact of TCS on the global policy making process (Batiwala and Brown, 2006). The NIBC identified and articulated the problem of marketing infant formula in ways that harmed infants in the developing world, and mobilized citizens to speak out about their concerns. The ability of the NIBC to mobilize customers in developed countries through churches, unions, and NGOs to boycott Nestlé was critical in gaining wider attention to the fates of infants and mothers. The NIBC used information and expertise to catalyse the setting of new standards and norms related to formula marketing. The NIBC also successfully exerted direct influence and contributed to policy formulation, as it was an active participant in creating the 1981 International Code of Marketing for Breast-Milk Substitutes, despite strong corporate resistance. After the adoption of the Code, the NIBC recomposed itself as a monitoring network to ensure compliance. Its ability to create connections among activists has influenced many subsequent campaigns, and remains active thirty-five years later with the involvement of 200 organizations in over 100 countries. The NIBC is but one example that illustrates the role of TCS in global policy making. Another example is TCS interaction with ‘conflict diamonds’ and the subsequent contribution of TCS to the formulation and enactment of the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme to block conflict diamond sales. Yet the Kimberly Process has been criticized for failing to effectively curb the sale of conflict diamonds. Another example is via the work of the Global Commission on Drug Policy
156 Kelly Ann Krawczyk (GCDP), a transnational initiative that consciously framed itself as a ‘global’, in order to create credibility in the global policy agora. The GCDP was successful in framing the problem, and in proposing policy solutions that resulted in recommendations for reform of global drug policy. Perhaps most importantly, the GCDP possessed ‘bridging capacity’ that allowed it to successfully link global discourse with local implementation (Alimi, 2015). In short, scholars are finding within the global policy domain a rich seam of TCS influence throughout the policy cycle, albeit with TCS influence decidedly more pronounced in certain phases of the policy process. In addition, it is important to recognize that the involvement of TCS in global policy making does not automatically create a panacea that leads to innovative, effective policy solutions—TCS grapples with issues of influence and competence that impact its own effectiveness, as well global policy outcomes.
9.4. TCS in the Twenty-First Century: Opportunities and Challenges Through its explicit contributions to the global policy making process, TCS hopes to elicit greater public control of global governance (Scholte, 2005). Other, more normative goals for TCS include increasing democratic accountability and promoting democratic norms and ideas. Each goal presents both opportunities and challenges for TCS in the global policy agora. The first major opportunity for TCS in the global policy process is related to policy formulation. While TCS is already often accepted as a legitimate actor in agenda setting and problem definition, increasing the participation of TCS in the policy formation stage of the global policy process presents an important opportunity for TCS to deepen its involvement in shaping broader development agendas, and to make sure these agendas actually speak to citizens’ needs. Currently, elite TCS actors interact with other elite actors in the formulation of global policy—for example, during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. This serves to perpetuate the power imbalances that are rife in TCS, and stifles the voices of non-elite actors. Broadening participation to include those TCS actors that work directly with marginalized communities to address pressing social problems will be increasingly important in the policy formation stage of global policy, since these TCS actors have deep contextual knowledge, and engage directly with citizens. The knowledge and relationships they possess must be leveraged to formulate more effective policies that integrate innovative ideas and local knowledge with global realities (Naidoo, 2006). This will also help to restore the balance of power by ensuring marginalized voices are included in the global policy process. A second important opportunity relates to transnational civil society’s watchdog (monitoring) role. TCS is working to leverage its legitimacy and experience to become
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 157 a greater champion for democratic norms and values such as accountability, transparency, equity, and representation at multiple levels. First, TCS has a key role to play in monitoring the actions of governments, the media, public institutions, and private businesses regarding how their policies and practices affect the lives of ordinary citizens (Naidoo, 2006). To advocates, in fact, there is little doubt that the growth and influence of TCS is consistent with the ultimate goals of enhancing the quality of democratic governance and the degree of democratic accountability in global policy decisions. Second, TCS must itself internalize democratic norms and values, and engage in self-regulation to ensure this democratic accountability is reflected in its own policy contributions. A third opportunity for TCS is the prospect of partnerships, both formal and informal, with international organizations (IOs). The ability of TCS to participate in global policy making partnerships has increased over the past two decades, and now pervades all issue areas, all policy functions, all forms of IO bodies, and all world regions (Tallberg et al., 2013; see also Vabulas, this volume). The principal driver for this has been demand for the resources and services of TCS organizations, which can help IOs address governance issues more effectively and efficiently (Tallberg et al., 2013). Although overall participation has increased, patterns of TCS participation with IOs, and across stages of the policy process, have remained stable over time. IOs are more open to TCS in the area of human rights and development, and most closed in the areas of finance and security. Relative to policy issues, for example, GAVI was created in 2000 as an alliance between public and private sector organizations (The World Bank, World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Gates Foundation). It promotes human rights and development by creating equal access to new and underused vaccines for children in the world’s poorest countries (GAVI, 2018). Relative to the global policy process, IOs are most open to TCS in the monitoring phase, most closed in decision-making, while formulation and implementation offer ‘medium’ levels of openness (Tallberg et al., 2013). It is clear there are many opportunities for expanding the role of TCS in global policy making, relative to interaction with IOs, in terms of both policy issue areas and policy process stages. However, these opportunities will not come without all the attendant dangers of co-optation and mission drift. In addition to opportunities, there are also serious challenges that accompany the role of TCS in policy making. As TCS has garnered increased voice, visibility, and influence, it has been subject to a higher level of scrutiny and criticism, and an increasing number of governments, think tanks, and governance institutions are questioning the right of TCS to be playing the important role it has come to assume (Naidoo, 2006). TCS has also come under attack from those who believe it wields undue influence in the global policy making process. One major critique is that transnational activism is essentially undemocratic, and threatens to undermine the nation-state and formal democratic systems by circumventing established procedures for decision-making. Another criticism is that direct civil society involvement in global policy making is unnecessary and redundant, because democratic societies already employ representative institutions that provide channels for citizens’ concerns to be considered during decision-making processes (Naidoo, 2006).
158 Kelly Ann Krawczyk It is clear that the influence of TCS is not without criticism and controversy. TCS faces two specific challenges that contribute to this negative debate. First, despite the contention that TCS provides new spaces where a multitude of voices are heard, shared norms and values are created, and collaborative policy decisions are made, TCS is now accused of doing the exact opposite. That is, of stifling diversity of views at the expense of its own agenda, and subverting the policy making influence of other actors in the global agora. The Gates Foundation, for example, has weathered complaints that its sheer size has dominated health policy relative to malaria research, and has stifled opposing viewpoints and even eliminated the World Health Organization’s policy making function (McNeil, 2008). The core critique here is that TCS now mirrors the elite power and resource structures of globalization, and its organizations represent only their own views, and exhibit upward accountability to funders, versus downwards accountability to those they are supposed to empower (Naidoo, 2006). At its most extreme, TCS becomes simply a microcosm of the imbalances of power, resources, and access that characterize the global policy making agora more broadly (Batiwala, 2002). One way these imbalances manifest themselves is in the relationship between TCS in the Northern (developed) and Southern (developing) hemispheres. Because Northern civil society often provides funding and donor access for Southern groups, the South may feel that such interactions are paternalistic and/or claim to speak on behalf of the Southern groups. Communication barriers also shut out Southern actors: Northern languages are the dominant languages of TCS, and access to information and communication technologies is more prevalent in the North (Naidoo, 2006). Another lens through which to view these power imbalances is through the distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ stakeholders. Direct stakeholders are local citizens negotiating for change in their own communities. Yet global public policy spaces are often occupied by indirect, international stakeholders, who have no direct links with or accountability to the constituencies affected by the policy, and who often have entirely different perceptions of the nature of the problem (Batiwala, 2002). These indirect stakeholders enjoy an ‘elite’ status, however. This gives them more power, privilege, and voice when shaping the policy debate, facilitating and prioritizing their entry into the policy making arena (Carlarne and Carlarne, 2006). This can also be a two-way street whereby direct stakeholders gain legitimacy by building relationships with elite international actors. Similarly, elite international actors gain credibility, legitimacy, and power in the global sphere when they act with, and on behalf of, these local entities. Both sides engage in an ‘exchange of credibility’, and the result is that neither side has to be accountable in their own right as they successfully ‘outsource’ accountability to their partner organization (Carlene and Carlene, 2006). Anderson (2009) paints a vivid picture of how power imbalances can play out on the ground, using a case study of The International Rivers Network (IRN), an international campaign opposed to a World Bank-funded dam building project at Bujagali Falls, Uganda. While IRN had local, national, and global members, only twenty-five of its local members were opposed to the dam project, mainly because others saw it would provide electrification for millions, and the displaced Ugandan villagers felt
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 159 they had received adequate compensation. Yet IRN involvement effectively blocked the project, and afterward, stakeholders questioned whether this result was a triumph of global TCS activism on behalf of a marginalized local population, or simply the triumph of the priorities of elites in Berkeley, California, over the electrification needs of millions of poor Africans (Anderson 2009, p. 170). This example illustrates the larger controversy that has been building since the 1990s, which alleges that serious power imbalances in the structures of TCS are negating its ability to be representative and accountable. A second, and perhaps more crucial, critique of TCS surrounds its (in)ability to affect meaningful change. Despite early successes, TCS organizations increasingly have difficulty moving from the global to local policy arenas, and there is intense criticism of their failure to create lasting, meaningful, and appropriate change on the ground. The literature notes the struggle to create linkages between the macro, global policy arena and the micro, local spheres (Hunter, 2009; Salmen and Kane, 2006). TCS organizations often function better in the global arena, where they are capable of influencing policy goals to align with their missions, but fall short when they become ‘street-level bureaucrats’. This is because they lack the tools and mechanisms required to implement the context- specific, locally appropriate policy interventions that they themselves have recommended (Balboa, 2014). This shortcoming stems from a ‘paradox of global capacity’ in which TCS organizations, in order to obtain and maintain their positions in the global policy arena, prioritize global capacities and values over local ones. Deprioritizing local capacities reduces the ability of the TCS organization to create context-specific interventions, and sets them up for failure on the ground (Balboa, 2014, p. 274).
9.5. Strengthening the Global Policy Making Potential of Transnational Civil Society The evidence presented here supports a strong argument for the legitimate role and influence of TCS in the global policy making process. However, it also reveals critical challenges TCS must address, including issues related to co-optation and power imbalances, undemocratic institutional structures and values, and ineffectiveness, in order to become more accountable, transparent, and representative, and to acquire more direct influence in the global policy making process. Clearly, the ability of transnational civil society to move forward in harnessing its potential, while also concurrently tackling its inherent challenges, is a tall order. What will this look like in practice? First, TCS cannot only focus on the global level. TCS must also focus on local, ‘bridging capacity’ that will improve its ability to implement global policy on the ground. Second, TCS must increase its ability to participate in global policy making by becoming involved in more issues areas, as well as by expanding its role and influence in additional stages
160 Kelly Ann Krawczyk of the policy process. Third, we need more nuanced, rigorous empirical research that allows us to better understand the function, motivations, and priorities of TCS actors. Why, for example, can TCS gain access to certain areas of the policy process, and certain issue areas, more easily than others can? How do power dynamics and relationships between TCS and other entities—funders, IOs, governments, other INGOs—shape this access? Answering these questions will require engaging in more rigorous and nuanced research into TCS, in order to build evidence and shape practice. Over the past three decades, the emergence and growth of transnational civil society, made up of individuals, organizations, campaigns, movements, and networks all seeking to influence global policy, has been tasked with leading the charge in pursuit of a more just and equitable global order. With this broadening and deepening of cross-border citizen action, however, troubling questions have surfaced about the representation and democratic accountability of TCS, and its ability to affect equitable and meaningful change. Within the broader TCS context, grassroots movements—direct movements of, for, and by people most directly affected by the consequences of public policies—have emerged as a potential way to combat these challenges inherent in TCS. These grassroots-oriented movements, formed and led by local marginalized groups, are thought to possess sustainable structures with the capacity to challenge the rights of non-grassroots, indirect stakeholders to lead and represent them, especially in the global public policy arena (Batiwala, 2002). These local, grassroots movements embody both a ‘challenge and an opportunity for democratizing and strengthening the role of transnational civil society in global policy’ (Batiwala, 2002, p. 393). Yet more than a decade after recognizing the potential role of grassroots-driven, participatory TCS movements, there have been few successes in building this sort of sustainable, collective action. As Balboa (2014) posits, this may be due to the lack of ‘bridging capacity’ among the local, national, and global spheres of TCS. National and global TCS actors are skilled at communicating and networking in the global arena, and are able to leverage funding and shape global norms and practices. Nevertheless, ideas created at the global level, and endorsed at the national level, must be implemented at the local level if they are to be successful. It is at the local level where ‘bottom-up approaches meet top-down policies, the results of which . . . differ depending upon their introduction and execution. Indeed, it is at this local level that TCS has had the most difficulty’ (Balboa 2014, p. 275). To address this lack of bridging capacity, TCS actors will need to develop new capacities and strengths. Balboa (2014) points to the need for ‘bridging’ TCS actors who possess the capability to link other actors at the global, national, and local levels. She argues that the core skills these ‘bridging’ actors need to have are embedded in conceptions of a new type of leader, one who has in-depth inter-cultural and cross-cultural understanding; the commitment and discipline to act as an intermediary; and enough power in the organization to influence or change how work is done (Balboa, 2014, p. 276). Her suggestions are echoed in the work of Banks, Hulme, and Edwards (2015), who propose that the bridging, intermediary role of TCS is the key to successful activism in the future. However, they also posit that in order to successfully embrace this intermediary role,
NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 161 TCS organizations will have to view and conduct themselves in a new way, stepping away from their own agendas and viewing themselves as supporters and facilitators of a more deeply networked, transformative social action. The recent work of Tallberg et al. (2013) examines variations in TCS access to policy making within and across IOs. They find two main drivers of TCS access: first, the principal driver is the demand for the resources and services of TCS organizations, as TCS can enable IOs to address governance issues more effectively and efficiently. Second, democratic standards and values in IO membership mean they are apt to involve TCS in policy making. They also explore constraints on TCS access to global policy making relative to IOs, finding that state concerns with national sovereignty are the principal constraint on TCS access, and this contributes to the patterns of variation across policy functions and issue areas that we see played out in the global policy arena (Tallberg et al., 2013). Additional research of this kind is needed to help us further understand what helps or hinders the ability of TCS to engage across more policy issues, and throughout more stages of the global policy process. There are also serious gaps in our empirical knowledge about the function, motivations, and priorities of TCS relative to global policy making. Adding rigorous empirical evidence to our current knowledge base will help TCS increase its legitimacy and influence in the global policy arena. For example, research is needed to help us understand the conditions that will promote normative TCS activism, and what conditions may lead to TCS that mirrors the inequities, dysfunction, and incapacities present in the traditional policy arena. In addition, uncertainty exists surrounding how TCS campaigns function relative to the power dynamics between the various actors participating in them. The assumption of many academics and policy makers is that the beneficiaries of international advocacy actively participate in global policy making, and consent to the advocacy undertaken on their behalf. Evidence presented in this chapter disputes this idea, however, since in many cases, serious power balances exist. Northern partners often have undue influence and control over Southern partners (Naidoo, 2006), and direct stakeholders are often subject to the policy priorities of indirect, international actors (Batiwala, 2002). Finally, much of the empirical evidence surrounding TCS is comprised of case study evidence. Utilizing alternate methodologies can provide more nuanced evidence. Again, the work of Tallberg et al. (2013) is an example. Using mixed methodology that combines statistical analysis with in-depth case studies, they offer a systematic and empirical account of the rise in participation of TCS in cooperation with IOs, in all areas of global governance, as IOs have opened up access to TCS over the past 20–30 years. They ask when, where, how, and why IOs offer transnational actors and organizations access to global policy making. This theoretical basis and comprehensive analysis is necessary before we can gain understanding on other important questions such as whether or not TCS helps ameliorate democratic deficits, and what the impact of TCS is on global policy making (Tallberg et al., 2013, p. 3). The discussion here addresses many of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, yet we are still left with several unresolved issues. First, we do not view the
162 Kelly Ann Krawczyk relationships between TCS and other actors in the global policy agora as entirely collaborative, but see them as having inherent power and resource imbalances, especially when it comes to North–South and direct–indirect stakeholder relationships. This can lead to the co-optation of TCS actors. Second, while it is apparent that transnational civil society has clearly gained status as a legitimate, credible player in the global policy agora, with strengths in certain areas of the policy process, TCS must still overcome serious challenges related to power and authority relationships, democratic structures and values, and long-term effectiveness. These challenges seriously impede the ability of TCS to shape global policy so that it is more inclusive, responsive, equitable, and ethical. When asking how TCS actors can help define social problems, and contribute to innovative policy solutions and implementation, the evidence indicates that TCS already contributes effectively to problem definition, does a moderate job of participating in policy formulation, but often fails when it comes to implementation. One way to strengthen the ability of TCS to contribute to policy implementation is by increasing the capacity of TCS as a local, bridging actor, and by participating in more policy issues and in additional stages of the policy process. This will also allow TCS to achieve greater levels of direct influence in the global agora. Furthermore, as TCS grows and develops, it exhibits increasing challenges relative to competing interests among stakeholders, and displays hierarchical and potentially undemocratic structures with its own organizations. While TCS has the potential to be an equitable and direct player in all stages of the global policy process, it remains stymied by many of the same challenges and barriers faced by traditional actors in the policy arena.
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NGOs, Transnational Civil Society, and Global Public Policy 163 Bartley, T. 2003. Certifying Forests and Factories: States, Social Movements, and the Rise of Private Regulation in the Apparel and Forest Products Fields’. Politics and Society, 31 (3): 433–64. Batiwala, S. 2002. ‘Grassroots Movements as Transnational Actors: Implications for Global Civil Society’. Voluntas, 13 (4): 393–410. Batiwala, S. and Brown, L.D. 2006. ‘Why Transnational Civil Society Matters’. In Batiwala, S. and Brown, L.D (eds). Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Bernstein, S. and Cashore, B. 2000. ‘Globalization, Four Paths of Internationalization and Domestic Policy Change: The Case of Ecoforestry Policy Change in British Columbia, Canada’. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 33 (1): 67–99. Brown, David L. 2008. Creating Credibility: Legitimacy and Accountability for Transnational Civil Society. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Brown, L.D., Khagram, S., Moore, M. H. and Frumkin, Peter. 2000. ‘Globalization, NGOs and Multi-Sectoral Relations’. The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and The Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University. July 2000. Working Paper No. 1. Carlarne, C. and Carlarne, J.. 2006. ‘Credible Government: Legitimacy, Democracy, and Non- Governmental Organizations’. Public Organization Review, 6: 347–7 1. Cashore, B. and Howlett, M. 2007. ‘Punctuating Which Equilibrium? Understanding Thermostatic Policy Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Forestry’. American Journal of Political Science, 51 (3): 532–51. Castells, M. 2008. ‘The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance’. AAPSS Annals of the American Academy, 616: 78–93. Charnovitz, S. 1997. ‘Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance’. Michigan Journal of International Law, 18: 183. Christensen, R.K. 2006. ‘International Nongovernmental Organizations: Globalization, Policy Learning, and the Nation-State’. International Journal of Public Administration, 29: 281–303. Clark, G. 2006. ‘Evolution of the Global Sustainable Consumption and Production Policy and the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Supporting Activities’. UNEP DTIE. Paris, France. Davies, T. 2014. NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Florini, A.M. 2000. The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. GAVI: The Vaccine Alliance. 2018. https://www.gavi.org/about/mission/, accessed 13 June 2018. Gunter, M.M. 2004. Building the Next Ark: How NGOs Work to Protect Biodiversity. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Hall, P.A. 1993. ‘Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25 (3): 275–96. Hunter, A. 2009. ‘National Federations: The Role of Voluntary Organizations in Linking Macro and Micro Orders in Civil Society’. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 22 (2): 121–36. Hammad, L. and Morton B. 2011. ‘Greater Influence, Greater Responsibility: Are Self- Regulatory Standards Effective?’ Working Paper. North–South Institute. International Rescue Committee. 2018. https://www.rescue.org, accessed 13 June 2018. Kaldor, M. 2003. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Malden, MA: Polity Publishers in association with Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
164 Kelly Ann Krawczyk Kaufmann, J. 2012. ‘China’s Evolving AIDS Policy: The Influence of Global Norms and Transnational Non-Governmental Organizations’. Contemporary Politics, 18 (2): 225–38. Keck, Margaret E. and Sikkink, Kathryn 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khagram, S. and Alvord, S. 2006. ‘The Rise of Civic Transnationalism’. In Batiwala, S. and Brown, L.D. (eds) Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. McNeil, D.G. 2008. ‘Gates Foundation’s Influence Criticized’. The New York Times. Myers, N., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A., and Kent, J. 2000. ‘Biodiversity Hotspots For Conservation Priorities’. Nature, 403 (24 February). Mock, G. 2003. ‘Undue Influence: Corruption and Natural Resources’. In World Resources 2002–2004. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, pp. 36–7. Naidoo, K. 2006. Claiming Global Power: Transnational Civil Society and Global Governance. In Batiwala, S. and Brown, L.D. (eds). Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Price, R. 2003. ‘Transnational Civil Society and Advocacy in World Politics’. World Politics. Issue 55: 579–606. Salmen, L.F. and Kane, E. 2006. ‘Bridging Diversity: Participatory Learning for Responsive Development’. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Salamon, L. 1994. ‘The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector’. Foreign Affairs, 73 (4): 109–22. Scholte, J.A. 2005. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Hampshire and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, J. and Weist, D. 2005. ‘The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: Transnational and Global Influences on Transnational Association’. Social Forces, 84 (2): 621–52. Stone, Diane. 2008. ‘Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities, and their Networks’. Policy Studies Journal, 36 (1): 19–38. Tallberg, J., Sommerer, T., Squatrito, T., and Jonsson, C. 2013. The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 10
T he Internat i ona l Civil Serv i c e Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal
10.1. Introduction Historically the idea of an international civil service (ICS) has provided an ideal model of administration in international organizations (IOs). Trygve Lie, the first UN Secretary-General, described the establishment of an international secretariat to support the work of the League of Nations as ‘surely one of the most important and promising developments of the twentieth century’ (Lie, 1954, p. 41). Other observers described the ‘revolutionary concept of an international civil service’ (Owen, 1970, p. 208) as ‘one of the most important innovations in the history of humanity’ (Young, 1970, p. 217). That idealism survived WWII, after which there was a widely held hope that the United Nations would lead the way to a better world upon the foundation of the ICS. On the basis of independence, impartiality, and public service this ‘new human category’ would facilitate an international society of rules, justice, progress, and institutions (Langrod, 1963, p. 24). How does the ideal of the ICS, developed in the first half of the twentieth century, travel to the twenty-first century? On the face of it, the increase of IOs in size and number should mean the concept is even more relevant today. This is also reflected in increasing attention to the work of IOs and their staff, and a growing scholarly consensus that the ICS matters for global policy decision-making and implementation. At the same time various challenges and scandals have led sceptics to question whether the ICS is able to meet the standards of effectiveness, accountability, and transparency expected of a modern public service. Was a true ICS ever viable, or were these early twentieth-century ideas utopian and unrealistic? The ICS is both a normative concept and an empirical category. As a normative concept it has its roots in liberal internationalism and a vision of effective and professional bureaucracy based on Max Weber’s ideal type. As an empirical category it simply refers
166 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal to the staff employed by intergovernmental organizations. It was first developed to describe the staff of the League of Nations, and the UN system later retained the label for its secretariat staff. As such, the ICS is a narrower concept than transnational administration, which ‘refers to the regulation, management and implementation of global policies of a public nature by both private and public actors operating beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the state’ (Stone and Ladi, 2015, p. 840). The ICS may play an important role in transnational administration, but it is not the only relevant actor in the management and regulation of global policy. Other concepts that have been used to describe the staff or secretariats of IOs include international public administration (Knill and Bauer, 2016), international public service (Mathiason, 2008), global managers (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009), global administrations, or simply international secretariats or bureaucracies. These concepts can be taken as synonyms for the ICS, and they are often used interchangeably by scholars. Where the ICS differs from the others is its more explicit normative content. The ICS developed simultaneously as an ideal type and an empirical reality in the League and UN systems. The normative expectations linked to this concept colour both the academic and policy discussions of IO performance today, even though some of this might be hidden from view in the use of other, less explicitly normative, concepts. Building upon earlier work (Newman, 2007), this chapter first revisits the founding principles and goals of the ICS and then examines the constraints experienced by the ICS in seeking to fulfil an effective and independent role. The second half of the chapter examines the state of current research on the ICS, both as an empirical category and a normative ideal. It examines the growing body of scholarship in International Relations (IR) and public administration in relation to the impact of the ICS on global policy, how states seek to assert their control over the ICS, and discussions about ICS accountability and legitimacy. Lastly the chapter concludes by indicating areas of future research and debate.
10.2. The Concept of the ICS The ICS holds an important position in the evolution of international organizations, indicating the emergence of formal, institutionalized cooperation. The classical model of the ICS was based upon both functional and normative thinking. Normatively, the classical model resides within the liberal internationalist school of IR, which sees IOs as the embodiment of the collective will and manifestation of an international society. According to this, International organization is not so much a contrived deviation from the natural course of international relations as a modern expression of some of the perennial tendencies and requirements of states operating in a multistate system . . . a part
The International Civil Service 167 of the political and administrative apparatus of human society. (Claude, 1984, pp. viii, 5)
This view of international relations envisages a cumulative and progressively formalized development of institutionalized cooperation in line with the demands of increasing international interaction, yet one that is always dependent on the political dynamics of intergovernmentalism. The Congress of Vienna, the nineteenth century concert system, the conference diplomacy of the Hague system, and the early twentieth century arms control endeavours all reflected the needs and limitations of the international system at a particular time. Deeper organizational experiments in subsequent years represented a greater normative sense of collective will and greater functional demands, resulting in the principle of the collective whole being greater than the constituent (member state) parts. This was manifested in the international secretariat. For Claude (1984, p. 191): The identity of every organization . . . tends to be lodged in its professional staff. Members, stockholders, or citizens may control the organization, but they cannot be it; the staff, in a fundamental sense, is the organization . . . the invention of the international secretariat may be described as the real beginning of international organization.
Nevertheless, the origins of the ICS were essentially functional. Its establishment was a practical response to administrative demands: in line with increasing international regulation and cooperation there arose the need for logistical support. A secretariat was required to administer and prepare for meetings, to carry out decisions, and to act as an institutional memory. Langrod (1963, p. 24) wrote that ‘[i]t is nowhere possible to administer without administrators. At every level this remains axiomatic. Theories and ideas are added afterwards to a practice already established’. Even if the ICS lacked a theoretical basis at its inception, Langrod (1963, p. 24–5) wrote of it as a ‘new human category’ which was held to personify and foreshadow ‘great change’. One theory makes a comparison with the domestic sphere, where public administration not only results from the functional imperative but also embodies community and collective interest. Bailey (1964, p. 16) wrote that: the two needs which in national societies led to the emergence of independent civil services exist today in the relations between nations: the need for unity, as diverse nations seek to harmonize their actions in the attainment of common ends; and the need for administrative continuity, independent of the shifting allegiances of states.
So for the early supporters, the ICS—in the League of Nations, the United Nations and many other agencies—was the international community’s hope for the peaceful coexistence of states and functional cooperation, a worldview complemented by the liberal internationalist approach to IR.
168 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal
10.3. The Establishment of the ICS in the League and UN systems While nineteenth-century international secretariats were important functional antecedents, the true ICS was founded in the League of Nations under Sir Eric Drummond in 1919. As Drummond explained, [the] old system had not given altogether satisfactory results . . . [W]e maintained that the execution of decisions should be entrusted to people who, being servants of all the states members of the League, could be relied upon to carry them out with complete freedom from national bias. (cited in Hill, 1929, p. 981)
The classical model of the ICS was thus created in support of the League of Nations: an international staff loyal to the aspirations of the international community and theoretically independent from national influence. Contemporary observers were generally very supportive of this, and the international model was considered to be quite successful (e.g. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, 1943). It also represented a progression for the ICS from conference administration to being an organ which was to represent the collective interest. The hopes and expectations of those who supported the secretariat were that, in addition to loyalty and independence, it would reach the peak of efficiency and competence, in the tradition of the Weberian bureaucratic ideal. According to this, division of work, channels of authority, and communication are clearly structured and individuals ignore personal inclinations, applying policy with detachment (Weber, 2013). Another theory of decision-making in the execution of policy, supposedly in the absence of extraneous environmental pressures and human failings, is the ‘rational actor’ model. While not altogether analogous to the structure of international administration, this does convey the ideal of centrally coordinated purposive acts of individuals with clear goals and a shared objective (Allison, 1971). According to these models there are no systemic political problems or pressures—those imposed by the international system, and its derivative, the intergovernmental organization—or any question of human integrity. Thus, human weaknesses such as greed, disloyalty, or laziness were hardly seen to be problems for the classical model of the ICS. Where these are addressed in the classical conception of the international secretariat, they are not seen to be insurmountable obstacles. For League supporters, there was no contradiction between international loyalty and national identity, and the British and French traditions which were informally used in Geneva were felt at first hardly to need codification (Jordan, 1971). The League was geographically restricted in terms of membership, so the issue of the geographical distribution of staff was not a major concern. However, a more heterogeneous membership and the growth of nationalism in the 1930s did have repercussions in the secretariat, and prompted the need for a more formal framework to govern its recruitment and
The International Civil Service 169 operation. A number of League committees deliberated on these questions, contrasting the principles of a genuine and independent career service with a return to the national- supported system. The international model, which still seemed viable and desirable, won the day. The ICS model was continued in the UN system. The Preparatory Commission of the United Nations, at times echoing earlier League committee debates, supported and enhanced the League model. This is reflected in the status of the secretariat as one of the principal organs in Article 7 of the UN Charter, the explicit commitment to independence and internationalism in Articles 100 and 101, and the political role inherent in Article 99, which allows the Secretary-General to bring threats to peace and security to the agenda of the Security Council. The recommendations of the Preparatory Commission were based upon the fundamental principle that ‘[t]he degree in which the objectives of the Charter can be realized will be largely determined by the manner in which the Secretariat performs its task’ (United Nations 1945). The secretariats of other IOs such as the World Health Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, or the International Atomic Energy Agency operate within their particular environments. In aiming for particular objectives, such secretariats embody the aspirations of the membership of the organization in a different manner from a secretariat such as that of the United Nations, which seeks to encompass a broader agenda. But the ethos of the ICS is common to all. There are practical and theoretical problems with the classical model. Ever since the United Nations was established, the integrity of Article 101—which underpins the secretariat’s independence—and the staff regulations have been widely questioned. This deterioration in the classical model occurred as a result of the pressures of power politics in the international system and the manner in which this inevitably came into conflict with the ideal of the secretariat. The conflict at its most extreme was visible in the UN Secretariat in the 1950s. In the environment of McCarthyist anti-communist pressures, Secretary-General Trygve Lie colluded with the FBI to identify ‘subversives’ amongst US staff in the UN Secretariat. Eventually the Secretary-General dismissed a number of staff on the basis of suspicion, as the witch-hunt reached a peak in 1951–2 (Schwebel, 1953). Lie had capitulated to political pressure by cooperating with the United States, yet the strictest adherence to Articles 100 and 101 could have risked the loss of the confidence of the United States and thus jeopardized the organization itself. The price he paid was the loss of confidence and the morale of many of his staff; the secretariat reached a ‘melancholy nadir’ (James, 1971). The early 1950s represented a manifestation of systemic political pressures which always exist but which become pronounced during periods of acute international political conflict. As Green (1954, p. 174) observed: ‘[u]ntil the cold war terminates, international institutions and the civil servants they employ must attune themselves to the realisation that a truly independent international civil service remains a somewhat idealistic objective’. Of course, the reality is that even in less acute circumstances—after the Cold War—the independence of the ICS is far from assured. Many countries have openly used ICS staff as national policy instruments (Pérez de Cuéllar, 1995, p. 154;
170 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal Shevchenko, 1985). How states seek to influence the ICS or otherwise impose controls on IOs is one of three strands of the current scholarly debate, as will be discussed in the next section.
10.4. The ICS in the Twenty-First Century The past fifteen years have seen renewed scholarly interest in the ICS within the disciplines of IR and public administration. Mainstream IR theories during the Cold War agreed that IOs, and with them, their secretariats and the staff working therein, exercised little independent influence on international politics. Realists saw IOs as—at best—tools of their most powerful members or—at worst—‘lofty idealism’ (Northedge, 1976, p. 181), and warned that ‘the false belief that institutions matter . . . has had pernicious effects’ because they could not provide the security states needed (Mearsheimer, 1994/95, p. 49). In any case, realists rarely saw IOs as a worthy object of study. Public administration scholars focused on government decision-making and the implementation of policies by civil servants in a domestic context. Neither discipline devoted much attention to the ICS. But real-world changes have forced scholars to reconsider the role and impact of the ICS. An emerging scholarly consensus argues that IOs, and with them their staff, play an increasingly important role in global policy decision-making and transnational administration. (For a review of IR and public administration studies of ICS, see Ege and Bauer, 2013.) IR scholars employ two different approaches to the study of IOs: the principal-agent approach, a version of rational choice or neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Although principal-agent and constructivist scholars disagree about methodological questions, they agree that IOs have autonomy and can exert an independent influence on global policy, and both have a tendency to treat IOs or the ICS as unitary actors. Public administration scholars seek to understand the ICS with tools borrowed from studies of civil servants within nation states. The largest group of scholars in this field have studied administration within the European Union (EU) as another layer of administration or as a public administration in its own right (e.g. Egeberg, 2006). However, there is still debate about whether or not lessons from the EU are applicable to other IOs. Xu and Weller’s (2004, 2008) study of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the first significant step towards applying public administration approaches to other IOs. Borrowing from studies of domestic civil services promises to help open up the ‘black box’ of IOs that IR scholars have struggled to penetrate, but as Moloney (2017) warns, we need to be aware of the different context the ICS operates in. Public administration theories developed from studies of civil servants operating in an ordered structure with clearly separated powers between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government. Such clear divisions do not exist in IOs or transnational administration in general.
The International Civil Service 171 Overall, the recent debate in IR and public administration can be said to revolve around the study of three related questions. They all start from the assumption that IOs or the ICS are autonomous actors. One group with contributions both from IR and public administration inquire into the nature of ICS autonomy, and ask where ICS influence comes from or under what circumstances it is likely to be greatest. A second group, particularly operating within the principal-agent approach, asks how states can still exercise control over the ICS. Lastly, some scholars examine questions about the legitimacy of ICS influence. The remainder of this section will discuss each of these three strands of the debate in more detail.
10.4.1. How Should We Understand ICS Influence? Many scholars, both within IR and public administration, have convincingly demonstrated that the ICS does exert an independent influence on global policy. Barnett and Finnemore’s (2004) path-breaking study argued that ‘by establishing categories, fixing meanings, and diffusing norms, IOs use their authority to exercise power and influence the world’ (p. 34). Mathiason (2007, p. 18) described international civil servants as ‘invisible governors’ whose ‘primary purpose is to ensure that the global community holds together’. Several studies have examined the role of the ICS in general, or the UN Secretary-General in particular, as norm entrepreneurs in global policy (Rushton, 2008; Kamradt-Scott, 2010; Nay, 2012). Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s ‘Agenda for Peace’, ‘Agenda for Democracy’ and ‘Agenda for Development’ were highly significant in this regard. His (often unwelcome) insistence that the international community be more even- handed towards conflict in developing countries, his willingness to express opinions on the conduct of member states, and his willingness to be directly associated with the use of military force also pushed the boundaries of the ICS. Likewise, Kofi Annan was a leader in promoting new, creative, and often controversial thinking. His promotion of ideas on individual sovereignty, human security, and the international responsibility to protect civilians—including the possible use of military force for human protection purposes—led the way in international policy and academic discussions. The role of the UN Secretary-General, or other international civil servants, as norm entrepreneurs, is an example of a functional expansion of the ICS beyond the classical model as facilitators of interstate cooperation. Recent additions to this debate have described how the ICS can play crucial roles in processes of organizational change or design. The ICS in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the UNDP, for example, have succeeded in lobbying states to expand the organizations’ mandates to include programmes to address climate change (Hall, 2016). Through its involvement in the creation of new organizations like the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNAIDS, the ICS ensured that there were fewer mechanisms for state control and oversight of the new organizations, and a correspondingly larger role for the ICS itself (Johnson, 2014).
172 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal Going beyond demonstrating that the ICS can exert an independent influence on global policy or IO structures, scholars have also started to inquire where that influence comes from or under what conditions it is likely to be most prominent. Barnett and Finnemore (2004), borrowing ideas from Weber, argued that IOs should be understood primarily as bureaucracies which therefore, by definition, possess rational-legal authority. The ICS can augment this authority by drawing on its moral standing, expertise, and delegated tasks. Sending (2014) has discussed how the ICS draws authority from its claim to represent ‘the international’. Yet not all staff working for IOs are in the same position. The authority of the UN Secretary-General is not necessarily identical to the authority of senior management in the World Bank, let alone locally recruited staff in field operations of the UNHCR, and neither can we assume that they all, as international civil servants, exert the same influence on global policy. This is where insights from public administration have the greatest potential to supplement the debate in IR by examining the internal dynamics of the secretariat and different groups within the ICS. Xu and Weller (2008) proposed a framework to examine ICS capacity to influence global policy that takes into account the structure (formal and informal) of the organization, ICS competence (control of information, longevity, technical expertise, leadership), legitimacy, and organizational culture. They used this framework to demonstrate how even in the WTO—considered to be a ‘member-driven’ organization—there is a strong belief that ‘the contribution of the WTO’s Secretariat is essential to success in multilateral trade negotiations’ (2008, p. 49). In a further study of the World Bank’s country directors the pair argued that we need to understand the complex set of vertical and horizontal relationships within the ICS to develop an adequate picture of IO influence (Weller and Xu, 2010). Others have applied Xu and Weller’s framework to the OECD secretariat and found further support for the approach, while emphasizing the key role of ICS expertise (Kellow and Carroll, 2013). In addition to these case studies of individual organizations or groups of staff, an attempt has been made to embark on a programme of comparative and large-n studies of the conditions for ICS influence (e.g. Trondal, 2011; Trondal and Veggeland, 2014; Bauer and Ege, 2016). These researchers tend to focus on the structural characteristics of IO secretariats, perhaps because these are easier to operationalize and measure than factors such as legitimacy or culture. In contrast, we find a number of studies of leadership in IOs, often focusing on a single individual. There is a large literature on the UN Secretary- Generals, enquiring into the origins of their authority (Johnstone, 2003), the influence of individual secretaries-general’s moral beliefs (Kille, 2007), or their contribution to the development of the office’s political powers (Newman, 1998; Ravndal, 2017).
10.4.2. How Do States Control the ICS? While most IR scholars now accept that IOs do have some autonomy, many studies of IOs remain state-centric and primarily concerned with the question of how states can
The International Civil Service 173 control them. Principal-agent literature acknowledges that IOs (agents) can ‘carry out their function independent of the influence of the member states’ (Pollack, 1997, p. 101), but tends to focus on what states (principals) do to limit this independence. The literature therefore offers ‘an indirect picture of agents as seen through the eyes of principals’ (Hawkins and Jacoby, 2006, p. 199, emphasis in original). Asymmetrical information can give rise to agent autonomy as international civil servants hide information from their principals. States therefore need to ensure they have sufficient monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms in place before trusting an IO with important tasks (Nielsen and Tierney, 2003). Another factor that can increase IO autonomy is the presence of multiple principals with conflicting preferences. If states disagree among themselves they are less likely to reach agreement to sanction an agent for misbehaviour (Pollack, 1997). The more state members there are of an aid agency, for example, the more likely it is that the staff of that agency will enjoy autonomy in making decisions about the distribution of aid (Schneider and Tobin, 2013). Furthermore, some studies have shown that agents can actually increase their autonomy through the performance of the tasks delegated to them. This is the case with international courts where states recognize that the court needs to enjoy a certain degree of autonomy to maintain credibility (Alter, 2008). One way for states to reassert their control over IO operations might be to influence the ICS directly, for example through staffing policies. The question of geographic and national representation among IO staff has been a major sensitivity since the 1950s. Initially, the United Nations secretariat and leading Western powers resisted a mathematical formula for geographic or national recruitment quotas, because it was contrary to the global aspirations of the ICS. However, this flexible approach came to an end, and the flexible approach favoured by the traditionalists became an anachronism. In the UN Secretariat a system of quotas on the basis of membership, contributions, and regional representation has been in place since 1962 (Graham and Jordan, 1980). The political nature of recruitment is clearly visible at the highest echelon of the ICS. The UN Secretary-General is appointed on the basis of regional rotation, and candidates are now officially endorsed and promoted by their governments. Undersecretary-General posts are ‘national preserves’. For some government representatives the ICS, despite its shortcomings, is not being constrained enough. Conservative critics like John Bolton, American UN ambassador in 2005–6, argued that there should be no independent ICS. In response to a report by the Secretary-General on peacekeeping, Bolton complained: This is a growing and serious issue, the illegitimacy of the secretary-general’s commenting on the performance of the UN member governments . . . All international civil servants in the UN system are employees of member governments . . . They have no authority to act outside a very limited scope of responsibility. (quoted in Meisler, 2007, p. 205–6)
Recent empirical studies have found some evidence that powerful states, like the United States, have been able to exploit the system to place their nationals in important posts
174 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal within the ICS. Novosad and Werker (2014) examined the nationality of senior staff in the United Nations between 1947 and 2007, and found that small, rich democracies like the Nordic countries were over-represented. Similarly, Parízek (2017) found evidence for overstaffing by nationals from powerful states in a dataset covering nineteen IOs, but the data further showed that very poor states were also over-represented. He speculates that such over-representation from the least developed states could be linked to information needs and questions of legitimacy for IOs with large field operations in these states.
10.4.3. Is the ICS legitimate? The ICS developed both as a normative concept and an empirical reality in the secretariats of the League of Nations, the UN, and related organizations. Tension between ideal and reality has thus been present in the ICS from the start. One response to the gap between reality and concept is to question whether the concept is viable (Weiss, 1982; Newman, 2007). An alternative is to ask how well reality lives up to the ideal, or if things could be done differently. This becomes a question of judging IO secretariats’ performance against the ICS ideal, and it underlies much of the discussion about IO legitimacy. It is natural that the scholarly debate should be taking a turn towards questions of legitimacy once there is consensus that IOs and their staff do exert independent influence. As Klabbers (2008, pp. 169–70) observed: As soon as organizations become more than debating clubs, as soon as they exercise public authority, it becomes possible and plausible to wonder whether they do a good job, or whether someone else would have done a better job. When organizations start to administer territory, or impose and monitor sanctions regimes, or regulate markets, or set standards, discussions will start about how they do so, and whether they do so well enough to merit further support. They operate, so to speak, on the market of legitimacy, and legitimacy, however precisely conceptualized, is a scarce resource.
Several high-profile scandals connected to the conduct of the UN Secretariat in recent decades have served to highlight difficulties in implementing the ICS ideal in the realities of the modern world. The so-called ‘oil-for-food’ scandal drew attention to management problems within the secretariat. This scandal implicated some UN officials—along with private companies and national officials—in financial impropriety in connection with the programme which allowed Iraq to export oil in the 1990s in return for food and other supplies to mitigate the humanitarian effects of UN sanctions. While UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was personally cleared of improper behaviour, the independent inquiry into the scandal pointed to serious management failures in the UN secretariat (Volcker et al., 2005). Sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers provided a further challenge to the integrity of the ICS (Grady, 2010). The UN Secretariat struggled to implement new policies to ensure that all allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse be investigated and
The International Civil Service 175 that no perpetrator would go unpunished. But a difficult hurdle for the Secretariat in addressing the issue is that all UN peacekeepers are under the jurisdiction of their home state, they are not formally a part of the ICS. The member states are responsible for providing adequate training before deployment, investigating allegations, and holding perpetrators accountable. The Secretariat can only urge member states to act responsibly. As with the ‘oil-for-food’ scandal of the 1990s, the sexual abuse scandal gave ammunition to critics who question whether the ICS is able to meet standards of accountability and transparency expected of a public service in the twenty-first century (see Ndulo, this volume). A further challenge comes from problems with neutrality and impartiality, mainstays of the classical model of the ICS. During the Cold War, UN peace operations were premised upon the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and the consent of the sovereign government and other parties. In situations where peacekeepers formed an inter-positional line between national armies this made sense and was necessary. However, a continuation of these principles in situations of civil conflict has come close to undermining UN legitimacy. During the Bosnian civil war, the UN bore witness to a series of atrocities committed against non-combatants by all sides, culminating in a massacre of Bosnian Muslims at the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in 1995, where approximately 7,000 men and boys were killed. A similar case occurred in Rwanda, where signs that genocide was being prepared were apparently ignored in New York (Dallaire, 2004, pp. 6–7). The report of the independent inquiry concluded that ‘the failure by the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole’ (United Nations, 1999). The UN—both the member states and the secretariat—learned from these experiences. The landmark Brahimi report, for example, argued that peacekeepers must be given a robust mandate and the means to implement it, and they cannot be ‘impartial’ in the face of gross violations of human rights. As the report noted, ‘No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor’ (United Nations, 2000, p. ix). The debate on how UN peace operations can and should deal with the challenges of a changing situation has continued into the twenty-first century. A 2015 report highlighted the protection of civilians as a core obligation, but warned that more clarity is needed on the application of this principle and on the use of force by the UN to manage conflicts (United Nations 2015). Many of the problems discussed above concern the performance of IO staff in relation to the ICS ideal. International civil servants, like any civil servants, potentially face serious conflicts of interest in their work. Dilemmas related to gifts and honorary distinctions, financial advantages, opportunities for recruitment or advancement of relatives or friends, relations with businesses or NGOs, and protection of confidential information, occur for both domestic and international civil servants (Malonga, 2012). International civil servants additionally face unique conflicts of interest connected to their status as ‘international’. As ‘international’, the ICS is supposed to be neutral and impartial in relation to conflicting parties, but such neutrality caused problems for UN peacekeepers when faced with complex civil wars and atrocities. Country managers in
176 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal the World Bank also face potential loyalty conflicts in their dual role of representing the Bank to client countries and representing client countries to the Bank (Weller and Xu, 2010). A recent study of two UN humanitarian agencies sought to assess the prevalence of conflicts of interest between the national and international identities of international civil servants among different groups of staff. It found that locally recruited general service staff reported the highest level of loyalty conflict (Mele et al., 2016). This finding cautions us against focusing solely on senior management and professional staff when studying the legitimacy of the ICS. The dilemmas faced by the many ICS deployed in field operations, just as much as those faced by secretaries-general and senior management, will influence public perceptions of IO legitimacy. The 2016 election of a new UN Secretary-General provides an example of how IOs and their staff face additional demands from new constituencies. As the United Nations prepared to appoint a successor to Ban Ki-moon, civil society groups mounted a campaign to reform the entire process. Since the UN’s establishment, the Secretary- General’s appointment has been the outcome of back-room deals between the five permanent members of the Security Council. Article 97 says that ‘the Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council’, and it was decided in 1945 that the Council should recommend only one candidate and no practice of public debate on the process was established. This process seems arcane in today’s world where democracy and transparency are important values. The ‘1 for 7 billion’ campaign (2016) hoped to see the introduction of formal selection criteria, a clear timetable, a public short-list of candidates, greater member state and civil society involvement during the vetting process, a real choice for the General Assembly, and a Secretary-General appointed to a longer non-renewable term, in the belief that this might lead to a more efficient and independent Secretary-General. The appointment of António Guterres successor as UN Secretary-General in 2016 did not meet all of the demands of civil society, but it certainly reflected a more open process. Above all, it illustrated the desire within civil society for the Secretary-General to be a servant of the global public and not only narrow diplomatic interests. Tensions between the ICS as ideal and reality are inevitable. The ICS takes its normative content both from Weberian rationalization and liberal internationalism. As Barnett and Finnemore (2004) also observed, this tension can make it difficult for the ICS to maintain both procedural and substantial legitimacy. Koppell (2010) has further shown that it is near impossible for IOs to reconcile the conflicting demands of accountability—transparency, liability, controllability, responsibility, and responsiveness. In some ways recent developments have only served to make the job of the ICS even more difficult. Not only is the ICS under pressure from governments to adhere to their political wishes, but the media and civil society groups are adding new demands of their own. The classical ICS model did not include public accountability and transparency. Weberian rationalization is a version of governance by technical experts, while liberal internationalism is concerned with cooperation between sovereign states. Early twentieth-century proponents of the ICS could not have foreseen the changes of the last fifty years, which have resulted in a much larger group of more heterogeneous
The International Civil Service 177 state members, as well as increased calls for representation for the peoples of the world. Perhaps the ICS needs to change both its substantive and procedural norms to remain legitimate in the twenty-first century.
10.5. Conclusion IOs, and, with them, their staff, the ICS, have attracted renewed scholarly attention in the last fifteen years. At the same time they are often the objects of criticism from governments and civil society. There are inherent tensions in the ICS concept because of its dual origins as a normative ideal and functional entity. Arguably the ideal was never truly viable. Political pressure from states seeking to control the actions of IOs makes a truly ‘international’ civil service difficult to achieve. Other problems stem from the concept’s adherence to Weberian rationalization, which neglects the possibility that human shortcomings could endanger ICS neutrality and impartiality. As Jordan (1988, p. 41) once observed, ‘the international civil service, caught between ‘global’ responsibilities and national constraints . . . can only muddle along, performing in an imperfect way according to admittedly imperfect criteria of accomplishment’. The ICS is still trapped within this paradox. If anything, recent demands from civil society and small and medium-sized states have only served to add burdens to its already difficult position. Yet at the same time, continued interest in the performance and legitimacy of the ICS, as well as calls for its reform, indicate that many see the ideal as desirable. The ICS is a reality, it exists, and continues to perform vital services in transnational administration, and as such it will remain relevant. But states and intergovernmental organizations are no longer the only relevant actors in global policy. How does the ICS concept, developed within a state-centric understanding of the international system, travel to a (potentially) post-sovereign world? Where does the ICS fit into the new transnational system for provision of global policy? Or, as Mathiason (2008, p. 130) asked: ‘how much of [the ICS] model is still necessary to maintain the credibility of the international public sector’? Is the ICS a more legitimate provider of transnational administration than private actors? If so, why? How can IOs become more democratic? These questions will continue to shape public debate and academic research in the decades to come. As long as IOs continue to play a key role in global policy and transnational administration, questions will be asked about the performance and legitimacy of IO staff. A promising development in recent scholarship is the emerging exchange of ideas between IR and public administration. This research agenda promises to shed new light on the causes, circumstances, and consequences of ICS influence. Yet more attention is needed to the normative aspects of this. There is an inherent tension in the ICS concept between its normative ideal and the empirical reality. Unless we fully recognize this, the ICS will continue to be subject to impossible standards and criticized for not fulfilling utopian dreams.
178 Edward Newman and Ellen Jenny Ravndal
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Chapter 11
D omestic Capac i t y to Deliver In novat i v e Solu tions for G ra nd So cial Chal l e ng e s Susana Borrás
11.1. Introduction With the advent of the Millennium, the United Nations (UN) and other international actors have engaged in a series of reflections about the most pressing social problems on the global scale. These considerations have led to new initiatives with a unique way of approaching global policy making. In this chapter, these new initiatives are referred to as ‘new global governance architectures’ because they epitomize a new approach to addressing collective problems by generating deep transformations and providing concrete solutions to pressing problems. These architectures are the meta-level context of global policy towards solving grand social challenges. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) put forward by the United Nations in 2000, the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the Global Compact, or regional governance architectures like the Lisbon strategy of the European Union, are well-known examples of these new governance architectures. They are new because they approach policy making in a different way compared to the traditional governance based on legal policy instruments, such as internationally binding treaties or on conditional aid/funding from international donors/creditors. Often, these new architectures create specific instruments of global public policy at the meso-level. These can be specific global partnerships between international organizations, national governments, and other actors on the global scene with concrete solution-oriented initiatives. However, the extent to which these architectures and their partnership arrangements have been able to generate the expected impact, and are also generating new
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 183 dynamics among domestic actors solving complex problems, is an empirical question that remains open. This chapter provides an analytical framework to consider domestic impact by focusing on three mediating factors at the domestic level, namely, the knowledge absorptive capacity of domestic actors, their organizational capacity, and the communicative capacity with which they can articulate needs, visions, and strategies. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 defines the meta-level concept of ‘new global governance architecture’, paying particular attention to the different elements that characterize it, and providing some general examples. This section also aims to define the meso-level concept of global partnerships as specific forms of innovative solutions associated with those architectures. Thereafter, Section 3 focuses on one specific case of those innovative solutions, namely, the Product Development Partnerships (PDPs), which work to develop accessible medicines for neglected diseases. This concrete area is one of the grand social challenges in the field of global health. Other grand social challenges include the reduction of extreme poverty, the reduction of CO2 emissions, or better transport and mobility solutions in response to rapidly growing urbanization, many of which are addressed via the MDGs and SDGs. Given their different nature, each of these challenges is addressed by different innovative solutions. Section 4 looks into the domestic context, as a crucial level for the final implementation and provision of solutions. In particular, it examines the responses and proactive engagement of domestic actors in the definition and solution of those grand social challenges. In order to do that, the chapter elaborates on the different types of capacity that are required at the domestic level. It emphasizes that three specific types of capacity at the domestic level are of key importance, namely, knowledge absorptive capacity, organizational capacity, and legitimacy as communicative capacity. Section 5 asks whose capacity is relevant in the domestic context. The argument is that state capacity reflects both the capacity of public actors and public administration, but also of other types of domestic actors. The chapter concludes by highlighting the need to bring the literature of global public policy and of domestic actor capacity closer together, and to consider whether the growing global policy focus on ‘grand social challenges’ is re-shaping the interactions among organizations, ideas, and practices at the global, transnational, and domestic levels.
11.2. The New Global Governance Architectures and Global Partnerships ‘Global governance architecture’ is a concept that describes ‘the overarching system of public and private institutions that are valid or active in a given issue area of world
184 Susana Borrás politics’ (Biermann et al., 2009, p. 15). Global governance architectures are located between the broad notion of ‘global order’ and the narrower notion of ‘international regimes’. Hence, ‘global governance architecture’ is a notion that provides a mediumrange conceptualization of particular dynamics in world politics that cut across some specific institutional elements, norms and principles, but which define the contours of global collective action in some issue area, like forestry, fishery, maritime industry, and so forth. They epitomize a more fundamental transformation of global policy making moving towards more hybrid forms of organization (Kentikelenis and Seabrooke, 2017). These new global governance architectures are largely experimental (De Búrca et al., 2014; Keohane and Victor, 2015; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2012) because they use new approaches (see below) and because they seek to generate concrete transformations addressing grand social challenges (Gostin and Mok, 2009; Kuhlmann and Rip, 2014). More specifically, the new global governance architectures are characterized by three distinct features: they attempt to solve strategic and long-term grand social challenges in a holistic and collaborative way; they focus on output goals of what they want to achieve; and they have particular implementation arrangements combining old and new organizational structures (Borrás and Radaelli, 2011). Each of these three features deserves further attention. The first feature that characterizes the new global governance architectures is their strategic nature. They are strategic in terms of the nature of the grand social challenges they aim to address, which are related to long-term wicked problems (Head, 2008; Termeer et al., 2013), now addressed in a more encompassing and holistic approach. The notion of ‘grand social challenges’ is attracting much scholarly attention (Kuhlmann and Rip, 2014; Eisenhardt et al., 2016) in parallel to the new governance arrangements. The areas of action include issues at the core of the raison d’être of the organizations involved, like the improvement of health conditions for the global poor, the fight against poverty, access to education. These architectures provide a renewed focus and drive for innovative action directly approaching and formulating those challenges in explicit ways. The second particular feature of these new architectures of global governance is that they set up concrete and substantive output-oriented goals. In relation to previous conventional global policy approaches, the new governance architectures formulate the final expected results, strengthening their focus on outputs and outcomes. This output focus means that new global governance architectures also have high political expectations. They provide visions about a possible future that is expected to be realizable, defined, and within a timescale (e.g. by 2015 or by 2030) for achieving that goal, such as those epitomized by the MDGs and SDGs. The third novelty is that they are implemented through combinations of new and existing organizational structures. Implementation combines existing (or partly reformed) legal/regulatory frameworks and funding mechanisms, together with a set of new initiatives, like public–private partnerships, new mechanisms of cross-national learning and peer-reviewing, assessment and guidance (see Cafaggi and also Pal, this volume). These combinations have also been referred to as the ‘orchestrating’ of some actors, most typically international organizations (Abbott et al., 2014). The new global
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 185 governance architectures tend to include new and more dynamics ways of crossnational reporting and monitoring, which focus on domestic advancements in achieving milestones towards the ultimate goals, and on processes of learning at the national level. This contrasts with the traditional monitoring of legal enforcement and compliance, or the ex-post facto impact assessment of specific funding programmes. These three features defining the new global governance architectures—which have become apparent since the turn of the Millennium, in association with the new meta- level approaches to global policy making, which identify key global challenges—are emblematic of the multi-level dimensions in which they operate. The output-oriented goals give a powerful narrative and vision about the expected outcomes, in a way that mobilizes and orchestrates different types of actors with varied resources, interests, and backgrounds to harness these resources and pull together in the same direction. It is important to remember that these new architectures are put forward into specific meso-level initiatives and innovative solutions, typically through new partnerships. Sometimes these partnerships are led by international organizations, but other times they are not. Since they bring together multiple national governments, international organizations, NGOs, and firms around a set of ideas and practices, they might be initiated by some of those actors, and not exclusively by international organizations. For example, Vabulas in this Handbook discusses the role and set-up of traditional and informal international organizations whereas Legrand, also in this volume, assesses the policy functions of transgovernmental networks. Regardless of who initiates, domestic interaction is particularly important for achieving the overall goals of these new architectures. This is because many (if not all) of the expected outcomes promote the achievement of specific goals at the national level. This requires the involvement of various types of actors in the domestic arena, not least of which are national-level civil servants. Some of the most well-known examples of new global governance architectures for grand social challenges are perhaps the set of initiatives around the Millennium Development Goals, the goals defined by the United Nations in 2000, and the subsequent round of Sustainable Development Goals (Sachs, 2012). The SDGs are a set of seventeen goals, which contain in total 169 targets (each with several corresponding indicators to measure progress) (Sridhar, 2016). Implementation is at the national level, as UN member states translate the goals into their own national context. The states develop a specific plan of action that involves budgetary and legislative decisions, as well as searching for capable implementing partners. Monitoring is done regularly. Naturally, implementation is one of the largest issues for success, requiring broad frameworks for monitoring progress and assessing impact (Maurice, 2016; Victora et al., 2011). However, some observers have criticized the high level of ambition of the goals, and the somewhat limited stakeholder involvement in the process that lead to their definition (Fehling et al., 2013). Related to these developments at the meta-level of global policy making, are a series of meso-level initiatives that have unfolded rapidly. These are innovative initiatives aiming at putting forward specific venues of collective action and resources to address specific challenges. The different types of public and private partnerships seeking to resolve
186 Susana Borrás grand social challenges involve very diverse actors and specific targets depending on the policy problem. Likewise, the Introduction to the Handbook notes how one international organization, the World Bank, has convened many partnerships that differ dramatically in organizational set-up and size, funding base, and legal and management structure, with initiatives such as Cities Alliance, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, the Roma Education Fund, and the Global Development Network (Stone, 2013). Most relevant for this chapter is the example of meso-level initiatives aiming to give poor patients in the global South access to medicines, which is one of the grand social challenges of our times. Specific forms of public–private partnerships have been developing over recent years with this aim, as concrete meso-level initiatives to deliver innovative solutions. The next section assesses them in greater detail.
11.3. Access to Medicines for Neglected Diseases Malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS are diseases that affect large numbers of people in the global South, but are still neglected due to the sheer cost of producing medicines alongside the low purchasing power of patients and their governments. Providing accessible medicines for these diseases is among the most enduring and difficult grand societal challenges today, as they require large and advanced investments in R&D, as well as expensive and long regulatory approval processes for authorizing those medicines to enter the market legally. The low purchasing power of these patients (and the subsequent market failure related to that) means that private firms are unable to recoup their investments with the profits requested by international investors. The development of new medicines is capital intensive and high risk, because scientific discoveries are intrinsically serendipitous and uncertain. Another problem is that governments in developing countries lack the scientific knowledge, financial resources, and overall expertise to develop such advanced and capital-intensive R&D investments or to deal with complex legal authorization procedures in a successful manner. Market and state failures are the two simultaneous problems that Product Development Partnerships (PDPs) seek to overcome. By bringing together national governments, international organizations, universities, private firms, and large philanthropies, they target efforts to find suitable ways to prevent, treat, and cure these diseases. They are seen as a specific form of public–private partnerships (PPPs), and have become a topic of particular importance within the new global health governance (Clinton and Sridhar, 2017). There are approximately two dozen PDPs currently operating across borders (Nishtar, 2004; Rushton and Williams, 2011), most of them created around the year 2000. Much of the initiative and drive behind these partnerships originated with the Millennium
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 187 Development Goals, which served as a strong source of inspiration and provided an overarching policy narrative. PDPs are quite diverse in nature (Buse and Tanaka, 2011), yet they are characterized by managing medium-size R&D project portfolios of different medicine candidates, with the ultimate objective of launching cheap and easily accessible medicines for the poor in the global South (see examples below). These targeted partnerships are a serious attempt to create new types of innovative policy solutions and instruments for fostering change in the complex socio-technical systems related to these diseases. Product Development Partnerships are symptomatic of transnational and global forms of hybrid governance (Pierre, 2013; Wolfram, 2004), and in particular of the gradual emergence of new global governance architectures, which are strategic and directional initiatives targeted on issues (Abbott et al., 2014; Borrás and Radaelli, 2011). The peculiarity of Product Development Partnerships is that they bring diverse types of actors (including private actors, public actors, and civil society organizations) into partnerships supported by informal secretariats (see Vabulas, this volume) that administer different R&D projects and market authorization portfolios. In that regard, PDPs are very broad, combining actors with very different resources, backgrounds, goals, and capabilities into an overarching objective. It is important, however, to note that most PDPs are backed up by strong knowledge networks of scientific and medical communities, which have the expertise in the laboratory as well as in the active delivery of health care in those neglected diseases. These knowledge networks and scientific communities operate transnationally (see Sending, this volume) and they drive partnership arrangements. Overall, PDPs epitomize the emergence of meso-level innovative solutions or instruments of global policy making that respond to the meta-level approaches of new global governance architectures. The PDPs do so through the creation of an ensemble of organizational actors who combine initiatives and visions in order to address problems of market and government failure. Likewise, PDPs are also new (transnational) instruments of transformative research and innovation (R&I). Their development is part of an overarching political agenda that sees R&I activities promoting responsiveness and responsibility. Thus, Product Development Partnerships are perceived as instruments of transformation rather than instruments for scientific development on its own terms or for economic growth. At national level this is related to the creation of policy instruments to address grand societal challenges (Chataway et al., 2014; Rogge and Reichardt, 2016), and the growing directionality and mission-oriented nature of science technology and innovation (STI) policy mixes toward transformative innovation (Schot and Steinmueller, 2016; Wieczorek and Hekkert, 2012). Yet, countries’ increasing focus on grand social challenges is still in its infancy. Access to medicines has become a target for global North countries’ aid to development funding. As described below, this funding is an important financial source for PDPs, yet not the only one. For their part, global South countries are gradually dedicating innovation and R&D funding efforts to these challenges (especially South Africa), yet within the scope of their limited possibilities.
188 Susana Borrás There are many types of PDPs in terms of their structures, funding sources, knowledge expertise, regulatory strategies, and interaction with public health authorities (Muñoz et al., 2015). They share similar goals and expectations, but differ on concrete lines of action. Most PDPs focus on developing single types of medicines. These can be vaccines, like the ‘Malaria Vaccine Initiative’ (MVI), or they can be vector control (insects and parasites) medicine, like the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC). Some focus on single diseases, like MVI, whereas others address several different neglected diseases, such as the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) (on Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL), Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), Chagas, paediatric HIV, filiarial diseases, mycetoma, hepatitis C, and Malaria). Still other PDPs focus on the early stages of the value chain producing medicines (the R&D activities in the laboratory and pre-clinical trials), while others focus on the latter stages of the chain (the clinical trials phase II and III, and the authorization procedures, when the drug is closest to being approved and introduced to the market). In short, PDPs are very diverse when it comes to the diseases and the type of drugs they aim to address, and the stages in the value chain they address. Funding for PDPs comes from very different sources. Some PDPs coordinate and manage projects with important public funding sources, like the European Vaccine Initiative (EVI) or donor countries’ aid to development programmes, like the German Ministry for Education and Research funding of the PDP called FIND (Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics). Other PDPs have important funds from philanthropies, NGOs, and other private donations. Examples include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a philanthropy which is a prominent funding source for the PDP called SVI (Sabin Vaccine Institute)); or ‘Medicines Sans Frontiers’ (an NGO which is very prominent funding source for the PDP called DNDi). The extent to which these public or private sources of funding are exercising agenda-setting effects on the PDPs project portfolio management is still an open question. However, it is worth noting that over the past few years, some PDPs have been increasingly facing conditionality requests attached to those public and private sources of funding. The scarce empirical literature about PDPs that does exist studies the collaborative aspect of these initiatives, asking about the different scales—global, national and local— of the partnership formation and operation (Ansell, 2015), particularly on the issue of scaling from specific levels and across them. A few empirical studies analyse the dynamics of collaboration, paying particular attention to power relations in the partnerships (Jobson et al., 2017) due to different resources (mainly financial and knowledge resources). There are also issues about the global-level leadership required to launch those global-scale endeavours (Buse and Tanaka, 2011), and recent studies focusing on the first results of the PDPs (Boulton et al., 2015). This scarce literature about PDPs provides insights into their creation, their institutional framing, and about their global dimension. However, it is very limited when it comes to linking the global and the cross- national policy dimensions (the focus of this Handbook), and the administrative challenges that this entails. The few empirical studies mentioned above tend to pay more attention to the global-level dynamics rather than the national levels. This may lead to
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 189 underemphasizing issues of national capacity and implementation. Hence, more focus needs to be put on empirical questions about delivery and impact at the domestic level (Storeng, 2014). Domestic-level capacity is crucial to solving the grand social challenges. The next section delves into national capacity by paying particular attention to creating the conditions for maximum impact at the domestic level.
11.4. The Conditions for Impact at the Domestic Level: Three Dimensions of Capacity The open-ended strategic goals of PDPs are articulated in different institutional and organizational arrangements at multiple levels. The goals are typically defined as a set of specific objectives to be reached at a certain point in time. They are normally accompanied by institutional frameworks for monitoring and assessing progress at different levels of government, typically the national level. The extensive literature about multi-level governance, policy learning and policy transfer, and transnational governance, provide useful insights to examine the conditions for successful local impact. This literature has highlighted the role of international organizations and non-state actors in processes of transnational policy transfer and in the growing role of global governance, particularly the norms and values which are related to ‘softer’ forms of transfer (Stone, 2004). Hence, the literature has moved from a North versus South and state-centric approach of transfer and learning, toward a wider and more comprehensive approach of cross-national public administration from a global perspective (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012; Benson and Jordan, 2011). Likewise, recent developments in causal theorization about policy learning and policy change look at the multi-scale relations between the micro-level individual learning, learning in groups, and the macro-dimension. These studies explore the logic of moving from the micro to the macro scales of learning and change (Dunlop and Radaelli, 2017). Scale becomes a relevant issue in geographical as well as functional ways (Ansell and Torfing, 2015). Relatedly, the literature on organizational studies has increasingly paid attention to issues of capacity in the context of learning and change. More concretely, the extensive literature on health studies sees capacity and capacity building as a crucial dimension (Crisp et al., 2000; Minja et al., 2011) to ensuring successful implementation. Building from these approaches, this chapter applies some of these items in the context of the particular open-ended, strategic, and combined institutional arrangements that characterize the new global governance architectures: the knowledge absorptive capacity, the organizational capacity, and the communication capacity at the domestic level. First, absorptive capacity is a concept developed by economists and largely used in economic and organizational studies. Put forward in the context of knowledge economics,
190 Susana Borrás this notion has to do with the ability of a firm or any other organization to utilize knowledge that comes from external sources (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Zahra and George, 2002). This relates to the importance of knowledge for business development in rapidly changing market and technological contexts. Firms need new knowledge to transform business opportunities into real market value. Producing knowledge is very expensive; this is why firms rely on combining internal and external sources of knowledge. The main argument of the absorptive capacity notion is that the ability of firms and other organizations to recognize the value of new external knowledge, and to use it in the development of their own new products and solutions, is largely associated with the firm’s absorptive capacity, that is, with the firm’s own level of internal knowledge resources. This school of thought suggests that when organizations possess a certain level of internal knowledge they will be in a better position to understand the value and to utilize the external knowledge that is available to them. The combination of internal and external knowledge sources gives the organization a strong capacity to innovate and generate new solutions. There is a large literature in the field of organizational studies and economics dedicated to absorptive capacity and the diffusion of innovations (Greenhalgh et al., 2004). Absorptive capacity is not lineal, but curved taking an inverted U-shape. When organizations (any type of organization engaged in developing innovative solutions) start using external sources of knowledge, there is a positive increase in their innovation performance (that is, finding new solutions and approaches to complex problems). However, at a certain point, if they rely too much on external sources, performance weakens. This means that if organizations are too dependent on external sources, this dependency will tend to have negative effects on their overall innovative performance (Laursen and Salter, 2006). These empirical findings in organizational studies and knowledge economics are relevant when considering the importance of specialized technical knowledge in other organizational settings, like the hybrid (public–private and non-profit) nature of PDPs aiming at solving complex problems that require a substantial degree of access and use of medical-related and authorization-procedural knowledge. This is also the case for PDPs in the context of health, where technical and scientific medical knowledge combines with knowledge about local health conditions and needs. For example, the clinical trial phase III on drugs against HIV/AIDS, and the challenges of obtaining representative samples reflecting concrete socio-cultural dimensions of health conditions (such as reproductive and sexual habits). Global clinical trial managers need to tap into the expertise of local public health experts to come to grips with fundamental issues. For that reason, such empirical findings are a useful starting point in considering the factors that are relevant for processes of change and learning, associated with the new global governance architectures. The level of knowledge resources, and the absorptive capacity of knowledge at the domestic level, is an essential factor for explaining differential impact across countries. Domestic actors enjoy certain levels of internal sources of knowledge. This is distributed differently across different countries, and across actors within the same country.
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 191 Those internal sources of knowledge also have divergent characteristics and strengths. Solutions to large and complex problems in the field of public health in developing countries require the combination of different types of knowledge and access to various different transnational networks of knowledge actors (Stone, 2013). The degree to which a specific domestic context enjoys internal sources of that knowledge is likely to affect how different domestic actors understand and effectively utilize external sources of knowledge. Put in other words, domestic actors are able to make the most of new knowledge and ideas if they themselves have a certain minimum level of internal knowledge to start with. This is what the theory of absorptive capacity tells us. Its applicability to the context of new global governance architectures’ domestic impact is relevant due to the advanced nature of issue-specific social and technical knowledge. Briefly, the success of PDPs is largely associated with their ability to relate to domestic- level knowledge expertise, combining external and internal sources of knowledge in the provision of innovative solutions (in this case accessible drugs for the global poor that work in their local context). The second factor that is crucial for understanding the impact of those new global governance dynamics at the domestic level is organizational capacity. This concept concerns the national traditions of political and administrative organizations, as well as their interactions with other private and not-for-profit organizations. These characterize inter-organizational interactions and dynamics across the different national administrative structures, and across different organizations in the domestic context. In particular, it is important to examine two aspects: on the one hand, the organizational capacities of individual organizations in terms of their resources and strategies for addressing grand social challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016); on the other hand, the inter-organizational relations, meaning, the way in which the public, private, not-for-profit sectors in that country interact with each other to explicitly aim at reaching those goals. The key issue is to see the extent to which the different organizations that populate the sectors related to specific grand social challenges (health, energy, environment and so forth) have developed explicit strategies, as well as formal and or informal mechanisms for complementing and strengthening each other’s activities. Countries with long-established synergetic interactions between public, private and civil society organizations will be better prepared for dealing collectively with these global challenges and for implementing particular requirements of the new global governance architectures in the respective issue areas. Similarly, countries where those interactions are weak or uncoordinated will encounter more difficulties in articulating suitable responses and courses of action. This is partially related to inter-organizational inabilities to make most effective use of the resources each of those organizations hold. The definition of grand social challenges is subject to political processes like any other issues in international and world politics. These challenges are not pre-determined or exogenously defined, but they are the outcome of long processes of interaction and power. Likewise, the process of implementing them, putting them into practice at the domestic level, is also a process of subjective interpretation and constant redefinition by those involved. This relates to the communication and coordination of discourses and
192 Susana Borrás narratives around those grand social challenges and around how to articulate solutions to them. Legitimacy, and whose voices are or are not heard, also plays an important role (Termeer et al., 2015). Thus, the third factor that shapes the domestic impact of the new global governance architectures is the communication capacity of the organizations. This capacity has to do with the way in which problems have been discursively defined at the domestic level and in relation to the goals of the global level. Domestic actors of different types will only engage in solving challenges if they are normatively justified and if they believe those challenges are relevant to their local constituencies. The grand social challenges defined at a global level are very open ended in that regard. Translating them into a coordinated narrative that has meaning and relevance for the problems that domestic actors perceive is crucial to the success of implementing solutions. Hence, the extent to which domestic actors are able to coherently ‘translate’, ‘interpret’ and ‘articulate’ the nature of the problem and the vision for a possible solution, is paramount for the collective ability to pull resources into the same direction. A broad legitimacy at the domestic level is a building block for a significant domestic impact. Thus, legitimacy and its normative articulation is an essential element in the process of community engagement in research-related activities for addressing grand challenges (Tindana et al., 2007), but also for the endorsement at the domestic level of these global governance arrangements that are based on private–public partnerships (Bernstein and Cashore, 2007).
11.5. Whose Capacity? And How to Analyse it? Traditionally, in the context of public policy, the focus on capacity has been mainly on the features of public organizations and public administration in terms of their resources like funding, manpower, and administrative traditions. The state has four types of capacity: delivery capacity; regulatory capacity; coordination capacity; and analytical capacity (Lodge and Wegrich, 2014). The point of departure within the Lodge and Wegrich framework is a question about the limited problem-solving capacity of contemporary industrialized and advanced states. Their analysis focuses on administrative capacity within public administrations and state-level bureaucracies by arguing that those four types of capacities should be explored in relation to specific combinations of traditional policy instruments. The Lodge and Wegrich study focuses essentially on public actors (rather than a wider set of actors), and on industrialized and advanced states (rather than developing countries). However, their problem-solving approach makes their study ripe for application to issues of global public policy and transnational administration in contexts with intense public–private actor interactions. Acknowledging that problems are large and complex, scholars have associated this capacity with the ability of public civil servants to meta-coordinate and collaborate with
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 193 other actors to generate innovation in the public sector. The centre of attention remains the administrative capacity of the public sector. The main question is what administrative skills are needed to enhance collaborative innovation between the public sector and the other sectors in the economy and society (Sørensen and Torfing, 2014)? These are highly relevant observations about the administrative capacity of the public sector in a context of rapid change, and in the context of collaborative efforts at problemsolving. However, it is also necessary to consider domestic actors’ capacity in a wider perspective, and not only in terms of the administrative capacity of the public sector. This is for two reasons. First, the nature of some large problems does not exclusively require solutions that are designed and performed by public sector actors. This is the case, for example, when market dynamics and other social economic dynamics from civil society organizations dominate the dynamics of solving problems. This applies in the case of neglected diseases given the market and government failure situation mentioned above. In those situations, administrative capacity of the public sector is important but not decisive for providing workable and accessible solutions to local communities. Instead, public- sector actors engage with private actors, such as through mechanisms like the Product Development Partnerships, to solve those convoluted problems. The second reason why we need to consider domestic actors’ capacity in a wider perspective is that the administrative capacity of the public sector is problematic in many low-income and lower-middle-income economy countries. In those countries, it cannot be assumed that administrative capacity will be able to coordinate or meta- govern the design of some interactions or frameworks for collaboration across actors. In many cases that function is performed by non-state actors (civil society, NGOs, private firms, etc). In other words, in countries with weak public institutional frames, the administrative capacity of the public sector might mean that the government is not in the driving seat. For those two reasons, when discussing domestic actors’ capacity, it is worthwhile to include administrative capacity, as well as the capacity of a broader range of relevant actors recognized as participants in a policy community. This is similar to questions about political capacity that have been associated with studies about the effectiveness of new modes of governance. Following Adrienne Héritier: ‘A political process is considered to have politically capacity (a) when a decision can be reached without long negotiations, and (b) when it enjoys the political support of all concerned actors and therefore has a high consensus capacity’ (Héritier 2004). Capacity, in this sense, is associated with the process of negotiations and issues of legitimacy across different types of actors. These remarks serve to turn us back again to our question above about ‘whose capacity?’ The point here is who are we talking about when focusing on the three capacities of the state outlined in the previous section. Usually we are talking about the capacity of the public administration of the country in question, as well as the capacity of private actors, and civil society actors. In other words we discuss issues of domestic actors’ capacity in terms of the respective capacity of public, private, civil society actors in that country.
194 Susana Borrás Therefore, the next question is how to analyse that capacity. This requires a close definition of the attributes of each of the three capacities and of their operationalization for the design of empirical research endeavours. As mentioned, the knowledge absorptive capacity of domestic actors has to do with their level of expertise, technical skills, and scientific knowledge of the areas in question. That could be done by examining the specific skills and professional background of the human resources employed within the civil service, and within the other private and not-for-profit organizations. In the case of Product Development Partnerships, this could be examined by looking into the number and type of health-related knowledge skills among the employees in the civil service and the NGOs working in the area. Likewise, the organizational capacity could be evaluated by looking into the amount of physical capital and monetary resources, as well as their ability to engage in interactions with other organizations outside the national administrative structures. The level of organizational flexibility and its problem-solving approach in the interaction between public private actors are two concrete ways of empirically pinning down the extent to which there is organizational capacity in the domestic level. Last but not least, communicative capacity has to do with the extent to which domestic actors are able to translate and interpret in a coherent manner the nature of the problem. A suitable way to examine that would be to look into the degree of sophistication of the stated visions of domestic actors, as well as the channels that those actors have used to communicate those ideas (discourse analysis or content analysis might be relevant research methods). The coherence of that communication, in terms of the content of the ideas and of the communication channels, would be an important aspect to consider empirically. In the case of Product Development Partnerships, this relates to the communicative engagement and strategies of domestic actors, and particularly of public health actors, in view of the support and endorsement of the concrete unfolding of PDP’s activities in the specific domestic context. Taking the three capacities together, it would be important to study empirically how they are distributed inside any country. The key issue is whether they are distributed sufficiently evenly across the three types of domestic actors (administrators, private sector, civil society). This is not only related to the resources of the actors, but is also about power and dominance depending on the way in which those capacities are utilized in the domestic context. In sum, while domestic actors in public administrations or civil society might have sufficient knowledge absorptive capacities, implementation of transnational programmes at the local level can be de-railed, or fail, due to insufficient organizational capacity and/or communicative capacity. Or vice versa.
11.6. Conclusion This chapter provides a first step towards an analytical framework for studying new global governance architectures that are addressing grand social challenges, and how
Domestic Capacity to Deliver Innovative Solutions 195 its success depends upon actor capacity at the domestic level. The framework provides clues about how to combine two literatures, namely the literature about the new forms of global governance and the organizational literature about capacity. The new forms in the architecture of global governance focus directly on strategic problems in a comprehensive way, they define clear output-oriented goals, and they are implemented by combining traditional instruments and new organizational structures across different levels of political action. They are phrased and framed in a different way than previously. That is, their explicit focus on problems, and their relative open-ended nature, which do not necessarily entail regulatory/legislative instruments, are their main novelties compared to the more input-oriented, regulatory instrumentation of previous governance architectures. The extent to which those new global governance architectures will manage to deliver the expected outcomes is an unresolved research question as well as a practical question. The capacity of domestic actors is a crucial intermediary factor. Domestic actors’ capacity is not understood solely as the capacity of public administration, but also the capacity of other key private and civil society actors explicitly involved in the mechanisms and structures set up by the new global governance architectures to address grand social challenges. Those private and civil society actors have different capacities and resources that might be successfully mobilized together with the public administrators capacities in problem solving. Three essential types of capacities are relevant in this regard, namely, knowledge absorptive capacity, organizational capacity, and legitimacy as communicative capacity. Those three constitute essential intermediary factors for understanding the possible success of those new global governance architectures. This framework of analysis makes a plea for bringing closer together the growing literature on the fields of global governance studies and of domestic actors’ capacity studies in an understanding that global and state levels of policy action are strongly interrelated and dependent upon each other. One final remark is relevant. The role of new narratives should not be underestimated as a fundamental explanatory factor behind the remarkable dynamics of these new types of governance architectures. The large boost that grand social challenges received around the turn of the Millennium, mobilized the imagination and aligned the willingness and intentions of many powerful global and transnational actors. The notion of grand social challenges is essentially problem oriented. Many of these problems are trapped between the two double failures that we mentioned earlier in this chapter, that is, the market failure and the government failure (discussed further in this edited book in relation to global and regional public goods (Kaul, 2019; van Langenhove and Gatev, 2019). The notion of grand social challenges has provided an overall narrative and vision that has articulated specific lines of action by pulling together actors into one ambitious goal. Experts, professionals, and specialists in some specific fields (like health, agriculture, etc) understand the consequences of these two failures. The narrative and vision around the collective ambition to solve grand social challenges has provided a strong legitimating language and symbolic support to those actors. They have mobilized their complementary knowledge resources, and attracted financial resources from
196 Susana Borrás non-profit organizations as well as firms, while shaping new and different pathways to address those problems. There are some sceptical voices questioning whether the real possibilities of those grand visions can be realized, and successfully achieve their goals. However, individual problem-oriented initiatives, like PDPs, have managed to mobilize a wide variation of complementary resources. The solutions to grand challenges will not come at once, but they will be able to make a substantive step forward in very concrete ways, overcoming the paralysis of market-only or state-only initiatives. By pulling together the different resources, and collaborating at the project level, multiple national governments, IOs, NGOs, and firms are engaged in innovative policy design and development. These concrete partnerships, and their very specific project portfolios, might become long term adminstrative structures for problem-solving and policy implementation. For that reason, scholars of global policy, International Relations, transnational administration, and governance must pay increasing attention to the visions and dynamics behind the notion of ‘grand social challenges’. Anecdotal evidence shows that this broad idea has been able to stimulate concrete action among resourceful global and transnational actors to build responses and solutions to problems that seemed intractable a few years ago.
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Chapter 12
Sovereignt y Re new e d Transgovernmental Policy Networks and the Global–Local Dilemma Timothy Legrand
12.1. Introduction Global policy pathologies are transforming the processes, patterns, and outcomes of domestic public policy (Rhodes, 2007; Rosenau, 1997). Vast shifts in international political stability have induced a raft of overlapping cross-border issues resistant to unilateral state action, including forced migration, international terrorism, climate change, economic instability, cyber-crime, and more. These are challenges that International Organizations (IOs) have struggled to address due to their weakened governance capacity and the frequent unwillingness of member states to cede the sovereignty necessary for IOs to orchestrate collective action (Eberlein and Newman, 2008). At the same time, public policy scholars agree that the state itself is becoming decentred and fragmented and as global pathologies intrude on domestic public policy settings, officials have sought new modalities of governance to secure the public interest (inter alia, Cerny, 1995; Scholte, 2002). Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of new ‘transnational administration’ venues of policy praxis (Stone and Ladi, 2015). In these liminal spaces, or ‘agora’ to use Diane Stone’s (2008) term, domestic officials collaborate informally with non- government organizations, international organizations, multinational corporations, and foreign state peers to overcome collectively common challenges (Slaughter, 2009; Keohane and Nye, 1974; Scholte, 2011). Transnational policy, in this respect, can be ‘messy’: there are few formal rules that guide the processes (or actors) through which agreements are struck and implemented. This chapter focuses on one nascent modality of cross-border policy making. The cross-border relationship emerges when state-level civil servants and officials
Sovereignty Renewed 201 interact directly with their state peers elsewhere in networks of their own making, guided by interests of common choosing and using resources pooled collectively. ‘Transgovernmental networks’, as they are known, have attracted less attention than the machinations of transnational policy making in IOs and other transnational networks, yet nonetheless are demonstrably effective in achieving cross-border policy aims. Amongst scholars, there is a general anxiety that we must develop a ‘forensic understanding of multi-level governance problem structures’ (Coen and Pegram, 2015, p. 417) and bring about a shift in focus ‘from discrete actors to relationships among actors’ in transnational spaces (Finnemore, 2014, p. 223) even as public policy analyses of transgovernmental relationships remain in their infancy (Stone, 2008; Stone and Ladi, 2015). This chapter therefore explores the emergence and significance of transgovernmental public policy for modern public administration. Though a relatively unobtrusive activity, it is suggested that this government-centric form of transnational policy engagement may be understood as a form of off-shore bureaucracy: a product of the broader transformation in the imperatives, capabilities, and opportunities of modern public policy making in two key respects. First, globally, the social, political and economic pressures emanating from beyond the nation- state are challenging the long-standing orthodox view that domestic policy-making processes are, or can be, self-contained. The ascendant dynamic of ‘expanding global spaces’ (Scholte, 2002, p. 281) represents a fundamental challenge to nation- state sovereignty and policy officials by suggesting that achieving local policy ambitions requires extra-territorial action. The second dynamic is one of immanent transformation of public administration. In the ongoing evolution of the state, hierarchical and centralized modes of decision-making are gradually making way for new forms of networked collaboration in the determination and delivery of services. In this respect, the rise of a ‘digital era governance’ (Dunleavy et al., 2006) facilitates new forms of cross-border bureaucratic collaboration in transgovernmental networks. Officials not only have expansive access to policy-relevant information from overseas (on policy transfer, see Evans along with Chou and Ravinet on policy design, this volume); but may, where mutually advantageous, coordinate their policy settings with peers elsewhere to collaborate across borders to resolve collective action problems. The chapter commences by unpacking the relationship between transgovernmental and transnational analysis, drawing attention to the methodological dichotomy around sub-disciplinary interests in political studies. The second section connects transnational policy pathologies with the emergence of a global/local dilemma and the inception of network and digital era modes of governance. The chapter then proceeds to describe the global frontiers of transgovernmentalism, outlining the origins of the idea and its distinctiveness from cognate concepts before considering the rapid growth of transgovernmental networks among Anglosphere states.
202 Timothy Legrand
12.2. Transgovernmental Dynamics as an Element of Transnational Administration Research on transgovernmental dynamics has only just arrived at the cutting edge of the public administration discipline (see also Raadschelders and Verheijen, this volume). In their 1974 work, Keohane and Nye describe transgovernmental relations as ‘sets of direct interactions among sub-units of different governments that are not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those governments’ (1974, p. 43). These interactions are understood to be ‘principally horizontal, relatively informal, and driven by the basic need of government officials in one country to interact with their counterparts in another to regulate increasingly mobile and global private actors’ (Slaughter and Zaring, 2006, p. 215). This form of transnational policy interaction is qualitatively distinct from the broader gamut of transnational politicking since non-state actors are excluded. Operating in networks, transgovernmental actors mobilise the resources and powers of states, relegating the involvement of non-state organizations and obviating the crossover problems of state/non-state deliberations. Nevertheless, transgovernmental networks are oriented towards many of the same nascent global challenges and transboundary dilemmas of transnational policy groupings. A series of transboundary policy problems persist as a product of deepening interdependencies and forces unbound from geography or the state—these are ‘global governance’ issues that transcend national borders, transit public–private domains and compress administrative layers. In short, transgovernmental networks form part of the uncertain landscape of international power and public policy. Unpacking the complex raft of governance arrangements active today is urgent; indeed, it is the task of this volume. Diane Stone and Stella Ladi urge public policy scholars to ‘recognize the interconnectedness of different hierarchical and network structures of both a public and private nature at the transnational, international and /or global levels’ (2015, p. 839; also Finnemore, 2014). These structures are diffuse: they are multi- level, multi-dimensional, and involve multiple authorities; moreover, there are horizontal, vertical, and diagonal modes of governance (Legrand and Stone, forthcoming). Amongst this patchwork of governance arrangements, transgovernmentalism represents one important, though largely overlooked, mode of ‘transnational administration’. Understanding the role of transgovernmental networks is significant for transnational administration for several reasons: first, they are largely opaque (Legrand, 2015) and consequently attract little scrutiny of their operations; second, they exclude non-state officials and, crucially, because the networks involve decision-makers, they are among the most influential forms of transnational administration. For scholars, there is a third reason why we must enhance the granularity of our knowledge of cross-border policy
Sovereignty Renewed 203 making: understanding and theorizing the politicking on the fringes of the state has been held back by disciplinary divisions. Political analysts have long diverged ontologically on the separation of the international and domestic sphere: the view that the affairs of the state and the global realms are materially distinguishable and therefore analytically distinct. A theoretical apartheid has grown around this division. In the 1970s, Karl Kaiser observed, ‘because of the ensuing neglect of the processes of interpenetration, overlap, and societal interaction there is no theory connecting the two fields of national and international politics’ (1971, p. 792). Kaiser’s lament finds sympathy in the work of public policy scholars today. Sørenesen affirms that ‘the “domestic” affairs and the “international” context of any one country can no longer easily be separated’ (2006, p. 207). Analysis of how, where, and why transnational and transgovernmental policy making occurs is therefore central to contemporary political studies.
12.3. Transnational Policy Making and Domestic Public Policy Conceptualizing the interplay of domestic and global sources of authority and influence is a relatively new, though crucial, undertaking. It has been claimed that, despite clear intersections between the local and global ‘frequently both the discipline of IR and the discipline of comparative politics continue as if nothing has happened’ (Sørenesen, 2006, p. 207). Yet in recent years public policy scholarship has begun to explicitly transcend the domestic/international cleft and theorize the interplay of domestic, regional, and global social, and political dynamics. Stone and Ladi, for example, conceptualize extra-territorial bureaucratic interactions as a global landscape in which the activities of transnational administration and the object of global public policy landscape are analytically distinct. The former, transnational administration, is understood as ‘the regulation, management, and implementation of global policies of a public nature by both private and public actors operating beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the state, but often in areas beneath the global level’ (2015, p. 840). The latter, global public policy, they propose, refers to ‘overlapping but disjointed processes of public–private deliberation and cooperation among both official state-based and international organizations and non-state actors’ (2015, p. 840). Some therefore argue (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Legrand, 2015) that public administration should relinquish its long-held analytical focus on the state as primary point of reference, a kind of ‘methodological nationalism’. Instead, there should be an adoption of a methodological transnationalism to account for the manifold growth in the state officials’ formal and informal cross-border activities (e.g. see Amelina et al., 2012). This perspective builds on three broad prongs of cross-border policy research: (i) policy transfer scholars who emphasize the motives, resources and authorities of learning policy agents (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Rose, 1993; Stone, 2008; see Evans,
204 Timothy Legrand this volume), who exchange ideas, policy and evidence informally via peer-to-peer networks, secondments between institutions, or passive distribution of policy white papers, explanatory memoranda, legislation, and so on; (ii) policy diffusion scholars who track the structural influence of formal international organizations and emphasize the context of transfer in multilateral global settings, coordinated through foreign policy organs, in international summits—the Group of 7 or Group of 20—and multi- lateral settings in international organizations—the United Nations, International Monetary Foundation, World Bank, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development—or in regional formal settings, such as the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Benson and Jordan, 2012); and (iii) transnational networks scholars, who draw out the influence of informal non-state/state agent interactions that play a leading role in the global dissemination of ideas, norms, and policy in epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1999), global public policy networks (Reinicke, 1999), and transnational policy communities (Stone, 2008). As a whole, the scope of public policy scholarship is thereby broadening beyond the nationstate to embrace a landscape of global, transnational and regional policy practices and cohorts, informal and formal. Transgovernmentalism is both linked to and distinct from the transnational(ism) articulated by Keck and Sikkink (1999), Reinicke (1999), and Stone (2008). In common with transnational policy communities, transgovernmental networks (hereafter TGNs) seek multilateral cooperation to achieve common outcomes, operate on an informal footing, and are cooperative, not coercive. Indeed, a state-level official can be both a transnational policy actor (when interacting with civil society and private interests such as MNCs or international industry associations) and a ‘transgovernmental bureaucrat’ when interacting exclusively with counterparts and peers in official positions. Importantly, transgovernmental interactions are distinct activities insofar as they operate exclusive of non-policy officials, are separate from foreign/diplomacy institutions, and deploy collectively their separate domestic formal authorities and resources to achieve common outcomes. Here scholars have articulated the (connected) dynamics of, first, the evolving global socio-economic context and, second, the transformation of the administration of the state.
12.4. Imperatives of Global Collaboration: Transnationalism, Transformation and the State The roots of transgovernmentalism are apparent in long-standing debates about the interplay and interdependencies of domestic and overseas policy makers. The 1970s saw the emergence of a cadre of IR scholars who acclaimed a qualitatively new form
Sovereignty Renewed 205 of interconnectedness between states. The rapid international exchange of information, global financial markets and trade liberalization, they claimed, constrained states’ ability to manage complex international relations (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p. 27). These dynamics were regarded as simultaneously intrinsic and extrinsic to the state— beyond the immediate control of domestic policy makers—yet intimately connected to domestic political outcomes (Rosenau, 1997). In this ‘transnational’ environment, states were not just interconnected but interdependent (Keohane and Nye, 1974). Cross-border interaction between policy officials therefore became a necessary part of the broadening agenda of state administration insofar as ‘bureaucracies find that to cope effectively at acceptable cost with many of the problems that arise, they must deal with each other directly rather than indirectly through foreign offices’ (Keohane and Nye, 1974, p. 42). Transnationalism, on this view at least, referred to the changing complexity of the state and its relationship with its economic or political externalities. Debates in the 1980s and 1990s turned lexically and conceptually from transnationalism, and its emphasis on state interaction, towards pronouncements of conditions of ‘globalisation’, which captured instead the altered broader global socio-economic processes in which states operated: These processes are distinct, they are mutually reinforcing, and, importantly, they are not interdependence. Interdependence relates to relations between two states, which can be more or less interdependent depending on the level and nature of economic exchange between them. Globalization is a condition. (Kirshner, 2009, p. 41)
Amongst the interlocutors of this debate, globalization indicated the ‘declining authority of states’ (Strange, 1996, p. 4) in which sovereign borders were being rendered irrelevant by the caprices of unfettered capital flows, irresistible cross-border interchange of goods, services, and people, and instant and ubiquitous communication. Diagnosing the state with a fatal case of anachronism, some argued that states should ‘assume a backseat’ and relinquish their long-held regulatory control of markets (Ohmae, 1990, p. x). Thus, it was claimed that that the ‘policy orientation of the state has been pulled away from its territorial constituencies and shifted outwards’, and reoriented as ‘an instrumental agent’ of global market forces (Falk, 1997, p. 129). Unable to exert influence on global issues and incapable of levering regulatory control in the domestic sphere, it was thereby claimed that the state, with all its inefficiencies and inflexibilities, was to wither on the vine (for a summary of the state/globalization debates, see Hay and Lister, 2006). Defenders of the state claimed otherwise. Hay and Marsh describe predictions of the demise of the nationstate, the welfare state, and civil society as merely ‘a series of often overblown, distorted, uncritical and seldom defended assertions about the inexorable and immutable globalization of capital, culture and communications alike’ (2000, p. 4). Indeed, rather than envisioning the state’s demise, some herald its transformation: ‘Far from globalisation leading to the “end of the state,” it is stimulating a range of government and governance strategies and, in some fundamental respects, a more activist
206 Timothy Legrand state’ (Held et al., 2000, p. 28). Nonetheless, though the public policy literature broadly recognizes the power of global forces to transform the capacity of the state to act, it is also recognized that a series of transformations in the structures of the state have altered the mechanisms, logics, and agents involved in policy making, principally (i) growth in cross-border policy pathologies; and (ii) a concurrent set of immanent changes to the structures and processes of public administration.
12.4.1. Transnational Pathologies and the Global/Local Dilemma Against this backdrop of turbulent, muscular global forces, and evolving systems of state, administration is a series of cross-border policy challenges. Products of changing state and global structures, transnational pathologies must be understood, addressed, mitigated, or managed by state officials. Some of these challenges proceed from the rapid march of technology: most prominently perhaps, the emergence of the internet and digital infrastructures more broadly has not only created new economic opportunities but, as noted below, has driven a ‘Digital Era Governance’ and transformed the relationships of and between society, media, the state, and the political class. Yet, the digital era also ushers in a new class of transnational vulnerabilities that routinely transgress national borders. Cyber space hosts new vectors of criminality including, amongst many others, fraud and identity theft, the exploitation of intellectual property, the dissemination of child pornography, and violent extremist radicalization. Digital technologies make these threats potentially global in origin, but local in their outcome, requiring states to think collaboratively when attempting to impose regulatory controls. Other challenges proceed from the increased cross-border travel that is connected to the ease of economic migration and tourism, such as pandemics like SARS, swine flu, and the Ebola virus. With increased global trade, we have witnessed commensurate increases in opportunistic piracy in the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, and the Horn of Africa. The rise of international terrorism has prompted direct threats of extremist violence in addition to secondary transnational challenges, such as refugees fleeing conflict in Myanmar, Iraq, and Syria. Environmental challenges, such as human-induced climate change, augur a future of mega-disasters, failing crops, and mass population migration to avoid sea-level rises or pursue alternative employment. As the global financial crisis has shown, global economic instability can proceed from the unrestrained, or unregulated, risk-taking of often domestically focused financial market operators. It is against this backdrop of border-crossing challenges that the global/local dilemmas of public administration emerge. These challenges are global, or at least potentially global, in ways made possible by emergent technologies, politics, and governance challenges. Yet because they are transnational, states are often unable to tackle them unilaterally. Instead states must engage in transnational administration, which
Sovereignty Renewed 207 is both necessarily detached from the state and impromptu, as Castells suggests: ‘The process of globalization has shifted the debate from the national domain to the global debate, prompting the emergence of a global civil society and of ad hoc forms of global governance’ (2008, p. 78).
12.4.2. Governing the Global/Local The New Public Management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were intended to replace the inefficiencies of state administration of public services with the lean instincts of the private sector. The emphasis on managerialism and marketization (see Hood, 1996) and the associated relinquishing of service delivery, was just one early symptom of a deeper structural change underway in the relationship between the state and society during the 1980s. Sovereignty, it was argued, was becoming slowly disaggregated, seeping away from core state organs ‘sideways’ into the private sector, devolved ‘downwards’ to local and regional bodies, and ‘upwards’ to international organizations. Thus, the NPM reforms fundamentally reshaped or ‘hollowed out’ the state’s capacity to deliver public outcomes, inducing a change in the patterns of public administration that increasingly emphasized a diffuse governance perspective, rather than hierarchical government lens. Governance occurs where officials pursue new modes of policy, regulation, and law making to achieve domestic interests through self-organizing, inter-organizational networks (Bevir and Rhodes, 2007; Rhodes, 2007). On this perspective of the transformed state, the ‘linear, autonomous conception of governing had been replaced by far more complex arrangements for making and delivering policy’ (Peters and Pierre, 2006, p. 220). Networks consist of interdependent actors, in an exchange of resources and negotiated common aims. Interactions are predicated on a mutual trust, with autonomy from the centralized coordination of the state (Rhodes, 2007). In the years following the NPM reforms, a second important shift occurred concerning the role of technology, specifically the digitization of government and service delivery. Reflecting on the tranformations that ensued from the uptake of digital technologies, Dunleavy et al. (2006) argue that New Public Management, conceptually and normatively, could no longer encapsulate modern governance. Contemporary public administration, they suggest, should be characterized as Digital Era Governance, whereby the ‘growth of the Internet, e-mail, and the web, and generalization of IT systems from affecting back-office processes only to conditioning in important ways the whole terms of relation between government agencies and civil society’ (my emphasis). On this view, Digital Era Governance captures ‘the central role that IT and information system changes now play in a wide-ranging series of alterations in how public services are organized as business processes and delivered to citizens or customers’ (Dunleavy et al., 2006, p. 468). Digitization also represents a channel of communication, both within and beyond the state, which facilitates a new interface
208 Timothy Legrand within organizations, between organizations, and between clients and organizations across the world: Digital era changes have already triggered numerous significant shifts—a large-scale switchover to e-mail in internal and external communications; the rising salience of websites and intranets in organizational information networks; the development of electronic services for different client groups; the growth of electronic procurement systems; a fundamental transition from paper-based to electronic record-keeping and so on. (Dunleavy et al., 2006 p. 479)
In recent years, the digital era has been augmented by the embedding of social media in social, economic, and political discourse, in which it has come to function as an immediate, unfiltered and unbounded channel of public/private communication and information-sharing. Digitization represents a radical shift in states’ modes of communication, organization, and information sharing, and has made possible qualitatively new interactions between local and foreign policy officials to a degree not previously possible. We see such dynamics increasingly at play in many aspects of cross-border cooperation.
12.5. Between States, Beyond Institutions: Transgovernmental Networks The initial conceptual development of transgovernmentalism emerged from the work of International Relations scholars. Interest in informal networks forged between and by domestic policy officials was pioneered by prominent IR theorists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1974). Rising interdependency between states, they argued, meant that domestic officials were increasingly induced to reach out directly to their foreign counterparts. They designated these interactions ‘transgovernmental’. Operating in relative autonomy from higher authorities, transgovernmental relations are defined as ‘direct interactions among governmental subunits not directly controlled or closely guided by policies of the cabinet or chief executive’, and conceptually ‘transgovernmental’ applies when we relax the assumption that states act as units” (1974, p. 42). Broadly, Keohane and Nye posited two forms of cooperative behaviour between state officials: (i) transgovernmental policy coordination and (ii) transgovernmental coalition building (p. 44). The former refers to informal interaction, wherein ‘regularized interaction’ can produce change in attitudes, reinforced by common professional memberships, leading to marginal policy changes, ‘evident particularly in relations between close allies or associates, for instance between the United States and Canada or among countries of the British Commonwealth’ (p. 45). Around the same time, a large swathe
Sovereignty Renewed 209 of North American scholarship followed suit. (See also Russell, 1973; Keohane and Nye, 1974); Sundelius, 1977), including a large empirical focus on US–Canada relations (Holsti and Levy, 1974). In recent years, the concept of transgovernmentalism has attracted renewed interest. For its interlocutors, ‘a disaggregated perspective on domestic state structure’ (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p. 27) is key to understanding the emergence of informal cross- border networks of domestic officials where, so it is claimed, ‘courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures’ operate in networks with overseas counterparts, ‘creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order’ (Slaughter, 1997, p. 184). On this view, ‘transgovernmental’ networks are convened by state officials as an instrument of collective action to overcome common policy challenges (Keohane and Nye, 1974) regulatory problems (Slaughter, 2009; Eberlien and Newman, 2008), and they use the networks to ‘share best practices, coordinate policies, harmonize regulations, and provide mutual enforcement assistance’ (Bach and Newman, 2014, p. 395). Anne-Marie Slaughter’s A New World Order (2009) posits a growing global matrix of government networks convened to address common transnational policy challenges: Networks of government officials—police investigators, financial regulators, even judges and legislators—increasingly exchange information and coordinate activity to combat global crime and address common problems on a global scale. (2009, p. 1)
As ‘necessarily informal’ arrangements, transgovernmental networks have no legal, regulatory or treaty-based existence (2009, p. 38), even while they bring together officials with prominent formal regulatory and legal duties: [T]ransgovernmental groups are composed of actors with domestic regulatory authority. Often empowered to reprimand noncompliance, levy fines, or bar market access, network members enter negotiations or enforcement activities with real regulatory power. Far from simply participants in a discussion, such networks use their expertise to frame agendas and then leverage their delegated domestic authority to rally support and manage compliance. (Eberlien and Newman, 2008, p. 36)
Scholars have charted a range of policy domains in which TGNs are active among geographic, cultural, political and regulatory groupings, including the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Slaughter, 1997; 2009), global financial architecture (Baker, 2009), national and subnational human rights institutions (Wolman, 2015), the political grouping of the European Union (Eberlein and Newman, 2008), and national groupings of the Nordic region (Sundelius, 1977) and the Anglosphere (Legrand, 2015, 2016). TGNs have been identified across the European Union by a number of scholars. Frequently, TGNs in the EU have been depicted as being a means by which to evade the querulous sovereignty questions that have plagued the European Union, most prominently ahead of the UK’s referendum to leave the EU in 2016. This is described as an
210 Timothy Legrand emerging ‘top-down activism’ by Eberlein and Newman: ‘top-down activism, as international organizations attempt to assuage state concerns in politically sensitive issue areas where a sovereignty transfer would involve significant redistribution and challenge well-entrenched national policies’ (emphases in original, Eberlien and Newman, 2008, p. 35). Hollis argues security TGNs between EU member states can overcome the ‘resistance of member states to concede political authority to the EU’ (2010, p. 314). This swathe of emerging scholarship underlines how informality in regulation spans the EU, reflecting and extending earlier insights on policy transfer as a gradual, informal mode of coordination (i.e. Radaelli, 2000). This body of scholarship also shows how informal networking can coexist alongside and within formal decision-making processes, operating as a means to overcome the reticence of member states who fear ‘the supranational concentration of power’ in the EU (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p. 26).
12.5.1. Transgovernmental Networks in the Anglosphere Transgovernmental interactions are becoming apparent in distinctive configurations of states, including Francophone, Lusophone, Nordic, and Anglosphere countries (Legrand, 2012, 2015, 2016; See Sundelius, 1977). These configurations tend to have deep historical, geographic, cultural, and linguistic associations. Research on Anglosphere linkages is particularly instructive. Legrand (2015, 2016) charts the emergence of a range of transgovernmental relations between such states, particularly the ‘core’ countries with a ‘special bond’ of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States (Vucetic, 2011). These are states with long-standing cultural, historical and political linkages stemming from the era of colonialism and the stickiness of the institutions of liberal democracy. They are English-speaking, culturally adjoined, common- law countries with shared liberal democratic norms, a strong civil society, Westminster political heritage (except the US), free markets, and long-standing military cooperation (i.e. Legrand, 2015; Wellings and Baxendale, 2015). Legrand has described the contours of the emerging system of transgovernmental collaboration. Led by ministers or senior policy officials, in the past fifteen years these ‘Anglosphere’ networks have co-produced policy settings with substantive outcomes for domestic publics via an ‘architecture’ of transgovernmental policy networks. Anglosphere policy networks are constituted by networks of elite officials who have become adept in coordinating, transferring, and co-producing law, policy, and legal settings on an extraordinary range of common cross-border policy challenges, from security, policing, and justice to immigration, border security, and cyber-security. Legrand (2015, 2016) reports how, since 2001, this extraordinary architecture of Anglosphere network collaboration has grown to cover thirty-six networks and sub-networks (exclusive to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US), involving ~140 departments, agencies or regulatory authorities and ~1500 Anglosphere policy officials. A cross-section of agencies involved in Anglosphere policy networking is illustrative of the extent and depth of policy collaboration across (i) justice, (ii) immigration and
Sovereignty Renewed 211 borders, (iii) security, and beyond. In justice policy, the five countries’ chief law officers have formed the self-styled ‘Quintet of Attorneys-General’, which is linked to subsidiary networks in policing, such as the ‘Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group’, ‘Criminal Intelligence Advisory Group’; ‘Money Laundering Group’; and ‘Cyber Crime Working Group’. In immigration and border policy, the Five Country Conference—established in 2008—has evolved into several networks servicing policy and operational imperatives, including the Migration 5 (or ‘M5’: immigration policy) alongside ‘Border Five’ (or ‘B5’: customs and excise policy). Linked to these are subsidiary networks, such as the Five Nations Passport Conference (the Five Countries Passport Group) and Five Country Citizenship Conference. Second, in national security, a ‘Five Country Ministerial’ has been established, which is linked to networks governing critical infrastructure (‘the Critical Five’) and cyber security (‘The Ottawa Five’). Finally, assorted other networks include the Six Countries Benefit Fraud Group (‘Windsor Arrangement’) and the International Heads of Child Support Meeting, and the ‘Senior International Forum’ and ‘Ministerial Summit’ of Veteran’s Affairs portfolios. The dynamics of these transgovernmental networks are instructive. Legrand (2015, 2016) reports how these transgovernmental arrangements are led by elite domestic officials (e.g. Ministers, Secretaries and Chief Executive Officers). As informal vehicles of transgovernmental collaboration, Anglosphere Policy Networks (hereafter APNs) operate at varying levels and intensities of engagement. Variously, APNs operate: • continually/periodically as channels of government coordination amongst the five states; • to establish shared ‘five country’ policy narratives (e.g. countering violent extremism, critical infrastructure protection); • to form novel ‘supranational institutions’ (e.g. immigration and border protection), synchronizing policy (e.g. cyber security, extradition); • to transfer best practices (e.g. counter-terrorism) and real-time sharing of information and intelligence (e.g. immigration fraud, cyber security).
12.6. Rationalizing the Rise and Resonance of TGNs There are multiple explanations for both the emergence of TGNs and their function in modern transnational public administration. Some claim that TGNs fulfil a functional purpose in resolving dilemmas of the international system. After WWII, the development of a formal system of liberal international institutions—such as the United Nations and World Bank—was intended to act as bulwark against future international disputes turning violent and to promote better cross-border collaboration in resolving collective action problems. Yet despite such principled aims
212 Timothy Legrand and some prominent successes, IOs have attracted criticism for frequent failures in resolving collective problems and acting, it is argued, as proxies for their most powerful state contributors. IO failures stem from the unwillingness of states to cede the authority necessary to resolve global collective action problems. As such, a dilemma emerges because, while it is understood that, ‘under conditions of interdependence, institutions are essential if people are to have opportunities to pursue the good life’ (Keohane, 2001, p. 1), powerful institutions still have the potential to ‘foster exploitation or even oppression’ (p. 246). TGNs therefore have emerged as an acceptable solution to the ‘globalization paradox’ in which, according to Slaughter, ‘We need more government on a global and a regional scale, but we don’t want the centralization of decision-making power and coercive authority so far from the people actually to be governed’ (Slaughter, 2009, p. 9). In this ‘international governance dilemma’ (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p. 30) networks have emerged as a necessary, though problematic, response: The governance dilemma thus becomes a tri-lemma: we need global rules without centralized power but with government actors who can be held to account through a variety of political mechanisms. These government actors can and should interact with a wide range of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but their role in governance bears distinct and different responsibilities. They must represent all their different constituencies, at least in a democracy; corporate and civic actors may be driven by profits and passions, respectively. “Governance” must not become a cover for the blurring of these lines, even if it is both possible and necessary for these various actors to work together on common problems. (Slaughter, 2009, p. 10)
In this respect, transgovernmental networks emerge to bridge the governance gap between states and international organizations. Since informal networks do not transgress sacred national sovereignties, they have the flexibility to adapt to changing policy challenges and avoid the frictions of formal deal-making. TGNs can therefore potentially operate as a bulwark for state power, a means to safeguard state sovereignty from erosive global forces through a collective enterprise secured on an informal handshake with few of the legal constraints imposed by formal treaties. Scholars identify a range of structural drivers facilitating the rise of TGNs. In their original articulation, Keohane and Nye argued that public administration is beset by complex ‘expanding decision domains’ that drive new forms of cross-border coordination. For others, domestic drivers are key, whereby ‘regulation and sector dynamics create powerful demands for transgovernmental cooperation’ (Bach and Newman 2014, p. 396), or by ‘The imperative to coordinate across borders to resolve collective action problems’ (Eberlein and Newman, 2008, p. 33). Agency-oriented explanations draw attention to the instrumental utility of TGNs, acting as an attractive means for officials to exchange information, share policy ideas, and coordinate regulatory mechanisms. In some circumstances, further, TGNs can operate as an instrument promoting democratic principles. Examining the relationship between EU and Middle East regulators, for example, Freyburg (2011) explains: ‘In this
Sovereignty Renewed 213 perspective, norms and practices of democratic administrative governance are transferred indirectly, as a side-effect of joint problem-solving’ (2011, p. 1005). Finally, it is claimed that the intrinsic qualities of TGN collaboration are attractive to policy officials: specifically, the informality and flexibility of ‘soft’ agreements evades the need for the lengthy formal making of treaties, which are cumbersome and slow to adapt to changing needs. ‘By embedding these networks formally within international law’, Ebelien and Newman suggest, ‘this speed and flexibility may be leveraged to coordinate supranational goals’ (2008, p. 36).
12.7. Concerns of Democratic Legitimacy in TGNs Normatively, transgovernmental networks present some concerns. They tend to be informal and exclusive, and, as such, they represent for some scholars the erosion of public participation, transparency, and legitimacy in democratic policy making (Skogstad, 2003) or potentially a form of ‘global governance by stealth’ (Scholte, 2011, p. 111). In TGNs, officials pursue domestic policy outcomes offshore, off the books, and beyond scrutiny, raising the prospect of ‘agencies on the loose’, separate from the accountability structures of domestic institutions (Slaughter, 2009, p. 48). Indeed, Baker posits ‘participatory deficits’ in TGNs embedded in global financial architecture (2009).
12.7.1. From Policy to Transgovernmental Administration: The Five Countries Conference The administrative practices of TGNs have substantive outcomes. The strategic agreements reached between senior policy officials, usually in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or Statement of Intent, provide the footing for subsequent transnational ‘real-world’ administrative practices. The Five Countries Conference is an instructive example of such practices. This is a transgovernmental arrangement involving the immigration and border agencies of the five Anglosphere states, established in 2008; initially self-styled as the Four Country Conference with Australia, Canada, the UK and US as members, then subsequently renamed the Five Countries Conference (FCC) after New Zealand joined the collaboration. Under this arrangement, two distinctive networks operate in tandem addressing shared immigration, borders, trade, and customs challenges: the Migration 5 (M5) and the Border 5 (B5). Described in a Statement of Intent as ‘a non-formal grouping at official level’ (Five Country Conference, undated), the networks operate on the basis of an MOU—an arrangement that ‘expresses an intention but which will not be legally binding’ (Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection,
214 Timothy Legrand undated). Operating independently of foreign or state departments, the M5 and B5 network arrangement promotes collaboration at multiple levels of border security and administration. The M5 network is an operational global collaboration with shared issues of concern, targeting cross-border issues such as human trafficking, people smuggling, organized identity fraud, bogus marriages, funds transfers, and fraudulent refugee applications. This is achieved in practice by extensive information-and function-sharing. According to the FCC agreements, information-sharing ‘assists in the regulation’ of travel: determining the eligibility of individuals to ‘enter, or remain in, one of the five countries’; and aids the five countries to ‘disrupt or prosecute’ individuals seeking to evade immigration controls, identity fraud, human trafficking, people smuggling, bogus marriages, cash transfer, fraudulent visa services, and more. Information-sharing is made possible through a digital infrastructure: immigration officials undertake the automated exchange of fingerprints and biometrics through the ‘Five Country Joint Enrollment and Information-Sharing Project’, described as a means to improve national security through ‘a new, systematic, and long-term information-sharing project with trusted partner nations for immigration purposes’ (Department of Homeland Security, 2017). A second platform, the ‘Trend Sharer’ collates and dispenses data among the M5 on emerging trends and risks, including, for example, immigration fraud, visa overstayers, and entry-refusals. This platform facilitates intelligence-based targeting for immigration officials across the M5. Function-sharing occurs through another initiative: the FCC Shared Visa Application Centres. These Centres operate as single point of application for all Anglosphere borders agencies: By working together under the aegis of the 5CC, the border control agencies will collectively aim to counter some of the common challenges around global migration by sharing best practice and coordinating their response to these challenges. (VFS Global, 2013)
The collaboration between the M5 and B5 is managed via the ‘FCC Secretariat’, which acts as the records manager and auditor of information exchange. The Secretariat acquits a variety of functions: it administers secure data-exchange through secure digital channels, determines common approaches to information collection, disseminates FCC-branded materials, coordinates regular meetings, visits, personnel exchanges, and shared training initiatives; and produces an FCC annual report. These ‘everyday practices’ paint a picture of extensive collaboration between these immigration and border agencies that extends far beyond policy coordination. The extensive institutional consolidation resembles its own institutional form: an independent information-sharing and intelligence-generating system, coordinated through a dedicated secretariat with shared protocols, training and branding. This is a collaboration that is thoroughly twenty-first century governance, reflecting both new policy concerns and possibilies. Indeed, Digital Era Governance features prominently in the everyday administration and coordination of these networks. New technologies are embedded
Sovereignty Renewed 215 in network collaboration, including video-conferencing, shared databases and email, in addition to in situ annual conferences, secondments and embedding of senior officials (Legrand, 2015, 2016). This form of transgovernmental collaboration is made possible not only by technologies, but by governments’ understanding of digital technology’s capabilities and willingness to operationalize an administrative collaboration with like- minded agencies.
12.8. Conclusion Three elements of the foregoing discussion seem worthy of reflection. First, the proposition that public officials are at a loss to manage transnational policy problems is over-wrought. The innuendo of such claims is that twenty-first century public servants, beleaguered by the pace of technological, social, and political change, are embroiled in a qualitatively new struggle to maintain policy control in the face of a turbulent world. A brief review of civil servants’ writings knocks this sentiment squarely on the head. Writing in the 1960s, E.N. Gladden warns of impending ‘radical’ reforms required in a ‘rapidly changing environment’ facing the UK civil service. ‘Since 1960’, he suggests, ‘administrative changes have been hectic’. This is no less the case more than fifty years on; indeed, it seems that state administrators are embracing their rapidly changing environment by harnessing, in particular, technological solutions to resolve nascent global administrative challenges. Second, acknowledging transnational dimensions of policy making is central to our knowledge of policy making at all levels, since the practices of policy makers—from how policy problems are constructed and understood to the construction of ideas and ideas to produce policy outcomes—fundamentally influence decision-making of public importance. As Michael Lipsky famously asserts in his seminal work on policy implementation, Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980), ‘the decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become the public policies they carry out’ (emphases in original, 1980, p. xiii). If we invert Lipsky’s survey of street-level bureaucracy and shift our analysis upwards towards the decisions, routines, and devices of bureaucrats operating in transnational spaces, a new domain of what might be termed off-shore bureaucracy is apparent. As with street-level bureaucrats, these transnational forms of policy enterprise subvert linear or hierarchical models of a purely domestic policy process and affirm the contextual importance of implementation in policy making. Finally, transgovernmentalism provokes new questions around sovereignty. If we accept the assertion that states are, broadly, being stretched by cross-border structural trends, with MNCs taking advantage of mismatched tax laws, or criminal organizations flourishing in the gaps between policing jurisdictions, then TGNs offer a real solution to state officials who find formal multilateral cooperation cumbersome and unilateral
216 Timothy Legrand action unrealistic or ineffective. Diffuse sub-networks of state actors, in this sense, can give new carriage to sovereignty. As such, claims that global forces have precipitated the erosion or irrelevance of the state are much exaggerated. If anything, the growth of transgovernmental networks indicates that the global power of public officials has never been more pronounced. This growth augurs expansive prospects for future research on transgovernmental analysis in, at least, three directions. First, there is a need to determine the role of transgovernmental networks in the transmission of regulatory standards and norms. Formal decision-making bodies feature prominently in analyses of transnational regulation, yet the rise of TGNs suggests that informal collaboration might be a hidden but powerful influence on how regulation and norms are determined a priori. Second, the emergence of new diplomatic modus operandi (Legrand and Stone, forthcoming) suggests the disintegration of centralized foreign policy, since the full gamut of domestic institutions has the potential to pursue informal foreign engagements. How such informal foreign engagement proceeds raises significant questions for those concerned with the legitimacy and transparency of institutional decision-making processes. Third, there is a need to theorize the impact of transgovernmental arrangements on state sovereignty. In one respect, transgovernmental networks can be understood to represent a reassertion of state sovereignty in multilateral, rather than unilateral, form. The growth in transnational challenges along with the increased propensity to work in collaborative transgovernmental networks suggests the possibility of multilateral, coordinated, and collaborative mechanisms for assuring domestic sovereignty. In common with all these research challenges, the opaque processes and dynamics of transgovernmental policy collaboration represent an urgent challenge to public policy scholars. Generating knowledge of where and how policy is made in the ‘black box’ of policy making is crucial to liberal democracy, since ‘oppressive, incompetent, corrupt, or biased governance practices’ can undermine public perceptions of democratic legitimacy (Schmidt, 2013, p. 2), while incomplete knowledge of institutional decision- making influences can subvert public policy models (Bevir and Rhodes, 2007). In order to bring these transgovernmental dynamics and the attendant normative questions to the fore, more analysis is needed on TGNs operating across regions and groupings, such as the BRICs as well as a focus on cultural or Lusophone, Francophone, or Sinophone connections to balance the focus on the Anglosphere approach taken in this chapter. This chapter has sought, partly, to provoke political students to take seriously the role of transgovernmental policy networks in producing outcomes for domestic and overseas publics. Hollis confirms that ‘the full extent of TGNs remains elusive and demands further research’ (Hollis, 2010, p. 326).
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Pa rt T wo GLOBAL POLICY FRAMES, PRO CESSES, AND INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 13
Scales and Net work So ciet i e s The Expansion of Global Public Policy William D. Coleman
13.1. Introduction The use of the word ‘global’ carries a meaning such as ‘covering everyone’ or involving ‘all governments’ or ‘countries’. Accordingly, the notion of ‘global public policy’ implies policies that can affect, or respond to, everyone in any part of the world. In globalization studies, the term ‘global’ has come to be used to refer to the ‘space’ in which activities take place. In this respect, the anthropologist, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, defines the word ‘scale’ as ‘relative or proportionate size or extent’ (2005, pp. 58–9). Whether in globalization studies specifically, or in social sciences more generally, the term has come to be used as part of a scalar ladder ranging from a local scale to a global scale passing by the ‘subnational’, the ‘national’, the ‘regional’, the ‘interregional’ to the ‘global’. In most instances in the social sciences, these scales are understood to be fixed rather than fluid. Tsing challenges this understanding. She writes: Scale is the dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary . . . scale is not just a neutral frame for viewing the world; instead scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced and evaded as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects. A ‘globalism’—the operation or planning of policy on a global basis—is focused on a global scale. There are multiple, overlapping, and somewhat contradictory globalisms of this kind; a ‘regionalism’ is a commitment to the region; and so on. (Tsing, 2005, p. 58)
Following Tsing, based on thinking of ‘global’ as a spatial scalar concept that is brought into being, this chapter argues that policy becomes global when it draws input, advice
224 William D. Coleman and participants from anywhere in the world in its formulation. Similarly, once policy is agreed upon, that policy has the potential to be implemented in any place or all places in the planet. This definition departs somewhat from that of Reinicke (1998, pp. 85–7), where he focused on a more limited ‘economic geography’ of global public policy. By contrast, the understanding here does not mean that those involved in global policy formulation come from everywhere in the world; rather it speaks to the potential that they could do so. Similarly, the definition leaves open whether a given global policy is implemented in all places in the world; rather, it implies that no place in the world is necessarily excluded from receiving the benefits, or complying with the requirements, of the policy. To understand how global public policy fits into a world that has changed immensely in the last seventy years, we need new analytical tools. This chapter expands our understanding of networks and how such networks alter both societies and the world. It does so by drawing heavily on the thinking and the research of Manuel Castells who has pioneered the idea of a ‘network society’. He uses this concept to explain the depth of the changes that have occurred in the world up to the present day. With these theoretical tools explained, the following discussion demonstrates their consequences for the study of global public policy by looking at two cases of global policy development. The first example focuses on health policy by exploring how global public policy has been generated and expanded in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since the contagion began at a local scale in Africa in the late 1970s, HIV has spread to countrywide, continental, and finally global scales, reaching to the whole of the world. The disease led to searches for how to address a global health problem. It is supra-territorial in being unblocked from spreading anywhere and it is trans-planetary in the range of lives taken or permanently harmed. In the face of this pandemic, the United Nations, nation states, and AIDS services organizations have been drawn together into global-scale activities leading to the formulation and implementation of global public policies to control the virus. The second example explores the paths leading to the emergence of the global concept of ‘indigeneity’. Building on this concept, the chapter traces how actions that began locally created relationships that led to an agreement on supra-territorial global public policies. These policies, in turn, became the anchor for trans-planetary social change around the world based upon transnational collaboration among Indigenous peoples. The agreements they reached led to the global acceptance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. These cases are discussed through the lens of one nation state, that is, Canada as a pivot in policy responses from the local through to global.
13.2. Analytical Tools for Assessing the Emergence of Global Public Policy Central to the analysis in this chapter are four interlinked concepts: ‘globalization’, ‘supra-territorial’, ‘transnational’, and ‘trans-planetary’. Globalization refers to processes
Scales and Network Societies 225 that lead to ‘the transformative growth of connections among people across the planet. In the contemporary era, many of these connections take a supra-territorial form. In ever more profound ways, globalisation ties together what people do, what they experience, how they perceive that experience, and how they reshape their lives’ (Coleman, 2012, p. 674). ‘Supra-territorial’ is best understood as transactions between persons or organizations that occur without being controlled by states. By suggesting that global public policy is supra-territorial, policy formulation involves organizations, including states and individuals (Scholte, 2005, pp. 59–61). They are linked together across, or above, state boundaries from anywhere in the world in defining and activating policy design. Similarly, global public policy as supra-territorial means that policy is implemented not only by states (territoriality), but also by other actors not controlled by states (supra- territoriality). Its implementation potential is such that it takes place anywhere or everywhere in the world. ‘Transnational’ actions in given countries are made without being hindered by the territorial boundaries of respective states (Coleman, 2012, p. 675). These transactions may involve not only governments or state actors, but also corporations, interest groups, and social movements. The word ‘national’ in this definition suggests that the relationships are primarily directed by nation states. The term ‘trans-planetary’ emerges out of Scholte’s (2005, p. 59) own definition of globalization: ‘the spread of trans-planetary—and in recent times also more particularly supra territorial—connections of people’ (2005, p. 59). This definition suggests that direct relationships can be formed anywhere across the world between peoples including non- governmental organizations. Examples include AIDS services organizations or Indigenous leaders, such as discussed in this chapter, as well as nongovernmental organizations, religious bodies, and military rulers among others. Therefore, states become only one of several forms of organizations linking persons across the world. These distinctions are important because they point to the many distinct policy initiatives, often knitted together through networks, that take shape and thread across the different scales of governance.
13.2.1. Global Network Societies Tsing’s concept of dynamic scales reaching from the ‘local’ to the ‘global’ is built around political, cultural, social, and economic arrangements. For example, the functioning of global markets rests upon increasing trade links between global corporations. Reinicke, (1999, p. 85) suggested that ‘global public policy alters the political geography in a way that can both accommodate economic globalisation and at the same time allow countries to continue to exercise internal sovereignty’ (1999, p. 85). The working of these complex scaling processes is discussed at some length by Manuel Castells (2009) in his book, Communication Power. The concept of a ‘network society’ is a central focus in it. Castells suggests that the ‘network society’ is made up of ‘global, national, and local networks in
226 William D. Coleman a multi-dimensional space of social interaction’ (2009, p. 19). This supra-territorial concept of a global network society underpins the dynamics needed for a trans-planetary context. These networks, in turn, provide the foundations necessary for global public policy. The multi-dimensional spaces in which networks operate open opportunities for the expansion of a trans-planetary world. Castells writes, ‘networks process flows. Flows are streams of information between nodes circulating through the channels of connections between nodes. A network is defined by the program that assigns the network its goals and its rules of performance’ (2009, p. 20). Castells observes that networks are not new structures. They have been used in societies for hundreds of years. However, they were not the most important social forms that structured countries for most of this period. With the arrival of contemporary globalization and the emergence of novel communication technologies, however, Castells stresses that contemporary networks are displacing the long-standing hierarchical structures common in the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries. With these technological advances, networks have become increasingly the most efficient organizations for carrying out, and causing, transnational change. Their ‘flexibility, scalability, and survivability’ are necessary developments for the growth of global public policy (2009, p. 20). Castells adds that we should view these developments as sources that create the potential and eventual emergence of a ‘global network society’. ‘A network society is one whose social structure is built around networks activated by micro-electronical-based, digitally processed information and communication technologies’ (Castells, 2009, p. 24). He adds that the ‘global network society’ is uneven. It coexists with the older era of ‘industrial, rural, communal, or survival societies’ which are often outside the network society social structure. In his earlier work, he explains this situation to be one of contrasts between ‘spaces of flows’ and increasingly sidelined ‘spaces of places’ (Castells, 2000, Chapters 5 and 6). The ‘space of flows’ operates with the expansion of supra-territorial nodes and networks that make trans-planetary developments like global public policies more important. Global public policy grows out of ‘places connected by electronically powered communication networks through which flows of information that ensures the time- sharing of practices processed in such a space circulate and interact’ (Castells, 2009, p. 34). An ever-expanding globalized network society ‘not only deploys its logic to the whole world, but it keeps its networked organisation at the global level while specifying itself in every society’ (2009, p. 37). Such a deployment rests upon supra-territorial arrangements to a sufficient degree that ‘global public policy’ becomes increasingly relevant for addressing trans-planetary problems, not only like HIV and advancing social changes like global indigeneity, but also other issues addressed in this Handbook. It is ‘spaces of flows’ made possible by supra-territorial relationships between networks that permit global public policy itself to become increasingly trans-planetary. Such developments, in turn, lead to the greater importance of global governance in different areas of public activity. The most advanced of such changes is to be found in globally linked coordination in seeking to limit climate change
Scales and Network Societies 227 States do not disappear in the face of global change of this importance; rather they transform themselves to adapt to the next context. (2009, p. 39). The organizations involved in global governance form networks of states such as the European Union or NATO or ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations). They also collaborate with international and supra-territorial organizations like the World Health Organization where scalar thinking is particularly important. Castells observes that in the network society, political decision-making ‘operates in a network of interaction between national, supranational, international, co-national, regional, and local institutions’ (2009, p. 40). States come to share sovereignty and responsibility with each other, all the while acting at different scalar levels of governance. How well such cooperation arising from transnational problems meets the needs of global public policies remains unclear. Some, particularly large, states, may operate on their own rather than committing strongly to networks with other states. Some of these difficulties are shown in the two case studies that follow. The studies demonstrate that building global networks that give life to global public policy is both complex and often slow to emerge.
13.3. Global Policy Case Studies The first case study examines the rather timid, often prejudiced, steps taken by nation states to contain HIV. This section demonstrates how nascent cooperative activity among global network actors helped contain the disease to some degree around the world. The second case study traces the steps taken by Indigenous communities around the world to form a cooperative global network. These nascent relationships drew together hundreds of isolated Indigenous communities into connective nodes of Indigenous communities around the world. As node density increased, a global network society was created to put forth, and agree upon, the laws that underpin Indigeneity. The word ‘transnational’ is used to characterize the cooperation of countries in containing HIV. This concept is similarly used to characterize the growing cooperation among Indigenous peoples around the world. When speaking about the global impact of a disease, one that cannot be controlled by states alone, the term ‘trans-planetary’ is utilized. Similarly, indigeneity becomes a trans-planetary concept, describing how Indigenous peoples came to work together to create a new international law defining global Indigenous rights.
13.3.1. Building Global Public Policy Around the HIV/AIDS pandemic In the mid 1970s, a new unknown virus was discovered in Africa. By the late 1970s, the virus had begun to be found on several other continents, including North America
228 William D. Coleman and Europe. The disease was a harbinger of the newly forming illnesses with global reach. The spread of ‘human immunodeficiency virus’ (HIV) quickly became supra- territorial as the disease accelerated in speed and in distance, reaching all continents in the world by the early 1980s (Zhou and Coleman, 2017). Complicating the situation was that homosexual men, a group largely stigmatized in most parts of the world, were the largest population group carrying the virus. Within HIV’s first ten years on the global scene, carriers of the disease lost their lives to a shocking and uncontrollable degree. Gay men quickly felt the stigma of the disease but stigma was quickly experienced by other men and women, whether young or old, including political elites. Such unsympathetic views led political leaders and the United Nations to hesitate and to respond slowly as the disease’s impact spread widely. Such hesitation, in turn, became a roadblock to discussion and agreement about defining how social network societies might act to contain HIV. Disease-related deaths quickly became a trans-planetary phenomenon. If there were circumstances in which global public policies could be created and mobilized to halt HIV’s spread, the United Nations, governments, and AIDS services organizations would have to agree upon establishing global networks of groups that would work together. To trace the development of a global network society fixed on HIV that could lead to global public policies for addressing HIV, we need to understand how these three very different political institutions came to work together: United Nations, governments, and AIDS services organizations. The latter are ground-level organizations providing local support for assisting persons with HIV. The year 1983 is chosen as the historical start-point since it was only in that year that each institutional type began to respond to the growing spread of HIV. Specific focus is given to Canada as a state indicative of the challenges faced by national governments. In 1983, these three types of organization acted independently from one another as they came to face the spread of HIV.
The United Nations The rapid trans-planetary threat of ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’ (AIDS) led quickly to pressure being put on the United Nations to prepare the world for the epidemic. But like many of its member states, the UN was slow to respond. In 1983, the UN had not yet understood the looming health crisis and described the situation as one that was ‘being well taken care of by some of the richest countries in the world’ (Knight 2008, p. 13). The UN did not bring together representatives for its first ‘International Conference on AIDS’ until 1985 when a meeting took place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. At this meeting, the World Health Organization (WHO) pushed member states to engage in immediate and effective action to control the spread of the virus. Dr Halfdan Mahler, Director-General of the WHO, admitted that at that moment even he had not understood the depth of the crisis. Later, after he had finished his time as Director-General, he admitted, ‘I know that many people at first refused to believe that a crisis was upon on us. I know because I was one of them’ (Knight, 2008, p. 13). In the immediate following years, the UN began to work slowly with the WHO. At the annual meeting of the WHO in 1986, Director-General Mahler warned about
Scales and Network Societies 229 international threats to global health and about the lack of money available for studying and finding means to slow the epidemic. Drawing upon the expertise of the American doctor, Jonathan Mann, and the Belgian physician Peter Piot, Mahler oversaw the first Control Program for AIDS in 1986. The Control Program, eventually called the ‘Global Program on AIDS’ (GPA), became active in 1988 with three objectives: prevent HIV infection, reduce the personal and social impact of HIV infection, and mobilize and unify national and international efforts against AIDS (Knight, 2008, p. 15). Nena Ferencic, an American expert in HIV/AIDS and long-standing senior specialist at the WHO, summarized the situation as one where the UN was still in an early stage in moving both the UN and nation states to action (Knight, 2008, p. 15). Unfortunately, and despite these early steps, it was difficult to encourage countries to think globally and to work toward cultivating a global (HIV) network society. (This term is used here to indicate the gradual formation of networks to address global issues or problems.) Many countries, including Germany, China, the USA, and India had a domestic focus and stipulated that HIV testing was to be mandatory for all legal immigrants. Over eighty-one countries developed anti-AIDS immigration laws, thereby overriding human rights conventions and doing little to address HIV effectively. In response, Peter Piot at the UN was quoted as saying that leadership based upon human rights was crucial. He wrote that the ‘Global Program on AIDS’ by now had taken ‘on the role of global AIDS advocate . . . [it] spoke with clear, consistent scientific advice to dispel myths and encourage socially just responses’ (Knight 2008, p. 16). Nonetheless, many countries were unable to agree on how to work together, just as many were also not yet convinced that extensive collaboration was necessary. Over time, countries began to buck that trend and to agree that a global response and the creation of a global HIV network society were necessary. Such a network would be needed for agreeing upon global public policy arrangements working under the UN umbrella. A first step in this direction took place in 1986 when the UN set up a new body, the ‘Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS’. This arrangement had the potential to shape a global network that might underline the need for global HIV- related public policies to challenge the ever expanding trans-planetary disease.
Nation States: Canada as a Case Study Virtually all nation states in the world, including Canada, were very slow in responding to HIV on their own territory, let alone cooperating with the United Nations. To understand how Canada responded to HIV, we need to discuss briefly two parts of its Constitution Act, 1867, which set up the new ‘Dominion’ as a federal state. The thinking behind Canadian federalism originated from the Haudenosaunee peoples who had developed a political system to bring together five independent nations in an arrangement designed to end fighting among them (Akwasasne Notes, 1978, pp. 31–40). Developed in the fourteenth century, the concept stirred the interest of the thirteen British colonies, who had become determined to separate from the British Empire in the 1770s. In the 1860s, the British colonies in present-day Canada followed along the same path as the Haudenosaunee and the United States to create a political system based on a ‘federal’ and various ‘provincial’ governments. Under the new Canadian
230 William D. Coleman federalism, health was defined as a responsibility of the provinces (Constitution Act 1867, Sections 91 and 92). Over time, however, the Constitution was re-interpreted to suggest that the Federal government could be involved in health and other provincial areas if ‘Peace, Order and Good Government of Canada’ was at stake in the country (Constitution Act 1867, Section 91, preamble). When major challenges faced the country that led to relations with other countries, such ‘foreign affairs’ were understood to be a responsibility of the federal government. Accordingly, the arrival of HIV in Canada in the early 1980s had obvious global linkages. The Federal government interpreted this understanding as requiring a federal response to the crisis. Such constitutional matters, however, do not alter the point that the federal and provincial governments would need to work together in the face of the HIV epidemic. Beginning in 1983 and lasting for the first twenty years of the pandemic, the federal and the provincial governments had difficulties working together. The full and effective cooperation needed for Canada’s participation was not set up until well until 2003. Such internal political problems occurred in most nation states facing the same problems at the same time. Like most countries, Canada’s federal government began slowly to create the initial infrastructure to respond to HIV. After some small steps in 1983, the government set up a ‘National AIDS Centre’, followed in 1987 by the creation of the ‘Federal Centre for AIDS’. The latter was Canada’s first comprehensive approach to HIV at the federal level (Smith Encyclopaedia of AIDS, 1998). Rayside and Lundquist (1992, p. 61) noted that the slow approach to HIV taken by the federal government was not coordinated either with the provinces or with the three largest cities where the HIV prevalence rates were especially high: Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Nor at this critical time was there any systematic sustained collaboration with other countries or with the United Nations or UNAIDS. Desveaux, Lindquist, and Toner (1994, p. 497) discovered that it was not until after May 1988 that the federal government took bigger, more effective steps. In a series of changes, the Health Department drafted a proposed national policy. In assessing the country’s first ‘National AIDS Strategy’, Desveaux et al. (1994, p. 493) classified it as an example of ‘shallow policy innovation’. They wrote that the Strategy involved ‘no new funding commitments, but did articulate the full range of federal activities into a more coherent package, shifted priorities across programs and announced only one new program, a national treatment registry’ (Desveaux et al. 1994, p. 502). Although the new policy was an important step, there remained concerns that the federal initiative was evolving in isolation from provincial policies (Smith 1998, p. 114) and from UNAIDS. After its 1990 initiative, the Progressive-Conservative federal government renewed funding and created the National AIDS Strategy Phase 2 in 1993 (BCPWA 2006, p. 34). By 1996, the Liberal Party had won a national election and become the governing party responsible for addressing HIV in Canada. Surprisingly, however, the new government refused to follow the steps taken by the Progressive-Conservative Party and largely ignored requests for assistance from UNAIDS. AIDS activists were infuriated by Canada’s
Scales and Network Societies 231 failure to think more globally about HIV and their dissent spread across the country. After a year of turmoil, a new Federal Minister of Health, Allan Rock, finally introduced the third phase of the National AIDS Strategy in 1997. This initiative’s name was changed to the ‘Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS’ (CSHO) to signal a major departure in direction from that of prior Canadian governments. This Strategy encouraged the steps that would lead to Canada’s participation in a developing global HIV network society. The country’s change of mind led to the gradual acceptance of the importance of global cooperation. At this point, Canada began participating more actively with other countries, non-governmental organizations, and AIDS services organizations. Such cooperation opened the door to advance towards a global HIV network society that might refine emerging global HIV public policy.
AIDS Service Organizations A third development crucial to supporting gradual control of HIV has been AIDS services organizations. These emergent novel and unique organizations were set up by persons with HIV themselves and their supporters. Their power to shape an evolving HIV agenda had begun as early as 1983 In 1983, the two earliest AIDS services organizations (ASOs) were founded in Canada: AIDS Vancouver in the province of British Columbia and AIDS Committee of Toronto in the province of Ontario. ASOs expanded from their initial activities in the largest cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) where HIV had spread the most quickly. They followed the growth of the disease into the smaller cities that were increasingly facing significant numbers of persons living with HIV. These city-based organizations were to gradually form linkages with developing province-wide ASOs. These provincial ASOs, in turn, began to support the institution of country-wide organizations in their fields of concern. By the late 1990s, these country-wide ASOs began to send their leaders to annual international meetings. In short, the ASOs became globally important institutions. They brought knowledge and talent to the growing global HIV network society based on their prior local-level work with those living with HIV. This coordination permitted persons living with HIV, and those supporting them, to engage in systematic dialogues with government officials at local, provincial, and national levels. In addition, working relationships also gradually developed between nation states and the United Nations. These relationships would be extended to AIDS services organizations. Important ASOs operating at the global level include the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO) founded in 1990 and the International AIDS Society (IAS) established in 1988. The IAS is also the steward of the world’s two most prestigious HIV Conferences relevant for contributing to needs for global HIV public policies: the International AIDS Conference and the IAS Conference on HIV Science. In summary, ASOs around the world created a movement and would join governments and the United Nations as essential complementary contributors to addressing the HIV pandemic and its policy responses. As the first responders to HIV on-the– ground, they have pushed governments and international organizations like the United
232 William D. Coleman Nations to participate in a global HIV networked society, and thus, used their leverage to generate the global public policies needed to contain the HIV epidemic.
Towards Global Public Policy and HIV Despite the many challenges and obstacles that it faced, UNAIDS brought together governments from all parts of the world, leadership from AIDS services organizations operating at the national levels in many countries, and health experts and representatives of ‘Persons with AIDS’ (PWAs). At the end of the first five years of the founding of UNAIDS, an important meeting of the global HIV network society group took place. A United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS was held on the 25–27 June 2001. The output was a UN-approved ‘Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS’. Some fifty pages long, the Declaration outlined a plan for integrating all possible contributors needed for controlling HIV. In the Foreword to the Declaration, the United Nationals Secretary-General at the time, Kofi A. Annan, indicated its importance. He wrote: For there to be any hope of success in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the world must join together in a great global alliance. The Declaration of Commitment on HIV/ AIDS is the culmination of a year-long process of awareness, engagement and mobilization. My great hope is that it signals the emergence of a response to this deadly disease –by Governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector and civil society –that could soon match the scale of the epidemic itself . . . To date, HIV/AIDS has infected an estimated 36 million people and claimed 22 million lives . . . (UN 2001, p. 1)
In response to this Declaration, the Government of Canada changed its direction to fit with the broader UNAIDS plan. The government passed into law the Federal Initiative to Address HIV/AIDS in Canada (the Federal Initiative) and the Canadian Vaccination Initiative (CHVI). It added another new body, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which came into operation in 2004. Finally, the government brought forward a document entitled Leading Together: Canada Takes Action on HIV/AIDS. This document described how Canada would proceed with other countries in gaining control of HIV. In addition, in cooperating with other countries belonging to the UN, the Canadian governments committed to work collaboratively to build effective responses and lead the fight against HIV/AIDS at home and abroad. The commitments made by the UN, by nation states belonging to it, and by AIDS services organizations around the world helped create a global HIV network society. Its mandate was to work with others around the world to agree upon global public policies focused on HIV. The policies put into action since 2001, which continue today, remain the concern of the global HIV network society. For fourteen years, they have cooperated in the context of defining and supporting global public policies focused on one of the more serious global health issues in human history.
Scales and Network Societies 233
13.3.2. Building Global Public Policy for Indigenous Peoples This second example is drawn from recent developments involving Indigenous peoples. The adjective Indigenous is derived from the Latin word, indigena, which is based on the root indigina, which, in turn, is derived from the root word ‘gen-’ to be ‘born in’. Groups usually claim to be ‘indigenous’ when they have lived and maintained traditions for a very long time in a sacred and community space. The word ‘peoples’ began to be used by anthropologists in the nineteenth century and is now defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship. In addition, the persons involved tend to have a common language, ways of living, and beliefs’. This case focuses on how the word ‘Indigenous’ came to be a part of international law. To reach this objective, Indigenous peoples have come together from all parts of the world initially to create, and then later to expand upon, a global Indigenous network society. The society has found ways to participate in the complex discussions involving Indigenous communities, each with very different languages, cultures, and distinctive original creation stories. As this society brought together an extensive number of Indigenous communities from all parts of the world, they collaborated to identify and shape into novel global laws how they wished to live as Indigenous communities. They also sought to end being treated as inferior human beings. In succeeding in reaching these goals, this global Indigenous network society has worked successfully to define and bring into law global public Indigenous policies. After identifying the paths for working together within varying nation states, they sought ways to discuss common needs and challenges with Indigenous nations from all parts of the world. The United Nations eventually became the home for these discussions. To trace these developments, Canada will also be used as a case example. This approach includes tracing how Indigenous peoples participated in designing, agreeing upon, and bringing via international law a global Indigenous network society. Of course, the path taken by the Indigenous peoples in the territory named Canada will differ from those taken in other places in the world, even if their respective journeys have many steps in common.
Growing with the United Nations Indigenous peoples are found in all provinces in Canada and in the northern territories. As defined in contemporary Canadian law, there are three distinct groupings: First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Discussion and analysis will focus primarily on the largest group, the First Nations. Until a constitutional change in 1982, the First Nations were referred to as ‘Indians’. This term was chosen by the British colonisers and became part of colonial law when Great Britain began to increase control over these peoples in the 1850s. A crucial first step occurred in 1857 when Britain introduced law that defined who was an ‘Indian’ and who was not. The definition was based on ‘blood’: marriages
234 William D. Coleman between persons whose families could be proven to come from families with Indigenous blood parents. The British law was carried over to Canadian law when Canada became a ‘Dominion’ of the Empire in 1867. The term ‘Indian’ was defined and elaborated further when the Dominion of Canada passed into law the ‘Indian Act’ in 1876. The Act remains an important source of power over Indigenous peoples in Canadian law today. Indigenous men from the British Empire, including Canada, fought for the Empire in the WWI. Indigenous men and women both joined up again, this time under the Canadian flag, in the WWII. As recounted to the author in a conversation with an Indigenous Elder from the Six Nations of the Grand River, many Indigenous veterans from Canada attended the opening of the United Nations in 1949 (Coleman, 2013). Despite being veterans, the Elder observed that many Canadians still looked down upon him and other Indigenous persons; prejudice had not disappeared with the end of WWII. He added that Indigenous persons like himself were struck by reading the, then, new ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR). Reading the law opened their thinking to novel global public policies relevant to respecting Indigenous communities. The first article of this Declaration states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’. The opening of the second article had an additional powerful impact on Indigenous persons: ‘Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status . . .’ More generally, the UDHR contradicted virtually all the ways Indigenous peoples had been regulated under the Indian Act. In contrast, ‘First Nation elders, leaders and organizations saw the UDHR as a critical tool for decolonizing Indigenous peoples as it affirmed human rights in international law’ (Boyer, 2014, p. 13; Henderson, 2008, p. 38). Under international law, however, the responsibility for a minority group such as the Indigenous peoples lies with the state in which they live. Despite Canadian law, Indigenous leaders continued to observe closely the development of the UN. In 1960, the year that Indigenous persons finally received the right to vote in elections in Canada, the UN, focusing more on decolonization, added a new part to international law: the ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’. Its explicit reference to ‘Colonial . . . Peoples’ drew the attention of many Indigenous groups around the world. The opening statement for the General Assembly was as follows, with key components for Indigenous peoples emphasized: ‘Mindful of the determination proclaimed by the peoples of the world in the Charter of the United Nations to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.’ Later in the text, the Declaration added another clause of considerable interest to Indigenous peoples: ‘Convinced that all peoples have an inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integration of their national territory . . .’ Finally, the second clause of the
Scales and Network Societies 235 Declaration stated: ‘(2) All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.’ The emphasis on the word ‘peoples’ in the Declaration opened up further thinking about global public policy and individual and communal autonomy for Indigenous peoples. It was read by Indigenous leaders to suggest that they were ‘peoples’: persons who have distinct histories, cultures, ways of living, languages, and other aspects common to a ‘people’. However, when they made this case to the UN, Canadian Indigenous persons were told that defining who was a ‘people’ was the responsibility of the Government of Canada. In the ten years that followed this 1960 Declaration, Indigenous peoples formed linkages between and among the various nations and communities of Canada to create the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB). This legal step proved to be timely because at the same time the federal government had prepared a White Paper that proposed to restructure the Indians’ ways of living through assimilation. The NIB led a country-wide protest invoking the global public policy concept of human rights with a focus on the right to self-determination. Indigenous peoples rejected the White Paper and refused to consider any movement to eliminate treaties. Faced with such unified opposition from Canada’s Indigenous peoples, the federal government withdrew its proposals for continued assimilation. The countrywide mobilization of Indigenous peoples in 1969–70 was by no means unique. Rather it was an indicator of growing defiance expressed by Indigenous communities in different parts of the world. In 1969, the United Nations recognized that the rights of Indigenous peoples had been insufficiently studied. It directed its Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities to look at the issue (Venne, 2011, p. 560). Following this initial step, the Economic and Social Council of the UN authorized a comprehensive study of worldwide problems of discrimination. A Special Rapporteur for the UN, José Martinez Cobo, began his study in 1971. The twenty chapters of the report were gradually released between August 1981 and August 1983 (Daes, 1995, p. 1). The report concluded that the social conditions in which most Indigenous peoples were living were wide open to discrimination (Daes 1995, p. 2). During the same period, while Martinez Cobo was gathering information, Indigenous communities from around the world began to find ways to work together in pursuit of global Indigenous public policies based on their Indigenous and Human rights. In 1975, the first International Conference of Indigenous Peoples took place in Port Alberni, British Columbia, Canada. Coming out of the meeting was the formation, for the first time, of a worldwide organization, the World Council of Indigenous peoples (Venne, 2011, p. 563). In 1977, the UN Non-Governmental Organization Sub-Committee on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Apartheid and Decolonization held an International NGO conference. It focused on land rights and discrimination affecting Indigenous communities in the Americas. The US, Canada, and other countries blocked Indigenous peoples’ use of the UN Committee on Decolonization as a meeting place to discuss their next steps
236 William D. Coleman toward global recognition of their rights. Nevertheless, the UN intervened and the Sub Committee permitted the Working Group for Indigenous Peoples to carry out their deliberations under their support (Thompson, 2014, p. 29). The Working Group’s emphasis on ‘self-determination’ received a hostile response from the Canadian government. Canadian officials wrote: ‘Canada does not want to see the traditional concept of self- determination used to attack the territorial integrity of a sovereign, non-colonial state. Since Canada is such a state, it does not agree that the concept of self-determination is applicable to Indigenous Populations within Canada’ (Thompson 2014, p. 30). Canada’s attack on the involvement of Indigenous representatives in global Indigenous rights discussions was countered by Indigenous peoples in Canada. Various Indigenous groups in Canada accused ‘the government, of among other things, having inflicted “great atrocities”, including genocide and subordination through “tyrannical laws’’ ’ (Thompson, 2017, p. 81). In this regard, ‘a number of Indigenous groups in Canada informed the working group that they sought the right to self-determination as defined in Article 1 of the ICCPR and ICESCR’ (Thompson, 2017, p. 81) In his report around the same time, Martinez Cobo commented specifically on Canada: through the colonial-like framework created by the Indian Act for the administration of reserves, the Indian communities were locked into a structure completely outside the mainstream of Canadian society. The Indian became the self-like recipient of an all-powerful White bureaucracy which, playing the role of benevolent dictator, mercilessly, if unintentional, debased and destroyed the rightful heritage of a proud and fine people. (Thompson 2017, p. 82)
The federal government remained ‘particularly leery of any “evolution of standards” in international law relating to the rights of Indigenous peoples’. The government claimed that the existing framework of international human rights and treaty monitoring bodies guaranteed sufficient protections for abuses ranging from violations of physical integrity and security, to failures to protect religion and culture, to discrimination against minorities (Thompson, 2017, p. 82). Nonetheless, the Canadian Indigenous Peoples’ participated in these international discussions and in the research that ultimately influenced the content of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). These discussions, however, continued to be consistently opposed and disrupted by the representatives of the Government of Canada at the UN (Thompson 2014, p. 31). Once Indigenous leaders began to explore how international legal Indigenous rights might be defined for Indigenous peoples around the world, the beginning of these negotiations led to hundreds of Indigenous persons coming from different parts of the world to participate in the discussions. In support of these discussions, the UN agreed to create the ‘United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ in 2000. The establishment of the Forum became an important step for the exploration and discussion of global public policy. The Forum took on the responsibility to ‘Provide expert advice and recommendations to the Economic and Social Council and to the various programs,
Scales and Network Societies 237 funds and agencies of the United Nations System through the Council.’ In addition, the Forum was directed to ‘raise awareness and promote the integration and coordination of activities related to indigenous issues within the UN system’ (Henderson, 2008, p. 62). The Canadian scholar and participant in the UNDRIP negotiations, Saki Henderson, articulated well the arrival of UNDRIP. The arrogance that assumed the universality and inevitability of the Eurocentric model of development prevented Indigenous peoples from seeing that the model is embedded in racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Postcolonial development cannot be properly understood without recourse to self-determination and human rights. This points to a process of civilization transformation, as the spirit of self- determining people overruns the imposed scripts of nation-states. (Henderson, 2008, pp. 88–9; also Boyer, 2014, p. 12)
The combination of the successful negotiation and ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 and the Permanent Forum are important components for the strengthening of the global Indigenous network society. The new forum became the oversight mechanism for creating global public policy initiatives important to Indigenous peoples. Long undermined by their home countries’ leaders and citizens, these steps in favour of global public policies serving Indigenous communities around the world have assisted Indigenous peoples considerably.
Toward Global Indigenous Public Policy Despite long-standing isolation from one another, both nationally and globally, remarkably distinctive languages, and unique cultures, Indigenous communities have now met one another and found ways to share thoughts and goals. Upon working with one another, they came to share a desire for self-determination: a wish to decide themselves how they might live well in the world. The founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the articulation of its goals of living in peace with one another were utilized by Indigenous nations to secure their human rights. As their pursuit of these goals became more frequently articulated, Indigenous communities began to meet with one another in the 1970s and to work toward defining and realizing their rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Indigenous community discovery of how to work together despite deep differences in languages and cultures made it possible to agree upon shared rules for living together. Such agreements emerged through the activities of a global Indigenous network society that agreed upon the formulation of global public policies in the UNDRIP and at the Permanent Forum. The UNDRIP speaks to these policies by opening its Declaration with a statement about encouraging the same human rights and fundamental freedoms recognized in the Charter of the United Nations. The policies also stressed that whether individuals or peoples, they have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination. This policy includes a statement about their ‘right to self-determination’ and thus their status: ‘By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.’
238 William D. Coleman In these respects, Fromherz describes the UNDRIP as an aspirational document. ‘It lays a foundation for the creation of future binding international law’ (Fromherz, 2008, p. 1343). Article 3 of the UNDRIP explicitly recognizes for the first time in international law the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. Thus, the modern human rights movement has forced ‘a rethinking of Indigenous peoples’ rights in international law’ (Fromherz, 2008, p. 1363). Fromherz adds that three central ideas in the Preamble of the UNDRIP seek to develop a partnership between states and Indigenous peoples. In interpreting Sections 3 and 4, Fromherz suggests that it refers to ‘internal self-determination’ that includes a concept of ‘self-government’ that—‘while not supporting secession—guarantees substantive control over lands, territories and resources’, in addition to the ‘power to create and manage a number of political and legal institutions’ (Fromherz, 2008, p. 1380).
13.4. Conclusion In her study of ‘global connections’, like the ones made by Indigenous communities in giving life to the UNDRIP or those connections arising out of the global challenge of HIV/AIDS, Tsing accurately argued that particular historical conjunctures give them ‘content and force’ (Tsing, 2005, p. 8). She adds that such conjunctures feature engagement: ‘Engaged universals travel across difference and are charged and changed by their travels. Through friction, universals become practically effective’ (Tsing, 2005: p. 8). The engagement with HIV has grown out of a global disease that has travelled from sub- Saharan Africa to the whole world. In becoming a global crisis, it has led, in turn, to global cooperation based on global HIV public policies in fighting a disease that still kills many persons in the world every day. The engagement with the control and undermining of Indigenous communities also has led to global public policies in scope and action. Global Indigenous network societies have devised global public policies in responding to these challenges. Global public policies, in turn, provide ongoing responses to the challenges of contemporary globalization.
References Akwesasne (ed.). 1978. Basic Call to Consciousness. Summertown, TN: Native Voices, a div. of Book Publishing Company. Boyer, Yvonne. 2014. ‘Using the UN Framework to Advance and Protect the Inherent Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada’. In Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) (ed.). The Internationalization of Indigenous Rights: UNDRIP in the Canadian Context. Waterloo, ON, Canada. British Columbia Persons with AIDS Society (BCPWAS). 2006. ‘A Twenty Year History’. In BCPWAS (ed.), The British Columbia Persons with AIDS Society 1986–2006. Vancouver: BCPWAS.
Scales and Network Societies 239 Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society, Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, William D. 2012. ‘Governance and Global Public Policy’. In David Levi-Faur (ed.). Oxford Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, William D. 2013. Discussion of Author at Six Nations Polytechnic, Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario, Canada, June. Daes, Erica-Irene. (1995). ‘Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples’. Final Report of the Sectional Rapporteur, Mrs. Erica Irene, in conformity with Sub-Commission resolution 1993/44 and decision 1994/105 of the Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Forty-Seventh Session, E/CN.4/ Sub.2/1995/26. Desveaux, James A., Lindquist, Evert A. and Toner, Glen. 1994. ‘Organizing for Policy Innovation in Public Bureaucracy: AIDS, Energy and Environmental Policy in Canada’. In Canadian Journal of Political Science, 27 (3): 493–528. Fromherz, Christopher J. 2009. ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Courts: Egalitarian Juridical Pluralism, Self-Determinism and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. In University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 156: 1341–81. Henderson, James (Sa’kej). 2008. Indigenous Diplomacy and the Rights of Peoples: Achieving UN Recognition. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd. Knight, Lindsay. 2008. UNAIDS: The First 10 Years, 1996–2006. Geneva Switzerland: UNAIDS. Rayside, David M. and Evert A. Lindquist. 1992. ‘AIDS Activism and the State in Canada’. Studies in Political Economy, 39: 37–76. Reinicke, Wolfgang. 1998. Global Public Policy: Governing Without Governance. Washington, DC: Global Public Policy, Brookings Institution. Scholte, Jan Aart. 2005. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Second edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Smith, Raymond A. (ed.). 1998. Encyclopedia of AIDS: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Scientific Record of the HIV Epidemic. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Andrew S. 2014. ‘The Slow “Evolution of Standards”, The Working Group on Indigenous Populations and UNDRIP’. In Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) (ed.). The Internationalization of Indigenous Rights: UNDRIP in the Canadian Context. Waterloo, ON, Canada: CIGI. Thompson, Andrew. 2017. On the Side of the Angels: Canada and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNAIDS. 2001. Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. Geneva, Switzerland: UNAIDS. Venne, Sharon H. 2011. ‘The Road to the United Nations and Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. Griffith Law Review, 20: 557–76. Zhou, Yanqiu Rachel and Coleman William. 2017. ‘Accelerated Contagion and Response: Understanding the Relationships among Globalization, Time, and Disease’. In Huebener, Paul, O’Brien, Susie, Porter, Tony, Stockdale, Liam, and Zhou, Yanqiu Rachel (eds). Time, Globalization and Human Experience. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group
Chapter 14
The Transnationaliz ation of Public Spheres and Global P olicy Ingrid Volkmer
14.1. Introduction The transnationalization of public communication is still today, at a time when digital networks reach across continents to connect citizens in unprecedented ways, a somewhat neglected field of academic debate. This is surprising as digital communication has become such a driver of the transformation of public communication in societies worldwide. In this ‘spatial’, deterritorialized public sphere ecology, the traditional dichotomies of ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ or ‘global’ and ‘national’ are no longer relevant. This networked sphere of ‘data’ flows is structured along thematic ‘threads’ and engages a ‘fluid’ community of like-minded ‘peers’ who are ‘concerned’ citizens of diverse societies and come together to deliberate on issues of national or global relevance, ranging from economic crisis and climate change, to military conflicts. Even in national crises situations, the traditional ‘order’ of normative legitimacy, reached by national citizens to influence national policy is ‘broken’, where citizens engage ‘live’ in threads on Facebook or YouTube with peers from all world regions to form a normative legitimacy which is then enacted on national levels. Transnational public spheres emerge in this digital ecology as spatial axes of civic ‘public’ engagement—civic ‘voice’ (Couldry, 2010). Often overlooked, this has an influence on national normative legitimacy on one hand and global public policy, on the other. Public communication as a deliberative dimension of transnationally connected citizenry requires a careful rethinking of transnational public spheres and of the influence of such an ecology on civic identity, public policy—and governance in the twenty-first century. This focus on communication is relevant to a discussion of ‘global public policy’
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 241 as the core public policy dimensions of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘accountability’ are shifting away from the national focus and are embedded in a seamless sphere of civic connectivity across societies. This chapter is structured in the following parts. The first part introduces the key gaps of traditional public sphere conceptions and the second focuses on the perception of the ‘transnationalization’ of these traditional debates. The third part suggests a paradigmatic shift towards an understanding of publicness in dimensions of communication ‘fluidity’. The article concludes with a proposal for ‘reflective interdependence’ as a theoretical model for the assessment of discursive spheres of publicness in these transnationally fluid landscapes.
14.2. Concepts of the Public Sphere Despite the density of transnationally networked communicative infrastructures, the Habermasian framework of the public sphere and specifically his notion of public deliberation still serves today as a normative and as a conceptual guideline when assessing transnational connected public discourse. Habermas’ focus was the transformation of public discourse in European nation states away from the ideal of reasoned ‘publicness’: the ideal discourse among citizens is towards ‘manufactured publicity’ (Habermas, 1964, 1991, p. 211) and the ‘mediation’ of ‘publicness’ which eliminates public discourse as a ‘critically debating entity’ (Habermas, 1964, 1991, p. 162) in the time of national mass media in the twentieth century. Habermas’ main concern was the ideal discourse situation—discourse ethics—of ‘reasoned publicness’ among citizens who vote and constitute the ‘demos’. The demos is—in Habermas’ conception—synonymous with ‘ethnos’, the national citizenry of a nationally bounded public sphere. Given the fact that the ‘Zeitgeist’ of the post-war period influenced his work, it is not surprising that the angle of discourse ethics and discursive power constitutes such an important focus in order to reconceptualize the democratic public sphere after decades of fascism. However, in the context of transnational public sphere conceptions, the Habermasian model has left us with a model of public deliberation which is closely linked to the deliberative mechanism of a European nation state and in consequence with three major gaps in crucial conceptual areas which are now vital for the much-needed debate of transnationally connected public spheres. The first gap is that the public sphere conception ‘normatively’ relates to modern nation states and the normative understanding of the ideal public discourse situation between the national civil society—where ‘ethnos’ equals ‘demos’—and the nation state. However, the geopolitical order is beginning to shift away from the power of the European type of nation state to a multi-polar world where the nation state ‘as such’ underlies and is now often incorporated into larger regional or even global governance structures. It is important to realize that this process is deeply related to, and
242 Ingrid Volkmer sustained by, the increasingly intensified forms of networked communication as a site of communicative ‘action’ among actors and citizens who no longer meet in person as they are situated in different world regions. It is also time to decouple public discourse from the ‘ideal’ normative national discourse situation in order to extend the understanding of discourse practices of other society types. We need to include the traditions of ‘ideal’ public discourse practices in non-Western regions; for example, in the Arab region where—often overlooked in debates of political communication—public spheres emerge mainly in a transnational context of the Ummah—the notion of the larger Arabic ‘nation’ transcending the artificial borders, drawn by colonial powers, for example in North Africa. This larger Arabic Ummah as an ecology of ‘publicness’ and practices of deliberation is also the reason why transnational satellite news channels, such as Al Jazeera are so successful in the region. The transnational Ummah as a domain of ‘belonging’ and loyalty is a main reason for the ‘relative closure of domestic public spheres’. Along ‘with the sense of collective identity born out of the Ottoman and Islamic experience, Arabs have long turned to the transnational level for political debate’ (Lynch, 2003, p. 59). In the traditions of some Asian regions, public discourse is not related to ‘reasoned’, rational debate but rather to a sense of maintaining national Harmony, for example in China (Yan, 2010). In African countries, public discourse and deliberation is understood as Ubuntu, reflecting the value of ‘sharing’, ‘participating’ and ‘belonging’ as a communicative mindset (Mabweazara, 2016). A second major gap, based on the still dominant Habermasian paradigm, is the ‘boundedness’ of the procedural ‘mechanism’ of public deliberation which is reflected in his conception of the ‘postnational’ (Habermas, 2001). The holes in the normative perception of the boundedness of public deliberation within state spheres are rapidly widening. Not only are communicative spheres increasingly spatially ‘disembedded’ from national territories but so are—often overlooked—core assets of public civic engagement practices which are now also ‘stretched’: one can live in Argentina, vote in France, follow the US election campaign ‘live’ on streaming US or Spanish television websites, engage with climate change issues with activists in Indonesia, and direct blog debates with scientists based in Antarctica. Until a decade ago, the transnationalization of publics was understood as a stretching process. However, in many debates this new phenomenon of publicness was understood as a public sphere ‘light’ as—at the time—it was not possible to think beyond the notion of deliberation as being a national public consensus influencing national policy outcomes. However, given the increased role of intergovernmental organizations and the re-positioning of national governance in light of greater globalized awareness, policy regimes ‘as such’ are much more embedded in processes of transnational transparency today and, hence, there are new types of accountability and legitimacy where the role of public opinion, generated across transnational axes and magnified in national media, shapes new political ‘pressure points’ on national governments. We see such a ‘direct mechanism’ of transnational public ‘pressure points’ on national public policy in areas of the economy, foreign affairs, and conflict resolution; for example, in the refugee crisis, which is no longer simply ‘national’ or ‘foreign’ but embedded in a complexity of multi-polar landscapes of ‘spheres of influence’
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 243 where specifically transnational public engagement ‘in real time’ on social media between all sorts of actors shapes new dimensions for ‘legitimacy’. The third gap is the focus on the nation state—the core domain of civic discourse as outlined in the Habermasian public sphere conception, which relates to the ‘sovereignty’ over ‘territory’ principle of international relations of the so-called ‘Westphalian model’. The ‘Westphalian model’, established by the Treaty of Westphalia signed in Muenster (Germany) in 1648, is regarded as the contractual basis of the modern international state system as it manifests the mutual respect of sovereign ‘states’, but also—and this relates to public sphere conceptions that persist today—to ‘sovereignty over territory’ (e.g. Clark, 2005; Held, 1996 and Muth, this volume). This ‘sovereignty over territory’ principle includes nationally ‘bounded’ communication. The founding of the International Telegraph Union (ITU) as an intergovernmental body enabled states to reclaim sovereign rights over the otherwise ‘unbounded’ radio frequencies in a national territory and in an international context. Radio technology, already emerging in the early twentieth century, was a technology which, given the shortwave spectrum and the cross-border flows even of shortwave frequencies, could have been established as a transnational medium, but was, and remains, regulated in the ‘sovereignty over territory’ paradigm. Despite the challenges of spatial digital communication, the conception of public communication as a nationally oriented mechanism of deliberation persists as the leading paradigm today. Over recent decades, various attempts have been made to revise some of the Habermasian public sphere parameters. These revisions highlight important new dimensions, such as the notion of cross-cultural deliberation in multi-cultural societies (i.e. d’Entreves, 2006) or they identify—mainly in national terms—deliberative mechanisms of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, ‘fractured’ and ‘mainstream’ publics. Others relate public spheres to communicative ecologies and separately address ‘online’ and ‘offline’ publics, in addition to publics driven by ‘issues’ (Dahlgren, 2009; Coleman and Ross, 2010). Public spheres are also revised within the spectrum of ‘digital activism’, digitally enhanced mobilization in a ‘logic’ of ‘scaling’ up of personal action frames to ‘connective action’ in relation to specific countries (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012) or in the lens of digital sites, such as social media embedded in national contexts.
14.3. Conceptualizing Transnationalized Public Communication In the main, the initial parameters of the transnationalization of public sphere conceptions have not been explicitly articulated but rather somewhat ‘assumed’ in larger conceptual debates of the ‘global civil society’, transnational governance, and public policy. Conceptions of a global civil society assume a vague role of transnational media as a
244 Ingrid Volkmer sphere of ‘mediating’ activism, such as of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Kaldor’s notion of ‘civic action’ is strongly related to ‘transnational civic networks’ (Kaldor, 2003, p. 95). Notions of global governance are embedded in transnational communicative mechanisms ‘where state and non-state actors participate in mixed private/public policy networks’ (Risse, 2005, p. 167). Conceptions of the ‘accountability’ of the public policy of intergovernmental organizations are—again vaguely—related to an assumption of transnational deliberation, mainly reached by ‘non-state actors’ (Crack, 2008, p. 19). However, beyond these vague assumptions of the transnationalization of public spheres, concrete ‘breaking points’ for national boundedness are specifically addressed with regard to legitimacy in a now transnational spectrum. Nancy Fraser, whose earlier work already had a strong focus on the issue of normative legitimacy in public discourse (Fraser, 1992), suggests we completely ‘rethink public sphere theory in a transnational frame’ (Fraser, 2007, p. 8) where ‘the interlocutors’ are now ‘neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens’ any more (Fraser, 2007, p. 16). It is in her view paramount ‘to construct new addressees for public opinion’, such as ‘transnational public powers that possess the administrative capacity to solve transnational problems’ (Fraser, 2007, p. 23). Whereas Fraser’s work focuses on legitimacy in the sphere of transnationally dispersed ‘interlocutors’, a second strand of debates ‘solves’ the legitimacy issue by simply focusing on transnational public spheres within a regional context of nation states; for example, by addressing the European public sphere as a side-by-side sphere of European and national publics (Koopmans and Erbe, 2004; Spichal, 2012). In addition, we should add a third type of conception of transnational public spheres where the issue of legitimacy in the situatedness of national public spheres (mainly Western world regions) is understood vis-a-vis globalized ‘risks’, such as climate change where normative legitimacy is reached through globalized publicness but enacted in national spheres. It is surprising that globalization debates, which commenced in political science in the late 1980s and explicitly addressed the openings and ‘breaking points’ of nation states, seemed to have been widely ignored in public sphere debates. For example, conceptions of post-international politics in political science suggested that no longer nations but rather ‘spheres of authority’ should constitute ‘the analytic units’ (Czempiel and Rosenau, 1989). The notion of ‘deterritorialized’ space is addressed in the sense that boundaries which ‘separate territorial states from another increasingly do not demarcate political spaces based on economic, social, or cultural interests’, instead, ‘each of these has its own boundaries that in the face of localisation and globalisation are less and less compatible with the border of states’ so that ‘the conception of political space as largely synonymous with territory poses a barrier to theory-building in global politics today’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 2004, p. 74). In the lens of such a framework, deterritorialized forms emerge where political space no longer ‘coincides with territorial space as defined by an interstate system’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 2004, p. 74). The outcome is that citizenship and nationality, ‘hardly begin to define who we are and where our loyalties lie’ and the question ‘of who is inside’ and ‘who is outside the boundaries of civic and moral obligation is
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 245 regaining an importance for political theory and global politics not seen since the birth of the Westphalian State’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 2004, p. 23). Other debates in political science addressing ‘debordering’ processes of ‘political spaces’ are important for the demarcation of the ‘sovereignty’ over ‘territory’ principle in the understanding of publicness. For example, ‘processes in the world of states are understood as an increasing permeability of borders together with a decreasing ability of states to counter this trend (Albert and Brock, 1996). A decade later, this focus shifted towards a sense that ‘identity space and decision space are no longer seen as identical’ (Maier, 2006 p. 48) and was again taken to a new stage in which ‘territory’ is replaced by ‘space’ and ‘space as opposed to territory is . . . a metaphor which provides an interdisciplinary analytical framework for the study of transnational political connections’, their ‘variable internal structure as well as their external boundaries’ (Albert et al., 2009, p. 17). These are globalized processes which are now summarized in a new dimension of ‘World Politics’ (Albert, 2016). It is through these processes that—on the surface—the spatialities of publicness enabled by digital networks not only ‘deterritorialize’ but as I have argued elsewhere (Volkmer, 2014) over time ‘de-bracket’ the ontological configuration of the state–society nexus and produce a dichotomy of formal citizenship and civic subjectivity engaging across transnational scopes of publicness enabled by the dichotomy of engagement in ‘nodes’ (of public action) and (discursive) ‘spaces’. In addition, sociological debates from the early 1990s onwards began to focus on the differentiation process of globalization in terms of individual identity and social practices, caused by transnational ‘linkages’, processes which de-bounded national territory ‘from the inside out’. Antony Giddens proposed the term, ‘time–space distanciation’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 64) to address the acceleration and—we could argue, ‘reflexive’— density of ‘social relations’ now linking ‘distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). A process which has also been described as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1992), which reflected—at the time—new phenomena of globalized ‘axes’ not only linking ‘nations’ but also individuals in the smallest local community in all types of societies in specific ways. The paradigm of the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996)—a sociological approach—aimed to assess the societal transformations set in place by digital communication and has provided an important framework for the understanding of globalization as networked structures of ‘timeless time’, constantly communicating in algorithm modes, and ‘space of flows’ eliminating the power of ‘territory’. In contrast, the field of media and communication, although a discipline engaged with the communication processes which drive many of the processes described above, has for decades mainly focused on a critique of ‘neoliberal’ and on ‘postcolonial’ dimensions of globalization. Only in recent years, and due to the pressure on the discipline to focus on the increasing transnational ‘comparative’ research that is required in digital contexts, are processes of communicative globalization re-entering the debate in the field of media and communication research. The discussion here agrees with Terhi Rantanen (2010) who critically highlights that a ‘methodological internationalism’ of comparative research in media and communications and still normative approach of
246 Ingrid Volkmer nation-by-nation comparison does not reflect the ‘fluidity’ of transnational communicative relations. It has only been recently argued that ‘we cannot explain a globalised world by limiting ourselves to the national framework of existing social phenomena’ (Esser, 2013).
14.4. Fluidity of the Public Sphere ‘Mechanism’ However, in today’s advanced digital networked spheres, we see the ‘de-bounding’ mechanism no longer in ‘breaking points’ of national boundedness, as discussed above. Today, we need to shift the angle from ‘breaking points’ towards ‘fluidity’ of citizenship, national media as a ‘fourth estate’, and the governance sector. All of these sectors in traditional nation states, but also other state formations, are embedded in scales of ‘fluidity’ caused by the transnationally connected ecology of publicness. Although formal citizenship is ‘bounded’, ranging from passports, taxes, election procedures and visa regimes, civic identity is no longer focused on the ‘national’. Embedded in individually chosen, concrete ‘densities’ of transnational digital political engagement, civic identities are enacted in horizons of subjectively chosen transnational ‘publicness’. Anderson’s (1983) notion of an ‘imagined community’ was one of the first transnationally enlarged conceptions of national civic identity. This ‘nostalgic’ perspective was replaced ten years later by the specifics of transnational networks of civic engagement in contexts of ‘diasporic’ civic identity, stretching between ‘home’ and ‘host’ country. Processes which are again rephrased as ‘hybrid’ ‘mobile’ civic identity, situated between different (national) places (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Madianou and Miller, 2011). Considering the densities of subjective transnational networks, civic identity was now situated in a ‘fluidity’ of global-local spaces (Chin, 2016). Another set of debates sees processes of ‘de-bounding’ of civic identity through transnational deliberative ‘action’ beyond formal national political institutions or structures in civic enactment networks, such as deliberative enactment in a transnational advocacy network, transnational activist coalitions, and transnational social movements (Khagram et al., 2002). A further process of ‘de-bounding’ of civic identity is seen in the transformation from national ‘demos’ to a ‘global demos’. which situates civic identity (not citizenship) in the transnationally stretched, discursive ‘interconnectedness’ of ‘closely knit networks of communicative interactions’ (List and Koenig-Archibugi, 2010, p. 85) in order to engage in non-national formations of ‘agency’ and democratic capacity in a ‘state-like manner’ (List and Koenig-Archibugi, 2010, p. 90). In the second component of the traditional public sphere conception, national media are seen in the role of a ‘fourth estate’, a term coined by a British politician in 1787 when press reporting of parliamentary debates began in Great Britain. This role of national media as the ‘fourth estate’ between ‘the people’ and ‘the government’
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 247 is reflected in national media policy frameworks in Western world regions, for example, the commitment to public service broadcasting is also drawn into the fluidity of communicative spheres. ‘Fluidity’ relates to organizational transformations but specifically to national media content which is not only digitally available and accessible—for example, via a cloud infrastructure—from anywhere worldwide with internet access but also embedded in digital platform ecologies or what we might call a ‘fluid topography of publicness’, ranging from individual blogs and NGO news sites to transnational ‘aggregators’ such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and app stores. Furthermore, the ‘fourth estate’ role relates specifically to investigative journalism. However, due to cutbacks of investigative reporting in national news outlets, investigative journalism has moved into a ‘deterritorialized’ data spectrum. The formation of the transnational investigative reporting networks, such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (icij.org), an organization which includes close to two hundred journalists from sixty-five countries worldwide that operates with a globalized focus on crime, corruption, and the ‘accountability of power’. In a transnational context, these reporting networks are symptomatic of the shift of the media’s fourth estate role, which is today embedded in ‘big data’ ecologies that are no longer ‘national’ but transnationally ‘fluid’. In addition, the third component, governance, legitimized by the normative consensus of citizens in the traditional public sphere is also entangled today in transnational ‘fluidity’. As Held and McGrew argued some time ago: ‘layers’ of governance are ‘spreading within and across political boundaries’ (Held and McGrew, 2000, 2006, p. 11). Governments are seen as being incorporated into various transnational networks and ‘compete, conflict, cooperate, or otherwise interact with the sovereignty-bound actors of the state-centric world’ (Cusimano, 2000, p. 27), such as with intergovernmental organizations. Intergovernmental organizations are setting core policy agendas summarized in a ‘to do’ ‘tool kit’ for sovereign governance, such as the World Trade Organization or International Monetary Fund on a global level, and the European Union on a regional supranational level. These processes have produced what has been called ‘disaggregated sovereignty’ through the emerging of such a multilateral ‘networked global order’ (Slaughter, 2005, p. 37). The term ‘network politics’ (Kahler, 2009) signifies the increasingly dense deterritorialized geographies of sovereignty or, as Castells notes, the ‘network state’ where ‘agencies that previously flourished via territoriality and authority’ are now in ‘synergies’ with other agencies elsewhere (Castells, 2010, p. 43). However, the established types of ‘global order’ of international alliances, and even the ‘network state’, are also breaking up in a multi-polar geopolitical digitally transparent spectrum. Whereas, decades ago, the executive power of modern nation states was withdrawing from democratic commitments due to intergovernmental alliances, today, the ‘fluid’ digital ecology transforms governance: not only are national politicians expected to communicate daily on Twitter but data ‘hacks’ constitute international political conflicts, surveillance tools sustain political power in an international arena, and the acceleration of ‘viral publics’ enabled by social media and live streaming sites demands not only instant ‘reaction’ but, even more, political ‘solutions’.
248 Ingrid Volkmer
14.5. Towards Trans-border ‘Publicness’ The construction of publicness as a discursive ecology is still embedded in local practices and traditions. However, we do not have much research into local practices in non-Western regions and, furthermore, the historical dimension of local conceptions of transnationalization of publicness is rarely addressed in Western and non-Western regions. Overlooked in these debates is the historiography of transregional ‘communicative’ networks, which already existed in the time of the printing press in the early Renaissance period in Europe, where ‘authority was both personalised and parcelised within and across territorial formations’ (Ruggie, 1993, p. 150). Trans-border communication, for example, already existed in the sixteenth century in the form of ‘newsletters’ of trans-regional political news for the transregional trade community. One of the most influential newsletters was the one established by the House of Fugger (financiers, based in Augsburg, Germany). The Fugger Newsletter created a specifically transregional community of ‘publicness’ across Europe: ‘Through the news they shared, the wheat traders of Venice, the silver traders of Antwerp, the merchants of Nuremberg, the financiers of Augsburg, and their trading partners around the world, were being drawn together into a society based on this new sensibility; on common interests—the fate of some ships sailing from India to Lisbon; on common values—a belief in the rights of capital’ (Stephens, 1988, p. 77). However, we require also a historiography of trans- border ‘publicness’, which emerged in various world regions in previous centuries. These practices laid the foundation of public deliberation as perceived in local traditions and are quite different from the normative Western model. The articulation of local traditions of publicness, such as Ubuntu in African countries, Ummah in the Arab World, and Harmony in a Chinese context are incredibly important for the understanding of what transnationalization of publicness means in the lens of local traditions. It is this angle of assessing local traditions of transnational communication in spheres of deliberation which require more scholarly attention, specifically in today’s globalized public ecology. This chapter can only highlight some examples which might serve as an illustration of the different notions of the dialectic of ‘internal’/’external’ and a historical ‘snapshot’. Whereas, as pointed out above, in Europe, early newsletters were circulated across vast distances to different trade capitals, there was resistance to print in Muslim regions in the sixteenth century and to trans-border ‘communication’ (Brigg and Burke, 2010). As Brigg and Burke argue, the ‘Muslim countries have been regarded as a barrier to the passage of printing from China to the West’. The reason for such a resistance in Muslim regions is seen in the fact that print ‘struck right at the heart of person to person transmission of knowledge which was fundamental in the world of Islam’ (Robinson, cited by Briggs and Burke, 2010, p. 14). However, ‘public dialogue ‘held a special place in the Muslim world’ where a ‘religious public sphere of learned scholars, schools of
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 249 jurisprudence, and their supporters was often autonomous from the official sphere of rulers in the early Islamic centuries’ (Eickelman and Anderson, 2003, p. 2). The result was to strengthen the role of ‘men of learning’ in such a public domain, beginning with the third Islamic century and continuing through to the modern era. As is argued, ‘subsequent caliphs and other temporal rulers intervened in this sphere only with caution, and in general left it alone’ (Eickelman and Anderson, 2003, p. 2). We also do not have a comparative analysis of the role of newspapers in earlier conceptions of transnational publicness, specifically in world regions which had been colonized in the nineteenth century, and which—through this process—have established traditions of associating ‘the transnational’ with colonial influence and, thus, developed specific local traditions of deliberation to shield themselves from foreign influence. For example, the globalized telegraph network, a technology dominated by the British Empire in the nineteenth century, has established the phase of colonial transnationalization where the agenda of political ‘issues’ in India, Australia, and Africa were set by the colonial power through its direct link with the news agency Reuters. Although the first newspaper was established in India in 1780, there were no Indian proprietors or editors of newspapers left between 1816 and 1820; only one Indian-owned newspaper published weekly in Calcutta (Natarajan, 1962, p. 29). A new phase—or ‘layer’—of trans-border publicness emerged in a larger transnational context with satellite television, specifically with satellite news channels established throughout the 1990s. CNN’s dominance in ‘live’ conflict coverage established political reporting in a ‘global’ dimension due to its transcontinental reach and the focus on ‘breaking news’, that is ‘live’, ‘fact’ coverage. This fast-paced style of political reporting influenced the public agenda of national audiences and, through the influence of its ‘direct’ reporting style from war zones and human disaster regions, the political agenda of governments and policy makers. Based on CNN’s worldwide dominance in the journalistic coverage of the first Gulf War, satellite news channels from other countries emerged throughout the 1990s in all world regions in order to be able to counter- balance other national viewpoints on a global scale. The specific angle which became possible through such an international coverage shifted the traditional public sphere mechanism as transnational political news took on a role as a ‘fifth’ estate, influencing the national media agenda and, through this process, national government action. This role of a ‘fifth’ estate was not only taken on by Western satellite channels but also by, for example, Al Jazeera’s English language channel. In addition to Al Jazeera, numerous other Arab channels compete for public opinion across the Arab region (Sakr, 2007). Today, the satellite news landscape has become a powerful communicative ‘extension’ of a national policy agenda. For example, satellites targeting simultaneously Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East deliver hundreds of news channels in Arabic, Chinese Hindi, German, Malayalam, Swedish, Russian, Tamil, Italian, French, Albanian, Bosnian, Serbian, Hindi, Farsi, Polish, Kurdish. The implications of these transnationalized dimensions of ‘publicness’ are, for example, understood in new formations of media–state relations, for example, in contexts of foreign policy (e.g. Robinson, 2002), where the reporting of humanitarian disaster has produced a need
250 Ingrid Volkmer for foreign policy action. ‘Breaking news’ formats have shaped a new journalistic dimension of magnified conflicts (Volkmer, 1999; Cottle and Rai, 2006; Musa and Yusha’u, 2013), government positions, understood as ‘public diplomacy’ (Seib, 2016) and democratization such as in the Arab region (Abdelmoula, 2015). Whereas transnational political journalism, delivered by satellite has transformed media–state relations, today’s digital communication sphere is no longer ‘transnational, ‘national’ or ‘global’ but rather ‘spatial’, a transparent globalized landscape—a communicative ‘matrix’—that reconfigures civic identity, public deliberation, and governance as a communicative space of now fine-lined, individualized digital ‘spatial’ communication.
14.6. ‘Networks of Centrality’ and ‘Centrality of Networks’: From Public Spheres Towards Subjective Horizons of Publicness Across such a digital communicative ‘matrix’, communicative dimensions appear as fine-lined subjective spheres, navigated and managed as individualized ‘interfaces’ across the scope of a digital ecology which is accessible from anywhere in the world with digital connectivity. Research tools, such as the visualization tools of social network sites, enabling a methodological shift towards ‘digital methods’ (Rogers, 2015), illuminate the networked patterns of transnationally connected communicative threads which are not accessible using standard social science methods. As these are new research fields, conceptual ‘threads’ are mainly assessed in the focus of technology-centred empirical research and rarely of larger conceptual, that is, epistemological debates (for example, Kitchin, 2014). The debating of deliberative discourse in these networked spheres is also tied to the enlarged dynamic communicative space of technology-centred interaction and, for example, discussed as specifically ‘digital’ or ‘online’ deliberation. Quite often the ‘ideal’ of traditions of rational deliberative discourse is broadly adopted in these one-dimensional network contexts and—in consequence—it is assumed that deliberative network engagement is either an ‘alternative’ sphere of deliberation or—due to the boundedness of the ideal model—restricted to a territorially (often nationally) shared space. However, the dialectic between ‘national’ and ‘spatial’ deliberative practices was already problematized in the early days of the internet with a sceptical understanding of ‘the utopian vision’ of the internet ‘as a worldwide agora’ (Margolis and Resnick, 2000, p. 14). More recently, the focus of the critical assessment has been more concrete as digital communication is now embedded in all sorts of political practices where the notion of purely ‘online’ deliberation is considered as ‘too narrow and one dimensional’ (Wright, 2012). Wright’s key point is the lack of conceptual understanding of the
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 251 ‘deliberative potential’ in the context of online research which, however, is often related to ‘traditional definitions of politics’ with ‘normative underpinnings that may not hold in the context of new media’ (Wright, 2012, p. 245). Still today, digital deliberation is mainly assessed in Western world regions and is mainly related to national contexts and to digital platforms. We require a larger paradigmatic debate to address its scalar transnational reach, and a focus on the relation between digital communication and ‘actor groundedness’ to assess the axes of deliberative engagement. Ulrich Beck once remarked that advanced globalization needed to be addressed in terms of the ‘epistemological shift’ (Beck, 2006, p. 17), that is, a shift in the debates of transnational public spheres in the ecology of connected publicness. Such an epistemological shift requires specifically a move away from the normative deliberative ‘discourse’ as the only model of deliberation and requires a focus on new dimensions, such as the new sphere of civic ‘reflexivity’ and deliberative engagement in transnationally stretched networks of ‘reflective’ interdependence, enabling political discourse in a digital ‘space’, such as social media, engaging like-minded citizens across societies. Given the advanced stage not only of globalization as a deterritorialized ‘fluid’ communicative landscape but also the complexity of networked ‘public’ communication in such an enlarged terrain, a conceptualization of the dimensions of spatial, transnational ‘principles’ of deliberative discourse can no longer be addressed through an adoption of the ‘modern’ ideal of deliberative discourse or a technology-centred focus through the lens of thematic threads of ‘risk’ communication. This necessitates a shift of the conceptual debate of public deliberation from the sole and normative focus on discursive publicness which worked well in the bounded ‘container’ of the Westphalian nation state and which ‘very few dare to openly challenge’ (Mouffe, 2000, p. 80). This takes the innovative approach of a discursive ‘global demos’ (List and Koenig-Archibugi, 2010) further in a ‘reflexive’ dimension. It is time to overcome the obstacles of the Habermasian gaps, such as methodological nationalism and a focus on the ‘ideal’ deliberative discourse through a paradigmatic shift. A paradigmatic shift which is not a shift to the ‘digital turn’ but—given the advanced digital age—one that is a turn towards the focus of the subject positioned in chosen and transnationally unbounded spheres of publicness. It is a communicative framework of the subjective micro-network site, the subjective ‘interface’ of selected communicative ‘axes’ of publicness and deliberative spheres in this transnationally spatial digital landscape, which are not only coming together but are—and this is the new dimension of deliberation—reflexively ‘bundled’ on smartphone screens or other digital devices within an everyday lived reality that we share with others that Habermas referred to as the ‘lifeworld’ universe. Such a subjective site of publicness is set up by citizens in Tanzania as well as in the US, in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia and Sweden. However, little is known about the specific transnational scale of such a subjective site of publicness and its relation to deliberative action on a local, national, or global level. So far, the ‘interface’ is mainly defined as a site of relations of technological space. It is possible to consider the subjectively managed ‘interface’ as a communicative site, a reflexive dimension of a subjective
252 Ingrid Volkmer public ecology, chosen from the options of a digital communicative ‘matrix’ that is accessible from anywhere in the world with digital connectivity. The ideal discourse of face-to-face deliberation in town hall meetings and coffee houses now takes place on social media sites and is expressed in all types of ‘utterance’ narratives, ranging from ‘like’ buttons to digital activism. Nancy Fraser argued in 2007 that the key problem of transnational publics is that the ‘interlocutors are neither co- nationals nor fellow citizens’ (Fraser, 2007, p. 16) but, today, ‘co-nationals’ and ‘fellow citizens’ engage in very different subjectively selected ecologies of publicness—despite being situated in the same country in which the national coherence of a public sphere has been lost. This is a scenario which applies to many society types, including failed states. Within these transnationally connected spheres of ‘reflective interdependence’, we have to broaden our understanding of deliberation in networked structures which are transnationally emerging across deliberative ‘fields’. An example of such a deliberative transnational action ‘field’ is ‘virtual activism’ intensifying publicness by simultaneously enhancing geographically dispersed ‘local’ discourse across a transnationally accessible activism of resistance and engagement. For example, the post-election crisis in Kenya in 2007–08 is an example where virtual activism across diverse transnational sites resulted in governmental change in Kenya. ‘Transparency’ is another ‘field’ of deliberation which was enabled by, for example, in an African context, Ushahidi, a mapping site for the geographical mapping of sites of violent political incidents which, as a consequence, resulted in government action. The ‘reflexive’ space of subjective micro-networks can be further understood in the broad dichotomy of ‘network centrality’ on one hand and the ‘centrality of networks’ on the other (Volkmer, 2014). The term, ‘network centrality’, refers here to the networked structure set up for the ‘monitoring’ of political ‘issues’, such as via chosen social media groups in addition to the web sites of activists like Greenpeace and world spanning news outlets like the Hindu Times and the BBC. The second sphere proposed is the sphere of ‘centrality of networks’, which relates to concrete forms of engagement; for example, uploading links, spurring an image, video or link to ‘go viral’ among online publics, posting comments, and the management of blogs. The sphere of ‘centrality of networks’ for public discourse relates in broader terms to public engagement through chosen platforms as continuous discursive and interactive ‘reference points’ but also engaging in social media and blog sites. These two spheres—the specifically selected ‘network centrality’ as the monitoring sphere and the specifically selected ‘centrality of networks’ as the engagement sphere—unfold the dialectical architecture of subjectively chosen publicness in the specifically ‘bundled’ ‘reflexive’ dimension, which has—potentially— deliberative implications across societies. The dialectic of ‘networks of centrality’ as the ‘monitoring’ sphere and the ‘centrality of networks’ as the ‘engagement’ sphere, helps to set very broad parameters for the ‘mapping’ of the emerging subjective horizons of publicness. Furthermore, public discourse across a diversity of communicative ‘networks’ can no longer be only related to ‘web- based’ spheres or technological ‘connectivity’ because communicative networks constitute multi-directional, multi-layered communicative forms. In this sense, the term,
The Transnationalization of Public SphereS 253 ‘network’, used here, includes a diversity of sites, the internet as well as satellite channels, traditional media forms, mobile phone applications, in addition to new forms of ‘networked’ television, streamed as iptv (internet protocol television) which—through streaming web delivery—seamlessly incorporates television content into a transnational space. This is the new dimension of networked complexities of cross-platform communicative practices.
14.7. Conclusion In conclusion, this chapter has undertaken three aims. First, it has addressed the idea of the ‘public’ in transnational contexts, through a focus on the diminishing role of the ‘state’ and national ‘boundedness’. The transformation of publicness was identified as one key aspect of this process; however, the second is the ‘fluidity’ of governance, citizenship, and the role of national media. The second aim was to reveal the historiographies of trans-border communication and the focus on local traditions of transnational public engagement. A third aim was to suggest a shift towards the subjective public horizon, enabled by digital ‘micro-networks’ situated in a digital space. Finally, there are promising avenues for future research. In the move from the territoriality of national information and communication spheres to multifold spatial directedness and deterritorialized public communication, the challenge for scholars will be to undertake research on the transnationalization of the public sphere as a truly interdisciplinary dialogue. Whatever the research routes forged in the future, the value for the study of global policy and transnational administration, is greater understanding of the evolving dimensions of ‘publicness’ as a crucial pillar of policy engagements.
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Chapter 15
C oncep tua l i z i ng Gl obal Publi c P ol i c y A Global Public Good Perspective Inge Kaul
15.1. Introduction The world is confronting a rising number of challenges, the benefits and costs of which have global reach (WEF, 2017). Many of these challenges, including climate change, communicable diseases, excessive financial volatility, cyber-(in)security, and wars/conflicts possess the properties of public goods. Such goods are, as economists say, public in consumption, meaning they might affect anyone anywhere, for better or worse. Global challenges with these characteristics can thus be viewed as a sub-category of public goods: that is, global public goods (GPGs). Some GPGs, notably global natural commons such as the moonlight or the ocean, have always existed. Over time, however (and particularly over the past half-century), the number of GPGs has risen as more and more human-made GPGs have been generated, partly to facilitate globalization and partly as a result of it. Some GPGs of note— international transport and communications systems, multilateral trade regimes, expanded and integrated financial markets, or norms such as basic human rights—are human-made public goods intended for global public consumption. In contrast, issues like communicable diseases have unintentionally taken on stronger GPG properties in the wake of globalization, as more porous national borders and increased cross-border economic activity have allowed them (as blind passengers, accompanying travellers and cargo) to easily criss-cross the globe. Not only has the number of GPGs increased, but the number of underprovided GPGs has risen, and with it the number of risks and crises we must face. For example, instead of climate stability, we have experienced global warming; instead of well-regulated financial markets, excessive financial volatility; instead of peace and security, international
258 Inge Kaul terrorism; and instead of universal respect for norms such as a life in human decency, large-scale movements of people driven from their homes by violence and lack of economic opportunities. While there is growing recognition of these challenges and many feasible solutions do exist, corrective measures are emerging at a relatively slow pace and in an often haphazard and inconsistent manner, allowing GPG-related challenges to linger unresolved and assume crisis proportions. Why is this the case? And how can these challenges be dealt with in a better, more efficient and effective way? The present chapter explores these questions in two steps. Section 1 examines the main attributes of GPGs in an attempt to uncover aspects that might set them apart from other goods, notably from the well-researched and better understood national public goods. The analysis suggests that GPGs do indeed differ. Against this background, Section 2 asks what features global public policies would need to possess in today’s increasingly multi-polar world to be judged fit to foster the adequate provision of GPGs. The concluding section suggests that, given the policy interdependence that many GPGs entail, states’ willingness to engage in international cooperation is a key prerequisite of their adequate provision. Social science scholarship thus has an important role to play in exploring the economic, socio-cultural, and political desirability and feasibility of requisite innovation in national, regional, and global policy perspectives and strategies, as well as corresponding organizational governance reforms. The starting point, however, must be a simple terminological differentiation. We must no longer use the terms ‘international’ and ‘global’ as synonyms, but employ ‘international’ for phenomena that exist between nations and ‘global’ for those that ignore geographic, temporal, sectoral, and actor-specific borderlines. The latter includes conventional borderlines between the various social science sub-disciplines. An adequate understanding of GPGs and the design of fitting policy responses to the challenges they pose depends on an appropriate twenty-first century definition of the term ‘global’.
15.2. Identifying the Policy Challenges Posed by GPGs GPGs are frequently described as public goods, for which the benefits and costs have global reach. This definition, while straightforward, raises three questions. What precisely are public goods? What does the term ‘global’ mean in this context? How do we define GPGs? What are the implications of a public good being not just of a national but also a global scale? Accordingly, Sub-section 1 begins by defining generic public goods; Sub-section 2 explores the key distinguishing properties of GPGs that matter in the present context; and Sub-section 3 identifies some GPG-specific policy requirements (for a detailed discussion of the issues raised in this section, see Kaul et al., 2003, 2016 and Sandler, 2004).
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15.2.1. Defining Public Goods Public goods are usually defined as goods that are marked by publicness in consumption: that is, by being non-rival, non-excludable, or both. According to standard economic theory, a good is non-rival in consumption if its consumption by one individual does not reduce its availability to others; and it is non-excludable if it is technically infeasible to exclude individuals from its consumption and/or if such exclusion is seen as too costly and hence undesirable in economic, socio-cultural, or political terms. If a good possesses both properties, it is said to be ‘pure public’, and if it exhibits just one it is called ‘impure public’. Increasingly, however, another aspect of publicness has been highlighted by researchers and policy makers: goods’ publicness in production. As a result of advances in public–private partnering, many public goods that were formerly fully or predominantly state-provided underwent various forms of privatization. Their provision may not only involve a large number of actors but also multiple actor types. In many instances, the state is now acting as just one input-provider among several, though nevertheless an important one owing to its special coercive powers (including taxation). The various changes that have taken place during the past half-century—including privatization, technological advances, rising income levels, and evolving normative frameworks—have clearly demonstrated that the publicness and privateness of goods are often not innate properties but a social construct. In particular, the property of non- excludability lends itself to manipulation. Consequently, ‘pure public’ and ‘pure private’ are increasingly being viewed as opposite poles of a public–private spectrum along which goods can be placed. Accordingly, this paper uses the two-tier definition of public goods presented in Kaul and Mendoza (2013), which says that goods have a special potential for being public, if they are non-rival, non-excludable or both but de facto public, that is, there to consume if they are left to be non-excludable or made non-exclusive. The defining property of a public good thus is its de facto publicness in consumption, which according to standard economic theory, may tempt individual actors to free-ride on its provision. The free-rider assumption dates back to a thought experiment conducted by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (2015 [1739–1740]). He assumed that two neighbours might agree to cooperate in draining a meadow that they possessed in common but that if a thousand people were involved each would perhaps find a reason to not cooperate, placing the whole burden on others. Ever since, the idea of ‘free-riding’ has been closely associated with the concept of public goods, as social scientists adopted another assumption, viz. the ‘rational choice’ assumption, which sees individuals as selfish and rational utility maximizers. Why, they ask, would a rational person contribute to a good that, once produced, is public in consumption? (For more on the free-riding assumption and its use in social science literature, see van Aaken, 2014 and Kaul et al., 2016.) However, empirical evidence is mounting that free-riding by individual actors in the presence of public goods is not as pervasive as has often been presumed. Rather, several
260 Inge Kaul types of actors exist, ranging from pure-selfish with mixed-motives to altruistic (for studies providing evidence of intrinsic willingness to cooperate, see Brousseau et al., 2012; Gächter, 2014; Ostrom, 2000; Sen, 1977). Moreover, reluctance to cooperate may not always be prompted by selfish considerations but could also be due to bounded rationality or varying preferences for particular or general public goods. Aside from attitudinal factors, actors’ willingness to cooperate also depends on structural factors, especially on whether all parties affected by a good’s publicness in consumption and/or production can have a say in whether to address the good and, if so, how to shape it and what distribution of costs and benefits to enforce. Following Hirshleifer’s (1983) article on the social composition function of public goods, scholars tend to distinguish between three main public good provision paths: the best-shot path; the summation path; and the weakest-link path. The ‘best-shot path’ implies that the good can be produced by a single person or agency. The ‘summation path’ implies that the good is composed of a number of building blocks and that all or most actors belonging to the community that is to be served by it need to contribute. Moving towards a low-carbon economy is a case in point. Some summation-type goods, such as communicable disease control, may have some weak links in their provision path—actors who lack the capacity to contribute or the requisite willingness to do so. Also, a ‘best shot’ producer may generate the good but may wish to be paid for having done so. The collection of that money may be a summation process. Similarly, weak links tend to exist within a summation process. Clearly, understanding the possible source(s) of reluctance to cooperate is important for averting the risk of non-cooperation and, thus, one of the key policy requirements of public goods. Economists list public goods and their related external phenomena (i.e. the unpriced public spillover effects generated by individual consumption or production activities) among the conditions that may cause markets to fail and potentially justify intervention by the state, not necessarily as a direct producer of the good but as a mobilizer of necessary public revenue and a provider of incentives.
15.2.2. The Distinguishing Features of GPGs Matters become even more complicated in the case of GPGs. To understand the key difference between national public goods and GPGs, it is important to clarify the notion of global and what it means for a public good to be globally public in consumption. In the case of GPGs, the goods’ benefits and costs stretch across countries and areas beyond national jurisdiction. By doing so, they penetrate countries and, possibly, ‘fellow’ GPGs, whether welcome or not. For example, the effects of global warming may not only affect countries (e.g. through floods and droughts) but also contribute to the acidification of the oceans. Moreover, some GPGs, including climate change and global inequity, are stock variables that may emerge—and be correctable—only incrementally over long periods of time. As such their public effects may also stretch across several generations. Box 15.1 distinguishes between three dimensions of global publicness in
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 261
Box 15.1 Defining global public goods. Global public goods (GPGs) share with other public goods (PGs) the key property of publicness in consumption: being fully or partially non-rival and non-excludable. What distinguishes them from other PGs is the reach of their publicness in consumption, which: (i) spans several geographic regions or even the globe as a whole; and may also (ii) penetrate into countries, areas beyond national jurisdictions, or both, with variable levels of impact; and (iii) be of long-term duration, affecting, for better or worse, several generations. Thus, while criterion (i) is the prerequisite for a good to be defined as a GPG, the publicness in consumption of GPGs could potentially comprise three dimensions: • a spatial dimension: being of worldwide span; • an impact dimension: affecting countries and areas beyond national jurisdiction; • a temporal dimension: having long-term effects. In most cases, global publicness in consumption along any of these three dimensions will not be an innate property of the good but reflect a policy choice or the lack thereof. In addition to being public in consumption, many GPGs, like other PGs, are also public in provision: their provision involves a large number of actors and compels countries to seek the cooperation of others. Source: Kaul et al. (2016).
consumption: a spatial dimension (being of worldwide reach); an impact dimension (affecting countries and areas beyond national jurisdiction); and a temporal dimension (having long-term effects). Publicness in consumption of GPGs is thus a complex, multi-dimensional, and even invasive phenomenon that ignores borders (both natural and human-made). Yet, like national publicness in consumption, global publicness in consumption is often a social construct. That is, it is the result of a policy choice to remove trade barriers and capital controls and allow national policy domains to become more interlocked. Similarly, in many cases, the existence or non-existence of cross-border spillovers from one country into another or from countries into areas beyond national jurisdiction (such as the atmosphere or high seas) is also a policy choice, notably one made by states individually and/or collectively. Tax havens must not exist, yet they are allowed to exist and to undermine the GPG ‘global tax base’ (see Fitzgerald, 2013; Konrad, 2008; and Tanzi, 2008). Or, while the arms trade supports violent conflicts and thus undermines global peace and security, it is nevertheless allowed to continue, and is perhaps even promoted by some states (see SIPRI 2017). The complexity and comprehensiveness of GPGs intensifies further when examining them from the provision side. As depicted in Figure 15.1, GPG provision is in many cases dependent on a large number of diverse actors supplying solicited or unsolicited inputs to the good (e.g. in the form of externalities). Moreover, GPG provision can often involve interventions in multiple sectors and at multiple politico-administrative levels. For example, climate change mitigation and adaptation calls for action in such areas
262 Inge Kaul
9
Global public domain 9
Regional public goods
Intermediate global public goods
Final global public good
Transnational actor groups incl. GPPPs
2 2
1
7 7
Multilateral global organizations/ negotiation venues
5
National public goods
8
8
7 5 7
Households and firms
6 3 1
3
1
Governments, national and subnational
8
4
6 4
Advocacy groups
8 3 1
Incentives
5
Encouraging actors to deliver direct and indirect inputs or change behaviour to take account of social concerns
2
Opportunities
6
Generating goods and services that either feed directly into a global public good (GPG) or facilitate its provision by individual states, households, and firms 3
Demands for international cooperation
Political pressures
Coercion and nudging Public policy measures designed to ‘push’ individual actors towards enhanced externality management or making a direct contribution
7
Reflecting national preferences for international cooperation 4
Consumption Consuming the benefits or costs of intermediate GPGs intended to motivate individual actors to contribute to the final GPG
Externality Resulting from activities by state or non-state actors, as well as GPG-related national and regional public goods
8
Coming from advocacy and lobbying groups calling on governments, intergovernmental organizations, and other potential providers to help fund or deliver GDGs
Direct provision Financial and non-financial inputs directly provided by individual actors to GPG-related national and regional public goods
9
Linkages Feed-in effects into the final GPG from intermediate GPGs and other final GPGs already in the global public domain
Figure 15.1 The provision paths of GPGs.
as technology development and deployment, intellectual property rights, energy, transport, housing, urban development, flood protection, ocean de-acidification, and forest development. Clearly, GPGs do not fit easily into existing governance systems. The question is, which entity is at present in charge of a GPG-like climate change mitigation, nationally and internationally? In most cases, the answer would most likely be that many entities are involved but none has the responsibility for facilitating or even ensuring the adequate provision of the good.
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 263 In many cases, no country, however powerful, is in a position to unilaterally produce a new GPG or change the provision of an existing one, and thus must seek cooperation from others. GPGs thus entail policy interdependence among countries and, consequently, may give rise to controversies and disagreements, notably in cases where global and national/regional interests do not overlap. In such cases, their publicness in consumption may be seen as running counter to one of the basic principles on which the present world order rests: the non-violability of national borders. In addition, their publicness in provision may be seen as violating a second world-order principle, namely national policy making sovereignty. Yet, when states act on an international level, they too are individual actors, namely actors with particular national interests that may or may not overlap with global concerns. Moreover, as the institution of the state has no equivalent at the international level, international cooperation in support of GPG provision, to the extent that it is required, has to happen voluntarily or ‘quasi-voluntarily’, based on power politics. However, with growing multi-polarity, power politics are increasingly losing their teeth as an effective strategy for GPG provision. More states are demanding a say in matters that concern them. GPG provision can be presumed to increasingly depend on the voluntary agreement of actors to contribute and, hence, on GPG input provision being an attractive proposition that is perceived by all concerned parties as just and fair in terms of process and outcome. GPGs thus present policy makers and their constituencies not only with a compulsion to cooperate but also with a compulsion to agree to process and outcome fairness in order to win other states’ cooperation. In particular, for the conventional major powers, who in the past acted as major global policy setters, this may still be a relatively new and unfamiliar experience and make both markets and states fail in GPG provision.
15.2.3. Identifying GPG-Specific Policy Challenges In light of the foregoing discussion, it appears that, in terms of GPG-related policy making, we have reached a ‘fork in the road’. While GPGs are not an entirely new phenomenon, their importance has grown, notably as a result of the technological progress and advance of globalization that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century. So far, GPG-type policy challenges have mainly been addressed within the existing governance frameworks modelled to fit the Westphalian state system and a global policy context comprised of a few policy-setting countries and many policy-taking ones. However, the rising number of GPGs, and the fact that more of these goods are suffering from under- provision, now confront us with a basic choice: to continue along the familiar policy path and head into a riskier and ever-more crisis-prone world or to explore new policy approaches that allow us to more effectively deal with GPG-type policy challenges. Let us assume that we opt for the latter. What would a GPG-theory-driven paradigm of global public policy need to be able to do in order to effectively and efficiently address GPG-type challenges?
264 Inge Kaul The foregoing discussion suggests that such a policy would need to bear the following five facts in mind: • GPGs are highly complex, multidimensional phenomena, beyond the scale and perspective of any of the conventional social science sub-disciplines; • they ignore national borders and other present organizational divides and thus may not fit easily into existing national and international governance systems; • there may be market and state failures when ensuring their adequate provision, though at present we only have a developed market failure theory; • as most public policy instruments were developed either with the national policy context or the development assistance paradigm in mind, it is important to assess to what extent they hold when applied in a GPG context and what needs there are for new and additional policy instruments; • the goods’ global publicness in consumption and often also in provision may affect countries and people worldwide. Thus, increasing multi-polarity will stimulate demand for more participatory decision-making on GPG-related matters, notably when preferences and expectations about how to address these goods vary across concerned parties. Consequently, the critical questions are what measures could be taken to correct the current impediments to adequate GPG provision? This is the issue to which we will now turn.
15.3. Elements of Global Public Policy Fostering the Provision of GPGs In the following sub-sections, we look at five features that, one could conjecture, a fitting global public policy needs to possess. They include: (1) placing the GPGs themselves at the centre of policy analysis and policy making; (2) approaching GPG provision in an integrated manner; (3) adopting incentive measures designed to help reduce the risk of dual-actor (market and state) failure in GPG provision; (4) devising mechanisms and tools to foster adequate GPG financing; and (5) aligning publicness in consumption and provision with publicness in decision-making to enhance the likelihood of international negotiations leading to outcomes that all of the concerned parties recognize as mutually beneficial and to which it is worth complying and contributing.
15.3.1. Placing GPGs at the Centre of Policy Analysis and Policy Making Many perhaps take it for granted that before a private good is produced it must be decided, upfront, how to shape and finance it, and whom to involve in its production. Why not do the same for GPGs, especially as they are of a highly complex nature?
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 265 An instrument that could help bring GPGs into policy focus might be ‘provision path analyses’. Such analyses help indicate what type of inputs might be needed to produce a particular good, who might be the best provider(s) for each input, and how the inputs might come together. The lack of such analyses is evident from the first attempts at providing such provision path sketches (see Akhgar and Brewster, 2016; Dubash and Florini, 2011; Frenk and Moon, 2013; IPCC, 2014; and Kickbusch and Szabo, 2014). These first provision path analyses indicate that a full understanding of the goods is often likely to require analytical frameworks that do what the goods do: span multiple levels, actor groups, economic sectors and, importantly, the foreign/domestic divide. One advantage of such analyses would be that, based on the principle of subsidiarity, one could see more clearly what balance to strike between centralization and decentralization, where scope exists for realizing economies of scale and scope, or how applying the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and capacities might impact GPG financing. The suggested provision path analyses would also sharpen our awareness of the fact that many GPGs (both natural and human-made) can have their own systemic integrity requirements that exceed what countries, individually or collectively, are willing to do for them. ‘Systemic integrity requirements’ refers to the conditions that need to be maintained or achieved for a system (natural or human-made) to function in an intact and undiminished way. Put differently, sometimes it may be necessary not only to sum up national (state and non-state) interests but also to take account of what the goods’ themselves require to be able to function and support sustainable global growth and development (see Kim and Bosselmann, 2015). Importantly, provision path analysis requires us to specify and agree on what constitutes adequate provision to undertake global, disaggregated regional/ national cost/benefit analyses that might, in turn, provide evidence that taking corrective action in a concerted and decisive manner could be beneficial to all and facilitate policy makers’ and the general public’s willingness to initiate requisite reforms. Last but not least, provision path analyses would sharpen our understanding of the policy interdependence that GPGs entail. Notably, often no one state can ensure their adequate provision unilaterally, perhaps not even by forming ‘clubs’ of like-minded states.
15.3.2. Approaching GPG Provision in an Integrated Manner Although Figure 15.1. presents a highly stylized overview of a GPG provision path, it does demonstrate how daunting the task of managing the provision process might be. However, it is precisely the complexity of the provision process that requires arrangements that help prevent the process from being derailed. A possible step in this direction could be to recognize the goods’ provision path as a new policy space and to add to the existing governance systems a new policy function (namely the facilitation of a globally networked approach to GPG provision) and appoint, for each main GPG, lead agencies at the national and international levels (Kaul, 2013; Kaul and Blondin, 2016). Clearly, the
266 Inge Kaul aforementioned provision path analyses would be an important information tool for bringing together and fostering linkages between the myriad members that might be involved in GPG provision networks. A more integrated approach to global issue facilitation or management cannot entail a return to the top-down implementation of international agreements. Rather, as Shaffer (2012) has argued, its purpose would be to avoid the comfort of a loose pluralist framework and the risk of legitimizing and promoting undue centralization. Global issue management should crowd actors in, not out. However, most current governance systems lack a function for integrated global issue management. Thus, the challenge is to change GPG provision from a fractured process into a more interconnected, synergetic, and cumulatively additive one (Jordan et al. 2015). A number of initiatives have been undertaken in recent years that seem aimed at promoting global issue management. Mention should be made of the special envoys that the UN Secretary-General appointed to act as representatives of such issues as climate change, disaster reduction, HIV/AIDS, migration, children in conflict, and genocide prevention. Similarly, a number of national ministries, such as health ministries, have already established global affairs units. The same holds true for ministries of foreign affairs, which have often set up such units for fostering coordination among national and subnational government entities dealing with global issues. Civil society organizations, as well as for-profit and not-for-profit firms, are according more attention to the globalness of the challenges with which they are concerned (on these trends, see Cooper et al., 2013; Hale and Held, 2011; Kaldor et al., 2012; and Stone and Ladi, 2015). However, many of these initiatives exist in an isolated and ad hoc fashion, with no broader (global public policy) narrative to explain why they were created.
15.3.3. Reducing the Risk of Dual-Actor—Market and State—Failure As discussed in Section 1, the behaviour of states vis-à-vis GPGs differs starkly from their behaviour toward national public goods. In the latter case, states act as ‘providers of last resort’, possibly as the only, or at least the main, provider of those goods. They can play this role because they are endowed with coercive authority (including the power to tax) that potentially allows them to prevent national public goods issues from becoming trapped in unresolvable collective action problems. With GPGs, in contrast, states may—for some reason, including resource and capacity constraints—become non- cooperators themselves, with no higher-level global authority to nudge them into concerted action. This is the problem to which Nordhaus’s (2006) ‘Westphalian dilemma’ refers. The policy concern then becomes how to escape from this dilemma. One way would be to provide more well-founded evidence that, in GPG policy spaces (in which conditions of policy interdependence exist), it pays to cooperate. The provision path and disaggregated cost/benefit analyses suggested above (in Point 1 of this section) would be useful here. Such empirical proof may also be required to persuade
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 267 states to agree to ‘exercise their sovereignty in a considerate, respectful, and responsible manner, so that their policies do not adversely impact the sovereignty of others’ (Kaul, 2013, p. 54). That is, for states to pay, in agreed-upon issue areas, special attention to the management of cross-border spillovers. Consensus on such a sovereignty norm would be more compatible with economic openness. Importantly, it would now, with advancing multi-polarity, be more feasible than perhaps a few decades ago, but this is only if there were also a broadened agreement among states to aim at striking mutually beneficial bargains. Again, some first tentative steps in this direction are discernible, as can be seen from the growing commitment of states to report on steps they intend to take or have taken in response to various agreed global goals. The reports on intended nationally determined contributions toward tackling the challenge of climate change are a case in point (see UNFCCC, 2015) and so is the commitment to engage in systematic follow-up and review in Agenda 2030 on sustainable development (United Nations 2015). Another way to reduce the risk of dual-actor failure could be the creation, under the umbrella of the United Nations, of a global stewardship council. Kaul and Blondin (2016) envision this council as ‘a standing body of eminent personalities, wise men and women, appointed in their individual capacities . . . not guided by particular interests, but by what is good for the global public’ (pp. 13–14). Its members would represent a select set of GPGs such as the atmosphere, the ocean, global financial stability and equity, and peace and security. Alternatively, perhaps there could be three categories of country (low, middle, and high income). They would not have legislative powers but would nudge states toward strategies that may make all better off, while ensuring respect for state sovereignty and the longer-term carrying capacity of the globe. A body of this type would thus not just be another body in which states negotiate intergovernmental agreements, but one that would remind us that achieving global sustainable growth and development requires the accommodation and combination of human and state interests with GPG provision requirements—notably those of the global natural commons.
15.3.4. Fostering Adequate GPG Financing Recent decades have seen considerable research and development initiatives aimed at devising new mechanisms and policy instruments that could help improve the financing and provision of GPGs. New risk management tools have been developed, often in public–private partnerships, that allow state and non-state actors to better cope with the negative effects of the rising number of underprovided GPGs, especially with the increase in natural disasters linked to global warming and excessive financial volatility (see Griffith-Jones and Tanner, 2016; Markandya et al., 2017; Mechler et al., 2016). Social science scholars, governments, international organizations such as multilateral development banks, and the private sector have collaborated to explore the creation of new markets, notably carbon markets. This has included looking at how the effectiveness and efficiency of carbon markets (in terms of reducing greenhouse gas
268 Inge Kaul emissions) compares with that of carbon taxes (see, Edenhofer et al., 2015; IPCC, 2014; Weitzman, 2016). Many GPGs entail policy interdependence, and hence it is important to support or incentivize the ‘weak-link’ elements in their supply chains. So, in many global challenge areas, international-level financing mechanisms have in recent decades sprung up to encourage countries (especially developed ones) to reduce or prevent cross-border spillovers that, if left unattended, could jeopardize the welfare of others. Mention can be made of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; the Global Climate Fund; and the Climate Investment Funds (for a brief description of these and other global funds, see WBG 2014; see also Wessel and Wescott, this volume). Among the innovations explored have also been measures designed to incentivize both individual states and private actors to provide GPG inputs over and above what they would do if guided only by national or private interests. For example, there are instruments such as increased loan concessionality and incremental cost reimbursement offered to states, or the advanced purchase commitment tool offered to private firms engaging in critical pro-poor pharmaceutical research (for a comprehensive overview of the new instruments that have been proposed, tested, and considered for adoption, see Sagasti and Bezanson, 2001; IPCC, 2014; Kaul, 2017; Kaul et al., 2006; see also Alesani, this volume). However, while many new ideas, including various new taxes (such as the currency transaction tax) (Leading Group, 2010), have been developed and often found to be technically feasible and economically desirable, most of them have not yet entered the policy mainstream. The main reason for this appears to be that governments have continually shied away from adopting new tools and tapping new sources. At the same time, governments have been reluctant to increase, in step with the rising number of challenges, the amount of national public revenue spent abroad. The public-finance resources required for GPG-related purposes abroad have, for the most part, been taken out of available development assistance funds (see, for example, OECD, 2017). However, the number of poor, vulnerable/fragile, and conflict-ridden countries still in need of developmental assistance remains high (MDBs, 2016; Messner and Haken, 2016). Yet, the development and GPG strands of international cooperation differ in important ways so that their intertwining could undermine the effectiveness of both (Kaul et al., 2015). An obvious alternative to the present use of the relatively small official development funds for GPG purposes would be to expect the national lead agency for a particular GPG to not only help finance the national parts of the good’s provision but also the regional and international parts. However, this would lead to resource additionality only if governments were also willing to act as policy entrepreneurs, realizing that addressing problems of GPG provision and development in good time and proper manner could, potentially, be a good investment that, in the short-term, opens up new business and growth opportunities and, in the longer-term, generates high social returns (see also Kaul, 2017). Another issue to be addressed in this context would be whether the agreed global public policy goals, notably those set forth in Agenda 2030 (United Nations, 2015) and
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 269 the Paris Agreement on climate change (UNFCCC, 2016) can be achieved, as currently envisioned, by increasingly employing the relatively scarce resources of international public finance for incentives to attract private finance to both developmental and GPG- related purposes. No doubt, the needed investments are so large that they could not be provided without involving private investors. However, what appears to be lacking so far is a clear understanding of the balance between the different types of finance to focus on in order to ensure that the intended public-policy goals stand a relatively good chance of actually being realized (see Bhattacharya et al., 2016).
15.3.5. Aligning Global Publicness in Consumption and Provision with Global Publicness in Decision-Making According to Slaughter (2012, p. 294), we are living today in a ‘Lego World’: a world in which leaders ‘cannot structure followers’ preferences in the same way that a top- down leader can’ (Slaughter, 2012, p. 297). Relatedly, Ikenberry (2015, p. 411) calls for a ‘system of shared leadership’, and Cooper et al. (2013, p. 20) hold that, under today’s policy making conditions, a selfish state or government ‘may not just be anachronistic, but acutely counterproductive’. Applying the analytical lens of GPGs in the search for an answer to what inclusive global governance might look like and how to recognize it, one could, for example, suggest as a possible formula the matching of the ‘4 Ps’: the four types of publicness that are associated with public good, namely, publicness in consumption, publicness in provision, publicness in decision-making, and publicness in utility. In the foregoing discussion, we have already mentioned the concepts of publicness in consumption and provision. To explain the other two concepts, publicness in decision- making refers to the circle of actors (e.g. policy makers, input providers, and other stakeholders) who have a say in matters such as which goods to provide, where to place them on the public–private continuum, and other aspects concerning the goods’ path of provision. Publicness in utility refers to the distribution of costs and benefits, notably whether international cooperation bargains are mutually beneficial. GPG provision today might suffer from publicness in decision-making not being matched with the publicness in consumption (say, that of climate change mitigation) nor the publicness in provision that the good demands. As a result, actors’ willingness to cooperate may be constrained by uncertainty about outcome fairness, that is, uncertainty about the distribution of its costs and benefits across the cooperating parties or, as it is called here, its publicness in utility. Of course, more inclusive governance would need to be generated at all politico- administrative levels, from the local to the multilateral, worldwide level. Moreover, if we bear in mind that some GPGs may have multigenerational reach, future generations should also be taken into account and have a voice through, for example, national future
270 Inge Kaul councils or representation on the global stewardship council mentioned in Point 3 above. Such developments, however, are problematically dependent on unified political will across nation states.
15.4. Conclusion: Where We Are and Where To Go Next This chapter explored how to conceptualize a global public policy that could help promote a more adequate provision of GPGs and end the downward spiral of crises in which the world currently appears to be caught. Section 1 identified the distinguishing features of GPGs. Then, Section 2 suggested, for the sake of further research and policy debates, five features that a global public policy requires to be fit for the purpose of GPG provision. The discussion also showed that while a few limited policy innovations along these lines are underway, so far there exists no fully-fledged global public policy, neither at the theoretical nor practical level. How can we explain this? After all, by now the scientific and technological aspects of GPG provision are quite well understood. So why are social science studies on this topic still lacking? One reason seems to be that social science scholars have stayed within the confines of their respective sub-disciplines; for example, within conventional, nationally focused public economics or within conventional international relations. They cover only isolated aspects of the usually multi-dimensional provision process such as the behaviour of particular actor groups at a particular politico-administrative level in GPG-related policy fields (see Kaul et al., 2016). Though informative and useful, these studies have little to say about how to improve the overall provision of a particular GPG or GPGs in general. An improved understanding of GPG provision thus calls for innovation in the organization of social sciences; for social science scholarship to develop concepts, methods, and analytical frameworks capable of capturing the globalness of GPGs in their full complexity. Once well documented and understood, the globalness of GPGs may also make it possible for academics and policy makers alike to recognize that, in the present age of globalization, we need to clearly define ‘global’. A pragmatic step forward would be to end the use of ‘international’ and ‘global’ as synonyms. ‘International’ could be reserved for phenomena that exist at a level or space above or between nations. And ‘global’ could be used to denote phenomena that, like GPGs, span the globe (and sometimes generations), penetrate national jurisdictions and areas beyond national jurisdictions, and often require all of us to contribute to their adequate provision. This small semantic change could make a major difference in our understanding of and policy responses to today’s major global policy challenges. The extent to which the reforms suggested here will be adopted and a global public policy emerge depends on the willingness of states and their constituencies to accept
Conceptualizing Global Public Policy 271 that in today’s world policy making sovereignty is often best secured by engaging, at least in policy fields marked by interdependence, in effective international cooperation and, to this end, by forging bargains that all concerned parties consider to be mutually beneficial. However, the more states hesitate to accept this fact, the larger will be the responsibility on the other actor groups, including academics, to foster a more enlightened and realistic perception on the part of state actors and intergovernmental organizations about securing national policy making sovereignty in policy fields marked by global policy interdependence.
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Chapter 16
Regionaliz at i on a nd T r ansRegiona l p ol i c i e s Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev
16.1. Introduction: Glocalization and Multi-L evel Global Governance The provision of public goods has changed over time. Ever since the Westphalia Peace Treaty, the state had been at the centre of organizing governance and providing public goods. As sovereign actors, states exert authority within their territory and over its citizens. As such, states are commonly regarded as the sole providers of public goods. The Westphalian notion of sovereignty also implies that above the level of the state there is no power except for what states agree on an intergovernmental basis. Yet ever since Westphalia, the world has transformed into a more complex system where the governance and the provision of public goods is spread across different entities. These developments are dramatically changing the Westphalian world order, not only because they limit the sovereignty of states, but also because they blur the boundaries between states and non-state governance entities. To be sure, states still occupy an important place, but over the years two developments have challenged the centrality of states in the provision of public goods. On the one hand, there has been a widespread devolution of state power to subnational entities of governance (Hooghe, Marks, and Schakel, 2010). Western Europe has been at the forefront of this development, but economic and fiscal devolution has also taken place in seemingly centralized states such as China. On the other hand, there have been increased transfers of governance to some supranational organizations because of regional integration between states (Mattli, 199). Together, these two developments have resulted in a governance system where, next to states, non-state actors are also present. Such non-state actors not only include non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or multinational corporations (MNCs), but also sub-and supranational entities that have also become engaged in
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 275 public policy making. These entities are not sovereign states but regions that have acquired some statehood properties. Although they are not states, they can act to a large extent as if they are (Van Langenhove, 2011). The proliferation of sub-and supranational regionalisms has not only increased the complexity of transnational administration, it has also reinforced the scalar component of public policy: such policies now exist not only at the level of states, but also at the subnational regional level and at the supranational regional level. Belgium, for instance, has its own national-level public policy while regional entities such as Flanders or Wallonia have their distinct public policies as well. What is unique in the transnational space is that Belgium is part of the Benelux, the Eurozone and the EU and each supranational region can also be regarded as a public policy space. In the old system with only states as major actors, the powers of sovereignty were confined to states regardless of their geographical size. As such, scholars focused on comparing the governance-system of states. From that perspective, it made sense to compare, for instance, Lichtenstein with China. Today, such clear-cut divisions or levels of analysis among previously discrete concepts like ‘individual’, ‘state’, and ‘system’ are seemingly less relevant. This altered space is captured by the notion of ‘glocalization’, referring to the simultaneously globalized and localized world. As public goods are no longer to be confined to state governance only, regional governance has become a lens through which one can examine both glocalization and the provision of public goods. Regions can be defined as any unit of governance that is not a state, but that has some statehood properties. A classic example are regional entities within a federal state (e.g. the Länder in Germany) that have their own government, but are not a sovereign state and can therefore be regarded, more broadly, as a non- state actor. The same holds for regional organizations such as the EU that have a legal personality and executive, and legislative and political powers (think of the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament). The EU is a non-state actor. It is not sovereign even if it has a legal personality and is therefore to be considered as a non-state actor, albeit it does have some statehood properties. These developments occur against the backdrop of several other societal developments that add to the complexity. First, there is the changing perspective of what states should do and what should be left to private initiatives and market forces. The rise of neoliberalism has certainly influenced the regionalization of the world by encouraging free trade arrangements at the regional level. Examples include ASEAN, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or Mercosur. Today, most Regional Arrangements are actually nothing more than Free Trade Arrangements. Second, the world is increasingly faced with a set of global problems and challenges that require global action. The anthropogenic challenges to the environment are one such problem. While single states can act within their own domain to alter their contribution to global warming and/or environmental care, it is only through cooperative action with other states that a comprehensive response to climate change can be successful.
276 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev Next to that there are problems linked to the accelerated development of information and communication technologies that, combined with increased transportation facilities, make state borders increasingly irrelevant (Baldwin, 2008). States can no longer define their own policy priorities without taking into account what other states do. Notwithstanding the global problems and the rise of regionalism, the state remains to a large extent the main player, that is, ‘the policy authority for tackling global problems still belongs to the states, while the sources of the problems and potential solutions are situated at the transnational, regional or global level’ (Thakur and Van Langenhove, 2006, p. 223). Finally, as states have to share their actorness with regions, there is now also room for region-to-region interactions. This is sometimes referred to as ‘interregionalism’: relations between two clearly identifiable regional organizations within the framework of institutionalized agreements. However, this captures only part of today’s interregional relations. Hence, the concept of ‘transregionalism’ used in this chapter, goes beyond the narrow interaction between two institutionalized regions within a formal framework. According to Rüland, transregionalism can be defined as ‘a dialogue process with a more diffuse membership which does not necessarily coincide with regional organizations, and which may include member states from more than two regions’ (Rüland, 2006, p. 296). The difference from interregionalism can be seen in the example of ASEM—the Asia Europe meeting—since its membership cannot be referred to as two distinct regions (Baert et al., 2014, p. 5). This chapter will focus on the transregional dimension of the provision of public goods. The structure of the chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, the phenomenon of multi-level governance will be introduced as a general framework to study transregionalism. Section three will discuss the rise of regions as providers of public goods. Section four will present an overview of theoretical approaches to regionalism. Empirical examples of transregional public policies will be discussed in Section five. The chapter will conclude with the claim that there is a growing governance space for public goods at the transregional level. That space is increasingly occupied by networks of actors, rather than by single actors.
16.2. The Rise of Regions as a Worldwide Phenomenon Change and instability are today seen as core characteristics of the world. The most important consequence of these rapid changes is the rise of a new form of governance through the construction of a ‘network society’, in Castells’ terms, in which networks constitute ‘the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operations and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture’ (Castells, 1996, p. 469). This approach focusing on policy
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 277 networks as a form of governance has been gradually applied beyond the national level, in order to assess governance at regional European level and international level. In social sciences, this was reflected by the growing interest in the concept of ‘transnational policy networks’ (Stone, 2008). Bőrzel (1997) applies this concept to European integration, with the European Union ‘conceptualized as a multi-level system of governance, where private and public actors of the supranational, national and subnational level interact within highly complex networks to produce policy outcomes’ (Bőrzel, 1997, p. 13). In this context, the state does not possess a monopoly over policy making and instead, becomes just one actor amongst many without clear control over the activities of subnational actors in the international arena. The resulting proliferation of actors at the sub-and supranational level has created space for the emergence of new networks that bring together actors who share similar policy interests. As pointed out by Peterson, these ‘policy networks are invariably linked to national networks in the same sectors. But the extent to which the former “stand apart” from control by national capitals may be taken as another sign of the coming of age of the European Union as a polity in its own right’ (Peterson, 2003, p. 19). As other chapters in this Handbook (see Legrand as well as Gaus, this volume) recount, a dense web of networks dealing with diverse issues such as national security, the global economy, and environmental policy has emerged whereby the different parts and functions of each government interacts both with each other domestically and with their foreign and supranational counterparts. Both the fluctuations in the number of states and the interactions between states can be understood as manifestation of integration and disintegration forces. The common usage of the term ‘integration’ is, however, often confusing. The notion of integration has traditionally been an issue of much debate. This is often due to the lack of definitional consensus on its meaning and its properties. Indeed, not only has the concept been used imprecisely, there is no single definition of ‘integration’ that has gained widespread acceptance. Inherent in the term is the concept of interactions, since any situation other than complete isolation will inevitably give rise to some kind of interactive relationship. One way to think about integration is to see it as a process in which units move from a condition of total or partial isolation towards a complete or partial unification. Applied to the interaction between independent sovereign states, the concept refers to a process of complex social transformations, which may or may not create some kind of permanent institutional structure or lead to mutual cooperation. Integration between sovereign states is a process of large-scale territorial differentiation characterized by the progressive lowering of internal boundaries and the slow rising of new external boundaries. Such processes liberate conflicting energies and tensions at all levels. The output has consequences for states, their welfare system, economic trade, national identities, and so on. Regional integration thus applies conceptions of interactions to the study of the modern world system. Integration can be understood either as a state of affairs or as a process. The former refers to a static account of integration, according to which a state of integration is achieved when certain (subjectively) predefined criteria are met. The process account of
278 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev integration views integration as a dynamic concept which involves movement between conditions of isolation and total integration. Obviously, these accounts are complementary, since at any given moment, units will be placed at any one point along the spectrum of integration. Given that no relationship remains immutable over time, units can move up and down the continuum. Hence, both integration and disintegration are essentially intertwined with the ongoing process of social change. The amalgamation of integration and disintegration is characterized more than ever by the simultaneous movements toward global and local governance. Conceptualization of this paradox has to consider the multi-directional and hybrid nature of the process of integration. This also implies greater attention to the concept of disintegration and a normative revision of its objective value. Disintegration has traditionally been attributed a negative connotation. Partly because of its destabilizing effects on the status quo of the nation-state system, and partly due to erroneous interpretation of it as the antithesis of unity in society, manifestations of disintegration have traditionally been contained and repressed by government authorities. Even so, it is arguable that there is no inherent value in either integration or disintegration. Rather, the state of (dis)integration is a reflection of human identities under conditions of (democratic) governance. Transferring powers from the state to subnational levels is often the outcome of state-level reforms decided by national parliaments. The same holds for supranational regional integration: this occurs when heads of state sign treaties that are then ratified by the national governments involved. As illustrated by the growing demands of subnational regions such as Catalonia or Scotland for self-determination and for devolution of centralized power, forces towards disintegration in the modern world are becoming increasingly difficult to. On top of it, ‘disintegration’ from state power to devolved power might also subsequently create a new ‘integration’ among and between devolved subnational actors. Supranational entities of governance continue to be created as a result of regional integration, including trade arrangements, security alliances and even political co- operations. A new world order seems to be emerging. Along with states and global institutions, the building blocks include regions and regional organizations. The trend towards global governance has enormous implications. For example, European integration has been accompanied by ‘defederalization’: the emergence of subnational regional governance. The EU is not only a collection of twenty-eight member states; it is also an association of hundreds of local regions. Regions can be found at all territorial levels. One could organize nice academic debates about what a region actually is, but a more pragmatic approach is just to accept the plurality of the concept and focus on what regions are not. They are not sovereign states! But regional governance does seem to be related to what is happening with and within states. Some analysts (Van Langenhove, 2011) argue that we are witnessing a decline of the importance of states for many issues of governance, and that regions of all kinds are filling the gap. Regions should thus be defined in the broadest sense and explanations are provided to link it to public policy. This component of the discussion in the next section is conceptual and provides a historical and mapping overview. There are two guiding
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 279 foci: the ‘nature of the region’: from regions that have a geographical and/or historical basis, such as Scotland, to completely imagined mega-regionals like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The second one is on the scale: from micro-regions to meso-and macro-regions, and beyond with interregionalism and transregionalism.
16.3. Theoretical Considerations to Regionalism The link between public policy and regionalism is under-researched. Consequently, a theoretical overview is important, however, it cannot be limited to the classical intellectual history of regionalism and its focus on functionalism and transactionalism. Functionalism focuses on common interests and needs shared by states and on the spillovers from one policy area into others. Transactionalism focuses on building communities between people in different states. Both functionalism and transactionalism are valid approaches to discussing public policy up to, and including, the diffusion of policy and policy transfers studies (see Evans, as well as Chou and Ravinet, in this volume). But in recent years a new theoretical framework has emerged, ‘new regionalism’, which aims to compare different forms of regionalism across the world, and thus acknowledge that not all regional integration needs to be driven by a functionalist logic. In order to study the relationship between public policy and regionalism in a comparative sense, a clear definition of regionalism is required. There has been much debate, which continues, over what exactly constitutes a region, how the boundaries of a region may be drawn, and how regional projects are to be operationalized (Van Langenhove, 2011; Fawcett, 2005). This matter is complicated further due to the fact that those attempting to define a region often find that they are not statically situated or clearly defined. Rather, it is more often the case that regional boundaries are blurred, prone to adaptation and change, or may sometimes exist in an overlapping structure. A good example of this is Europe: it is hard to say where the boundaries of Europe are, and it is certainly bigger than the EU. On top, the EU can be seen as a nested form of regions, as the Schengen-zone or the EURO-group are sub-regions of the EU. This problem of definition has been further exasperated by the various, and often competing, qualitative and quantitative approaches to regionalization seeking to understand and measure its processes (Söderbaum and Shaw, 2003, pp. 5–6). In light of these theoretical and methodological burdens, competing approaches, and problems of defining regionalism and regionalization, it is perhaps most constructive for the purposes of this chapter to maintain a more open definition. To this end, and following the Fawcett arguments, this chapter suggests that for ‘an increase in regional interaction and activity: regionalism refers to policies and projects, regionalisation refers to processes’ (Fawcett, 2013: 5). A similar definition has been put forward by Van Langenhove (2013), who distinguishes between regional projects (or dreams), regional
280 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev processes (the acts that put the dreams into practice) and the regional products (the institutionalization of the integration into treaties and organizations as well into flows of goods, capitals, services, and people). With these underpinnings in mind, scholars have divided notions of regionalism into two main groupings, or what can be referred to as ‘waves’ of regionalization: on the one hand, is ‘old regionalism’ which is associated with the dominant theoretical thinking in the post-Second World War era that places state-based regional interaction at the forefront. On the other, is ‘new regionalism’ which has gained prevalence since the end of the Cold War and seeks to incorporate the formal and informal interactions between states and non-state actors. Within the ‘old regionalism’ school of thought, state and interstate interaction is its central focus. The early theoretical formation of these integration theories were focused primarily on high politics, namely security and the survival of the state, as well as on increasing economic integration and interdependence. William H. Riker, one of the main contributors to the theory of federalism, argued that policy makers would only be willing to integrate and give up some degree of their national sovereignty in a process known as ‘federal bargaining’. For Riker, there were only two circumstances in which states would be willing to join together and subvert their national sovereignty: in cases of an external threat (often military); or for the prospect of economic expansion (Riker, 1964). In a similar vein, Karl Deutsch proposed the idea of a ‘security community’ whereby states would be bound together by mutual sympathy, trust, and common interests in order to resolve conflicts peacefully (Deutsch, 1968). Barry Buzan took this notion a step further with his proposed ‘regional security complex theory’, claiming that security concerns do not travel well over long distances and therefore should be organized and limited according to geographic region (Buzan, 1991). In all three lines of argument, ensuring and maintaining peaceful relations between states was thought to be the primary ambition. Formulated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainly by German economist, Ernst Haas, and American political scientist, Leon Lindberg, neo-functionalism stresses the importance of autonomous supranational institutions in the formulation of organized interests, and emphasizes the critical role technocrats may play in the decision-making process (Haas, 1958; Lindberg, 1963). Similar to regional economic integration theorists such as Bela Balassa and Jacob Viner, this mode of thinking views integration as a gradual process of state cooperation following a linear trajectory from preferential treatment, towards increasingly advanced stages of inclusiveness, until reaching an eventual complete level of integration (Viner, 1950; Balassa, 1961). For neo-functionalists, building and maintaining strong institutions as well as a competent bureaucracy will lead to the most positive and productive forms of integration. The final theoretical approach that may be grouped among the ‘old regionalism’ theories is that of intergovernmentalism. This theory, originally proposed by Stanley Hoffman and later expressed in its more liberal form by Andrew Moravcsik, maintains that national governments retain the ultimate authority over regionalization and its decision-making, but recognizes the capability of supranational
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 281 institutions in enhancing the capacity of national governments through the development of mutually beneficial policies (Hoffman, 1966; Moravcsik, 1999). For intergovernmentalists, engagement in regional integration projects can be understood as a series of rational choices undertaken by leaders within a specific institutional setting (Fioramonti, 2014). If all three of these theories may be summarized together, ‘whether more focused on agency (e.g. federalism and intergovernmentalism) or more concerned with institutional structures (eg. neo-functionalism), these theoretical approaches understand regionalism as an eminently top-down process, dominated by technocratic and political elites’ (Fioramonti, 2014, p 11). Or, in other words, they are concerned solely with the regional interactions of state agents, while minimizing the impact and influence of non- state actors or civil society actions. Before the late 1980s and early 1990s, Regional Integration Studies had been unable to garner much support for itself as a distinct discipline (for an overview of the development of the discipline, see Shaw Grant and Cornelissen, 2011; De Lombaerde and Söderbaum, 2013). Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a growth in multilateralism, and a rapid expansion of regional integration projects did it become a separate field of study in its own right. Until this point, the nuances of regional integration were often subsumed within the field of International Relations, as well as confined to security and economic thinking. However, new scholarly attention, along with a litany of case studies, created an innovation in thinking which sought to understand the complexity of regional formations and their multi-level and multi-sectoral purposes (Fawcett and Hurrell, 1995). Indeed, it would be difficult to find a contemporary scholar of regional integration who would disagree that regionalism should not to be viewed as the exclusive domain of states but is more accurately understood as also encompassing the interactions between non-state actors, as well as among states and non-state actors (Shaw, Grant, and Cornelissen, 2011; Fioramonti, 2014). In addition to the inclusion of non- state actors, Fioramonti argues that, ‘there is also an increasing recognition, by and large prompted by the application of constructivism to the study of regionalism, that regions are not geographically “given” but are rather socially constructed through human interactions, political discourse and cultural evolutions’ (Fioramonti, 2014, p. 6). These constructivist-minded scholars believe that when undertaking an exercise of defining regions, one may be referring to a variety of elements, including a geographical space, economic interaction, institutional or governmental jurisdiction, or social or cultural characteristics. Similarly, Amitav Acharya maintains that regions are not predefined, but transition and evolve over time depending on the prevailing political, economic, and social discourses that are taking place in each society (Acharya, 2009). Or, in other words, regions and regional thinking may transition to new formations and paradigms depending on social influences. This point on the transitions of societal discourse and the nature of integration has particular relevance in its applications to sustainable regionalization, and will therefore be returned to again in the sections below.
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16.4. Provision of Regional Public Goods As mentioned in Section 2, and as detailed in Inge Kaul’s chapter in this Handbook, the concept of the public good is closely bound up with the notion of governance. To govern is to ensure the provision of goods for the benefit of the general public. Public good provision has traditionally been the preserve of national and local authorities who, sometimes in partnership with the private sector, establish and maintain systems of universal healthcare, education, policing, and adjudication. The provision of public goods also involves the development of national transportation and communication networks, as well as the formulation of common standards that underpin the operation of these networks. The intended beneficiaries of these goods have traditionally been publics understood as territorially-defined national communities. Yet, governance understood as public good provision has transcended national borders and gradually acquired a regional dimension. Transposing the notion of the public good to the regional level has taken place in the context of increased concentration and coordination of activity among clusters of states that share a common space (Fawcett, 2004). The proliferation of regionalist projects in the second half of the twentieth century has led to a reconceptualization of the public good along regional lines. Examples include the rise of regional security organizations entrusted by their members with the provision of regional security and the maintenance of regional order. In many parts of the world, security as a public good is increasingly provided by regional bureaucracies that engage in the identification of shared threat perceptions and vulnerabilities, and the formulation of common responses to crises. Examples include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Alcaro and Reilly, 2015; Aris, 2009). The former upholds the security order in and around Europe against threats emanating mainly from state sources. The latter focuses on tackling the allied ‘three evils’ of terrorism, extremism, and separatism in Central Asia. The economic realm is another area that has undergone a process of regionalization. The existence of institutions for global financial governance notwithstanding, it is at the regional level that international monetary cooperation has been the most dynamic. This is evidenced by the phenomenon of regional monetary funds and currency zones (Desai and Vreeland, 2011). Free trade areas, customs unions, and common markets have also taken on a regional, not a global, character. Investment mechanisms in the form of regional development banks have followed a similar regionalist logic. Examples of common economic spaces include the European Economic Area that covers much of the European continent and sub-regional formations such as the Southern African Customs Union, the world’s oldest customs union. Examples of policy banks with a regional focus include the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Asian Development Bank. Sub-regional examples includes the Caribbean Development Bank. In addition to providing loans to
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 283 projects with regional impact, these institutions engage in activities, such as the gathering of statistics and the production of analyses of common trends that contribute to the manufacture of ‘imagined’ regional economies. They set convergence criteria for the management of these imagined economies that are more specific than those formulated by global financial institutions such as the World Bank. A third area where regionalization has had an impact on the provision of public goods concerns the management of transboundary movements, such as legal or illegal migration (Nshimbi and Fioramonti, 2013; Deacon, 2013). Regional forums have been instrumental in laying the ground rules governing the free circulation of labour within regional economies. An example of that would be the free movement of skilled persons agreement negotiated within the Caribbean Community. The agreement provides for the unimpeded access of certain categories of employees to the labour markets of the Community’s members. Not all regional forums have been instrumental in facilitating labour migration. For better or for worse, they have also been the preferred venue for formulating policies and measures designed to restrict access to regional labour markets. Sandra Lavenex has shown how, in the European Union, exclusionary policies against unwanted migrants have been shifted up to the EU level and then out to the realm of EU foreign policy (Lavenex, 2006). From one perspective, intergovernmental organizations with a global remit, such as the International Organization for Migration, have been co- opted in the propagation of these expanding spheres of exclusion (Uçarer, 2001). Common rules on citizenship and residency rights, visa and asylum applications, and even border controls, are increasingly decided at the regional level, most prominently in Europe but also to some extent in Southeast Asia. The Schengen area represents a common administrative space facilitating the free movement of people within the EU and a stringent system of ‘compensatory measures’ for restricting that movement for people from outside the Union. In the same way, reciprocal visa-free travel was agreed upon by the Southeast Asian states in the framework of the Association of South East Asian Nations, a regional economic and political bloc. Access to regional labour markets for certain categories of workers has been granted as part of regional integration projects, such as the aforementioned Caribbean Community, but also as part of regional trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Area. Human migration is only one type of mobility that is increasingly managed on a regional basis. The provision of regional public goods has as much to do with governing the movement of people as with regulating transboundary flows of goods, commodities, energy, and information. One example is the Transport Facilitation Agreement (UNESCAP, 2014) under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The Agreement provides for simplified border crossing procedures for road hauliers in the SCO member states. Similarly a working group was created in 2006 to establish an Energy Club within the SCO. The Club would promote common understandings of energy security and coordinate energy investment plans among the SCO states. The provision of regional public goods is also about managing the resulting interconnections between systems, markets, and industries. The EU Single Market, for example, is a complex arrangement among twenty-eight geographically contiguous states that
284 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev encompasses physical connectivity, legal and administrative convergence, and market reform in a wide range of economic sectors. Likewise, Eurasian economic integration in the post-Soviet space has been driven by the desire to preserve and expand the industrial production networks that the Soviet successor states inherited from the USSR (Libman and Vinokurov, 2012; Libman, 2007). Regionalization is thus a process of governing regional flows and interconnections. Transport routes, energy pipelines, and communication networks are increasingly developed and managed on a regional basis. They are an important part of what regional organizations now do. In this context, infrastructure deserves a special mention. Infrastructure is integral to a well-functioning economy, and as such is a public good. It consists of physical networks that enable the flow of goods, people, and information and that mediate their interaction and exchange over distance (Larkin, 2013). At present, infrastructure is fragmented along national lines and may, in some states like the United States, be fragmented along national, state, county, and city lines. This is a consequence of a system organized by and for national (and subnational) economies and their distinct technological and organizational regimes. Under conditions of globalization where economic and social activity increasingly transcends national borders, the organization of the world economy around discrete national structures represents an obstacle to economic development. Removing such inefficiencies is difficult because infrastructural systems have a certain resilience or obduracy (Johnson, 2014). They may follow their own technological path dependencies that cannot easily be overcome. Standardization, or the adoption of common standards, is a process whereby national infrastructures and economies become interoperable. The interlinking of infrastructures and markets is achieved on the basis of shared standards. Standardization applies not only to industrial and environmental standards, but also to work practices, legal and regulatory frameworks, and models of industrial organization. It includes metrological standards, i.e., the measurement of traffic flow in transport or energy systems, common traffic prediction models, shared understandings of concepts such as reliability, and protocols for information exchange between national systems. Standardization represents the continuous patching up of differences between national standards until full interoperability is achieved. It is a process that happens within, and is facilitated by, regional forums whose coherence and viability depend on the existence of shared ways of doing things. The EU-sponsored Energy Community, for instance, promotes the implementation of EU legislation in the energy, environment, and other related sectors among the states of the Western Balkans, the South Caucasus and in Ukraine. Likewise, a common electricity market based on common industrial and administrative standards is being constructed among the Eurasian Economic Union states in the post-Soviet space. The harmonization of standards advanced through regional cooperation has a beneficial effect on economic activity and therefore represents a type of public good. The benefits of standardization stem from improved connectivity between national transport, energy, and communication systems. Connectivity brings about increases in travel speed and throughput capacity, improves lead times, expedites freight, and reduces
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 285 operation costs. Taking costs out of supply chains results in gains in productivity. Standardization also leads to the integration of value chains which facilitates economic expansion that culminates in the creation of regional markets. This in turn leads to increases in economic activity and growth in prosperity. By bringing previously isolated regions and countries into regional or global markets, standardization directly contributes to international development. The flip side of this process is that the benefits of standardization are seldom distributed evenly. Standardization, like most transnational processes, produces winners and losers. The winners see their national standards prevail and become universal. This allows them to capture foreign markets and keep out competitors. The losers, on the other hand, are forced to undertake painful and expensive reforms that can lead to social dislocation and loss of economic activity. Standardization can change the economic geography of whole countries and regions, resulting in economic growth for some and peripherialization for others. The uneven benefits of standardization have been raised in the context of EU eastern enlargement (Agnew, 2001) and Eurasian economic integration (Sushko, 2004). In sum, the provision of public goods, once the preserve of national authorities, has jumped scale and increasingly takes place at the regional level. This can be observed in the area of security where the definition of threats and the adoption of responses to these threats happens more and more in regional forums, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the SCO. Regional forums also serve as a platform where decisions regarding monetary and investment matters are made. The management of mobilities, whether human or material, also bears a regional imprint as inclusionary and exclusionary policies and practices are increasingly adopted regionally. This is also the level at which the interoperability of technical and organizational standards is negotiated. The effects of these decisions exceed the national, but stop well short of the global, level. While public good provision rarely happens globally, it does not stay confined to the regional level either. This is what this chapter will turn to next.
16.5. Transregionalism Regionalization is a process that does not stop at the political and administrative borders of existing regional blocs. Rather, these blocs may engage one another in region- to-region relations. The ensuing interactions take a variety of forms that give rise to a complex web of interregional relationships. These relationships can be bi-regional in character, where a cluster of geographically contiguous states engages with a similar group of states, usually in the form of official contacts between regional bureaucracies. Interregional interactions can take a more hybrid form when a highly developed and institutionalized regional community such as the EU engages one-on-one with individual states or with clubs of states such as the G20 that are external to that community (Farell, 2009).
286 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev The term transregionalism is reserved for a type of region-to-region relations where the process of interaction involves a more diffuse set of actors than is the case with either bi-regionalism or hybrid interregionalism (Rüland, 2014). Rather than denote sustained interactions between two regional bureaucracies (bi-regionalism), or between one such bureaucracy and an external national actor (hybrid interregionalism), transregionalism connotes the involvement of actors from two or more geographical regions situated at different levels of authority. Further to the theoretical discussion of ‘new regionalism’ in Section 3, governance increasingly encompasses actors above and below the state. These actors form complex chains of interrelations geared towards the realization of common tasks or the solution to common problems. Transregional governance involving authorities at multiple levels is not an abstract supposition. Far from being a mere theoretical possibility, it manifests itself, for example, in the realization of large-scale infrastructure projects that bridge the divide between two or more regional markets and technological zones. The following paragraphs will illustrate the phenomenon of transregionalism with the example of Eurasian overland rail transport. Europe and China are situated at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass. The commercial relationship between China and the cluster of states that make up the European Union is one of the cornerstones of the world economy. Sino-European trade is large and growing, as are the means by which it is delivered. Currently the vast majority of that trade is carried by sea. Recent years, however, have seen the proliferation of freight rail links between centres of production and consumption in China and Europe. These rail links open overland corridors for the transport of goods and commodities across Eurasia and were hailed as the modern version of the ancient Silk Road that once connected imperial China with the West. Unlike the Silk Road of yesteryear, however, the new East–West rail route negotiates several national technological and administrative spaces. These spaces present obstacles in the form of different railway track gauges, electric current frequencies, accounting procedures, and systems of customs clearance and control. By overcoming these obstacles, Eurasian rail represents not only an engineering, but also a political, feat that serves to highlight the transregional cooperation around infrastructure taking place in Eurasia. It embodies the encounter of numerous national, regional, and international authorities working at different levels to establish connectivity between the European, former Soviet, and East Asian transport systems. Establishing connectivity between transport systems is achieved through multiple technical and managerial solutions. These are driven by the business community and aim to increase the travel speed and throughput capacity of the corridor thereby reducing operation costs. Leading manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard and logistics firms such as DB Cargo have introduced innovative solutions designed to expedite traffic. These measures, however, are insufficient in themselves to optimize Eurasian rail freight and make the corridor commercially viable. What is also required is a certain degree of interoperability and even integration of national rail transport networks.
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 287 Interoperability and integration of transport systems is achieved through dialogue and cooperation between national and regional railway authorities. The cooperative aim is to align national legislation in the railway sector and, where possible, to enshrine this alignment in international law. The cooperation takes place at multiple venues. It occurs bilaterally through intergovernmental channels between transport ministries. It also takes place in technical standardization committees operating within the framework of regional forums, such as the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union. There are also hybrid venues involving nation states and regional blocs, such as the recently launched EU–China Connectivity Platform. Much of this cooperation is facilitated by international industry associations, such as the International Railway Union, and by international organizations such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). These international agencies provide technical expertise and political brokerage during the negotiations. Issues are usually thrashed out at the level of technical and expert groups staffed by officials from national transport ministries while agreements are officially reached at transport ministerial meetings. For instance, the Europe Asia Transport Links initiative coordinated by UNECE seeks to identify the main Euro-Asian rail and road routes for priority development. The initiative prepares the technical groundwork for an international agreement on the development of Eurasian overland transport. Another example is the New Eurasian Land Transport Initiative (NELTI) advanced by the International Road Transport Union. NELTI promotes administrative measures facilitating cross-border road haulage in central Eurasia, including the accession of all the states in the region to the Convention on International Transport of Goods Under Cover of TIR Carnets (TIR Convention). Once ratified by national parliaments such agreements acquire the status of international law superseding domestic law. The interoperability and integration of transport systems produces interlocking institutions; for example, the Coordinating Council on Trans- Siberian Transportation, an international association of governmental and business structures registered in Switzerland. The process of international diffusion of legal norms and technical standards is not easy or straightforward. The rail and road sectors are functionally linked to other sectors such as energy and the environment. Adopting a common legal and regulatory framework impinges on contentious issues, such as competition (infrastructure unbundling), deregulation (price liberalization), and ownership (privatization), where states rarely see eye to eye. But the impetus behind the development of new transport routes is strong and, as the examples of Eurasian rail freight and road haulage demonstrate, it is sometimes able to produce spectacular results. The example of Eurasian overland transport illustrates the dynamics of transregionalism. Actors from Western Europe to East Asia and the lands in between engage in cooperation in a specific functional area (de Prado, 2007). These actors, situated at the subnational, national, and supranational level, interact at multiple venues and in complex ways. Interactions at the level of transport infrastructure, for example, take place among regional organizations such as the Eurasian Economic Union and
288 Luk Van Langenhove and Ivaylo Gatev the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, who have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation and information exchange in the areas of trade, investment, energy, and transport (Gatev and Diesen, 2016). Other examples include the aforementioned EU–China Connectivity Platform that seeks to consult policy makers and the business community alike in the realization of China’s One Belt and Road initiative. These interactions seek to overcome significant logistical and organizational challenges to make Eurasian rail freight technically feasible and economically viable, and in the process, these interactions revolutionize regional and global supply chains. As such, they provide an important public good by putting in place the infrastructure that enables the circulation of goods, commodities and, eventually, people, between two world regions. This allows for more efficient trade and has the added advantage of bringing previously isolated regions and countries into the world economy. At the same time, an overview of the benefits of transcontinental connectivity should not mask the fact of their uneven distribution. Nor should it ignore the intense competition between actors at different levels for a share in these benefits. In this context, the emergent materialization of the New Silk Road provides a convenient vantage point from which to watch the ‘new great game’ as it unfolds on the Eurasian steppes. Will the new lines of transportation be bearers of Chinese, Russian, or European influence? Which route option—the northern all-Russian route, the central Eurasian route, or the southern Caucasian one—will establish itself as the main thoroughfare for transcontinental exchanges? Which country will ‘rise’ as a result of these developments? Which regional organization, if any, will emerge as the dominant integration set-up on the Eurasian supercontinent. But the new great game is not only about control of physical territory or of particular transport routes. It is also about control over systems and the procedures that govern them. In this context, the issue of standards becomes far more important than the question of which route option will establish itself as the main thoroughfare for transcontinental exchanges or of which country or organization will ‘rise’ as a result of this development. Instead, the focus of analysis is on which actors would benefit the most by inserting themselves in the middle, as opposed to the centre, of the network and how they would go about doing that. Where Eurasian overland transport is concerned, setting the rules of the game becomes more important than actually playing the game. And setting the rules of the game in public goods provision is closely bound up with standard setting. The latter is a contested process accompanied by intense competition over whose standards and organizational routines will be carried into infrastructural form.
16.6. Conclusion The transregionalization of rail freight illustrated by the Eurasian overland transport phenomenon exemplifies many of the trends and issues explored earlier in the chapter. It exemplifies New Regionalism as a global, not a strictly European, phenomenon,
Regionalization and TransRegional Policies 289 one that involves actors both above and below the state. The participation of actors at different levels of authority in the provision of regional public goods speaks of transregionalization’s multi-level character. The advantage of the transregional, as opposed to the global, provision of public goods is that it offers more concrete solutions to problems affecting participants who are equally interested in their resolution. By contrast, the provision of public goods at the global level operates at a higher level of generality and is often hampered by disinterest on the part of many of the participants in global forums. At the same time, transregionalization seems to be more suited to interregional exchanges of tangibles, such as the overland transport of goods and commodities, which are governed by a certain territorial logic, and less suited to exchanges of intangibles, for example transnational finance, which are more appropriately dealt with at the global level. Accordingly, we are witnessing a growing complexity in the governance of public goods where not only states but also state-like entities become active in their provision. This poses two big problems. The first is how the different governance entities should interact. Principles of subsidiarity or federalism need to be re-invented and adapted to today’s reality of globalization. The second problem is how to reconcile the governance complexity with democracy and legitimacy. Developments such as Brexit, the rise of anti-free trade movements, and new forms of nationalism show a growing distrust of global or regional governance, or even of politics in general. Hence, the big challenge is how to think about the future of governance in a globalized world. A retrenchment to the Westphalian sovereign world order is not an option as globalization and ICT developments will further increase the inter- connectivity of states and blur the boundaries of what is governed within and above the state level. But the crystallization of a post-Westphalian world-order that guarantees prosperity and security for all, is not evident either. Slaugther (2017) has perhaps introduced the right metaphor to capture what is going on: world politics is no longer to be pictured as a chessboard where states play their games, but as a web where states compete and cooperate with ‘many different networks spreading beyond their border but incorporating their citizens, corporations, civic and criminal organizations’ (Slaughter, 2017, p. 24). According to Slaughter, it will be the states that have the most networked connections that will be the central players of the future (Slaughter, 2017, p. 161). One could add that that this might also hold for public goods: the states that have the most connections above, below, and through their state level, will be the states that are best fit to provide adequate public goods to their citizens and to the world. Transregionalism therefore has to become part of the strategies of states to be open to the world as much as possible.
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Chapter 17
Eu ropean U ni on St udies as a T ri bu ta ry of Gl obal P ol i c y and Transnat i ona l Administr at i on Stella Ladi
17.1. Introduction The European Union (EU) is the regional organization which has been studied and analysed in more depth than any other international organization. It is actually described as a supranational organization because of its unique characteristics. Processes of European integration as well as the impact of EU policies and institutions upon member states and beyond have been conceptualized using classical political science and public policy models but also by developing new concepts and frameworks such as Europeanization. The proliferation of EU studies is due to the unique supranational nature of the EU but also because of the interest that the EU has triggered due to a large number of research active universities in the EU and the United States (US). The changing nature of global policy making and transnational administration which is analysed in this Handbook calls for two interrelated tasks. First, an exploration of how global policy and transnational administration affect EU studies and, second, an examination of ways to adapt the analytical frameworks developed in EU studies for the analysis of global policy and transnational administration. Some of these frameworks were of course initially developed for the study of the national level but they have been advanced and applied to the European level in a way particularly interesting for the global level. Global (public) policy (GPP) has been defined as ‘a set of overlapping but disjointed processes of public–private deliberation and cooperation among both official
294 Stella Ladi state-based and international organizations and non-state actors around establishing common norms and policy agendas for securing the delivery of global public goods or ameliorating transnational problems’ (Stone and Ladi, 2015, p. 2). Many EU public policies, such as the EU policy for climate change as it has been presented to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21), which took place in Paris in December 2015, perfectly fit this definition. After deliberation with private actors, NGOs and a meeting of the Environmental Council of Ministers, the European Commission was able to announce the EU’s position well ahead of the Paris meeting (DG Climate Action and Energy, 18 September 2015). Transnational Administration has been defined as ‘the regulation, management and implementation of global policies of a public nature by both private and public actors operating beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the state, but often in areas beneath the global level’ (Stone and Ladi, 2015 p. 2). The EU, like other regional organizations, is an example of transnational administration regulating, managing and implementing global policies in its territory. For example, the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on government procurement (i.e. WTO, 2014) have directly affected the modernization of the EU public procurement directives in the EU and vice versa (Ladi and Tsarouhas, 2017). A vast literature has been developed showing that the EU is very active in shaping global policies, such as climate policy (e.g. Bretherton and Vogler, 2006, Meunier and Nicolaidis, 2006). A direct implication of the EU’s active role as a global actor is that implementing policies in its territory is less challenging than in other transnational spaces since the policies adopted derive from the EU itself. For a long time, the EU has been perceived as a unique governance structure, since it is neither a federal state nor an intergovernmental international organization. EU studies can provide a toolkit of concepts and frameworks which can be adapted to the needs of the study of global policy and transnational administration. Nevertheless, some important limitations exist in what can be transferred from European studies to the study of global policy and transnational administration. The most important limitation is exactly that the EU is not a typical international organization meaning that its structures and competences exceed those of most other international organizations. Notwithstanding this caveat, the EU is still an interesting laboratory of cooperation between different levels of governance and different administrative styles, worth taking into account when developing global policy and transnational administration scholarship (i.e. Moloney, 2015). In this chapter a linkage between European studies and the study of global policy and transnational administration is made. Three theoretical paths stemming from the study of politics and public policy that have been further elaborated in, and inspired, European studies are checked in relation to their applicability to the study of global policy and transnational administration. First, some of the most influential frameworks that have been developed for understanding EU governance are paralleled in the study of transnational administration. Second, what has been learned from the analysis of policy networks in EU studies is contrasted with the analysis of transnational and global public policy networks. Third, neo-institutionalism and the related literature
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 295 on Europeanization which discusses the relationship between the EU and its member states, as well as the impact of the EU beyond its borders, is explored for its relevance to studying the impact of other international and regional organizations upon their member states. A fourth section is devoted to the study of the EU as a global actor. The chapter closes with some general observations in relation to EU studies as a tributary of global policy and transnational administration.
17.2. EU Governance Approaches and Transnational Administration Multi-level governance (MLG), network governance, and experimentalist governance attempt to explain the functioning of the EU. That is, the way a non-hierarchical system which is by and large based on consensus between various decision-making bodies (that is, the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament) and with diverse levels of implementation—that is, national, regional, or local functions (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Sabel and Zeitlin, 2008)—operates. The importance of territoriality in understanding the different geographical locations of politico-administrative institutions and the different levels of implementation of EU legislation has made multi-level governance one of the most prominent terms for the analysis of EU governance. MLG aims to describe the highly dispersed policy- making activity and the participation of multiple individual and institutional actors at various political and territorial levels (from the supranational to the local level). Even more, MLG attempts to explain the linkages between the different levels by implying that no one level is superior to the others and that policy making activities are mutually dependent and intertwined (Stephenson, 2013). This is a theme particularly important for the EU which is often criticized for its democratic deficit. EU actors are therefore interested in integrating as many actors and levels of governance as possible into EU processes. Additionally, the Brussels-based bureaucracy has a limited capacity to deliver its policies without the help of other levels of governance, which again makes MLG particularly appealing (Peters and Pierre, 2009). MLG has thus been developed from an explanatory model to a policy paradigm. The European Commission has acquired a preference for MLG as a policy tool for the delivery of various policies, with regional policy being the most prominent among them. Regional or cohesion policy is particularly interesting since it is the most redistributive policy of the EU aiming to help the less developed European regions to catch up in order to reduce the economic, social, and territorial disparities that still exist within the EU (see Bache and Flinders, 2004). It is the policy to which the biggest chunk of the EU budget is allocated and accounts for 32. 5 per cent of the 2014–2020 overall EU budget (European Commission, 2014). Multi-level governance does not apply only to the EU. It can be useful for the understanding of federal systems or indeed decentralized national systems. Zuern (2010)
296 Stella Ladi argues that global governance can be described as multi-level governance under two conditions. Ensuring, first, the autonomy of the global level in order to be able to describe it as a separate level and, second, the interplay of the global level with the other levels of governance in order to justify its analysis as part of a system. The analysis of global governance as a multi-level system is a move away from the Westphalian understanding of national constellations towards an exploration of the fluid mélange of overlapping jurisdictions which characterizes global public policies. In order to move a step forward and to integrate transnational administration into this broader understanding of multi-level governance, the mechanisms which link the different levels need to be unpacked in order to unravel whether the global level is indeed significant in the delivery of global public goods and in the implementation of international law. Additionally, the different policy areas where this multi-level system may be in place should be investigated, since, as with the EU, some policy areas are more globalized than others. For example, it is likely that mechanisms of multi-level governance are more easily observed within climate change policy but less so in defence policy. Multi-level governance has been criticized for being limited to territoriality and focusing on the linkages between different spatial spaces such as a village, a city or a region within the EU and not paying enough attention to other types of potential co- ordination, such as between different policy domains. As a response, other concepts such as network governance and sectoral governance emerged. The key difference is that rather than only focusing on the territorial levels, the varied public and private actors in specific policy sectors are integrated in the analysis and distinguished from the territorial levels (Heritier and Lehmkuhl, 2008). Sectoral governance may operate at the supranational level and affect decision-making at the EU level but often it also affects decision-making at the national level in specific sectors such as energy or telecommunications (Levi-Faur, 2004). Empirically, what spurred the interest in sectoral and network governance was the persistence of the ‘regulatory state’ and the delegation of powers by national governments to the EU and to domestic independent regulatory agencies (Coen and Thatcher, 2008). A key argument in favour of delegation is that it allows policy makers to ensure sufficient expertise and that it guarantees a significant degree of stability and predictability in policy making (Heritier and Lehmkuhl, 2008). Although Coen and Thatcher (2008) in their study of European regulatory networks (ERNs) showed that the importance of network governance is still limited, its relevance for the exploration of transnational administration and global policy making is worth discussing. Coen and Thatcher showed that ERNs do not substantially bring actors from the private and public sectors together, because public actors only consult private actors and do not need to act on their suggestions. Additionally, few powers have been actually delegated to ERNs and in terms of decision-making processes, hierarchy remains strong. Global issues often concern specific sectors such as access to water or the global financial crisis. It is thus worth exploring the relevance of network and sectoral governance in understanding patterns of delegation from the national to the global level. Although the primacy of public sector actors at the global level may still persist, the role of networks may prove to be more significant than within the EU exactly because
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 297 state regulation is looser and there are more opportunities for self-regulation (e.g. the Basel Accords on banking law) or for problem solving (e.g. the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation HIV strategy) which bypasses the state and international organizations. Moreover, the European tradition is much more state-focused and attributes more trust to public organizations than the US or Asian traditions, which are more open to the public role of the private sector. These traditions also influence global settings. Sabel and Zeitlin (2008) argue that multi-level governance and network governance do not pay enough attention to innovative public rule-making which is more common in the EU than at the state level. These EU governance innovations are mainly of a deliberative nature and make the EU a pioneer and not ‘unique’ as it is often presented in the literature. The three examples of experimentalist governance that they discuss are: first, the re-regulation by the EU and its member states of privatized network infrastructure in sectors such as electricity, gas, and telecommunications via the strengthening of national regulatory authorities; second, the regulation of the public health and safety domain through the establishment of new administrative agencies advising the European Commission and, third, the social solidarity domain with the innovation of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) where the member states, together with the Commission, set non-binding goals and metrics which are implemented at the national level and are periodically revised following peer review. Sabel and Zeitlin further argue that the EU is not as distinct as perceived and that similarities can be found both in international organizations (e.g. WTO) and in federal states (e.g. the US). This observation calls for further empirical research comparing experimentalist governance innovation in the EU with similar innovations for transnational administration elsewhere. In summary, the debate about governance within the EU mainly concerns two questions: governance effectiveness and governance democracy. Both questions are also central at the global level, which makes hypotheses and findings about multi-level, network, and experimentalist governance relevant. The most common critique of EU governance is that it lacks output legitimization by being both undemocratic and excessively bureaucratic. Although many efforts have been made to tackle the EUs democratic deficit by strengthening the European Parliament and by introducing processes such as the OMC, the style of democracy that has been developing is still more associative—involving citizens through a number of channels—than it is representative and based on parliamentary democracy as in member states. At the same time, EU governance is highly segmented because competencies are shared between member states and EU institutions. There are areas such as the customs union and competition policy where only the EU has the right to act and there are areas such as transport and the environment where both the EU and member states can legislate (shared competencies). Finally, there are other areas, such as health and education, where the EU cannot adopt legally binding acts and can only support, supplement, and coordinate the actions of the member states. This makes EU policy-making style rather complex and distant from EU citizens (Peters and Pierre, 2009). Both of these critiques of EU governance remind us of similar concerns at the global level, where both democracy and effectiveness are difficult to achieve.
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17.3. Policy Networks: EU Networks and Transnational and Global Policy Networks In this section, the focus is on the evolution of networks analysis in EU studies, and possible avenues of exchange with the newer and less developed literature on transnational and global public policy networks, which has drawn upon the International Relations concept of ‘epistemic communities’ and the policy studies ‘advocacy coalition framework’ (ACF) (Haas, 1992; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999, respectively). Definitions of networks vary, leading to parallel literatures developing in different disciplines. Rather than starting by defining networks, we start by outlining the reasons why networks have been considered useful for the analysis of EU governance. Peterson (2009) reviews the literature and argues that there are three features of EU governance which lead to the use and preponderance of networks analysis in EU studies. First, EU policy making is technical and resembles the policy making of international organizations such as the WTO and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This technical nature of EU policy making encourages the involvement of experts in decision-making processes and thus the creation of networks which bring together experts, policy makers, and interest representatives. This does not mean that policy at the member states level is not technical but that a lot of its technical aspects have been transferred to the EU level since this is where the EU’s strength lies rather than the democratic processes which are still more coherent at the state level. Second, the EU can be described as an extraordinarily ‘differentiated polity’ to use Rhodes’ (1997) term meaning that decision-making processes and dominant actors vary significantly between different policy sectors. Policy networks that exist in one policy sector, such as agriculture, are often totally disconnected from networks in policy domains which by nature should be closely connected, such as environmental policy. Third, EU policy making takes place in a system of committees and working groups which design policies and reach a level of agreement before the final decision takes place at the political level, which involves a number of institutions such as the Council of Ministers, the Commission, and the European Parliament. Policy networks in EU studies often describe ‘a cluster of actors, each of which has an interest or “stake” in a given . . . policy sector and the capacity to help determine policy success or failure’ (Peterson and Bomberg, 1999 p. 8). The analysis of policy networks in the EU tries to answer which interests—national or supranational—are central to the bargaining within these networks. It explores the role of politicians versus senior public officials within networks and their capacity to impose policy solutions. It also questions the autonomy of supranational institutions in different policy sectors. The ‘advocacy coalition framework’ and epistemic communities have been popular in attempting to map and to understand the multiplicity of different resources and interests of actors (NGOs,
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 299 interest groups, lobby organizations) within networks (Richardson, 2006; Rozbicka, 2013). A key question is whether EU policy outcomes in specific sectors reflect technocratic understandings of policy problems or the political preferences of supranational and national actors. Peterson (2009) summarizes the most common arguments in network analysis in three sets. The first set of arguments concerns the way policy networks are structured in different EU policy sectors and the effect that they have in policy outcomes. For example, a network analysis was applied to understand the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform in 1992 and was shown that the outcomes were moderate because of the network’s interaction (Daugbjerg, 1999) The second set of arguments explores whether quasi-federal systems such as the EU naturally give rise to governance by policy networks. A good example here is EU water policy which as it grew gave birth to an open issue network bringing together national and supranational policy makers from different government levels and scientists (Richardson, 1994). The third set of arguments refers to the management and legitimacy issues that arise from governance by networks. The loose nature of networks creates issues of transparency in relation to the bargaining which takes place within these networks but also of efficiency in their management. ERNs introduced in the previous section have often been accused of lack of transparency in sectors which are sensitive to corruption, such as energy, and at the same time their efficiency has been questioned because of the lack of formal competencies (Coen and Thatcher, 2008) More specifically, ERNs are a type of formal network which has been created in sectors such as telecommunications, financial services, electricity, and gas in order to assist the EU in its increasing regulatory tasks (Coen and Thatcher, 2008). From the 1990s onwards, a logic of double delegation can be observed in various sectors where member states have been delegating regulatory authority to the EU and to Independent Regulatory Authorities (IRAs). The task of ERNs, which have been established by European law, is to bring together the national and supranational levels. Coen and Thatcher (2008, p. 52) describe them as ‘hybrid bodies that link the EU and national levels, and indeed bring together two sets of agents from previous delegations, namely IRAs and the Commission’. The criticisms of ERNs, as mentioned, mainly relate to the lack of private sector participants in the networks and the ERNs’ limited mandate. Nevertheless, the formal delegation of regulatory authority to networks that consist of national and supranational actors is novel. Whether similar types of networks have been created at the global level and whether such transnational-type ERNs could be helpful for the regulation of global issues is yet to be fully explored. What we already know is that transnational networks of state regulators such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) do exist but the various nuances of such networks and whether tendencies to formalize them exist, need to be further developed (Kingsbury et al., 2005). Network analysis is not new at the transnational and global levels. Stone (2013), for example, distinguishes between Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) of global or regional civil society sharing common beliefs from Global Public Policy Networks
300 Stella Ladi which refer to the global programmes of international organizations with private sector partners addressing shared problems. By contrast, Transnational Executive Networks (TENs) are governmental networks (in his chapter, Legrand uses the phrase ‘trans governmental network’) while Knowledge Networks include epistemic communities and other experts. These networks do not necessarily contribute to the inclusion of global civil society in policy making, as liberals and pluralists often suggest, and can often be better understood as new constellations of privatized power aiming to influence the sectoral policies of national governments and international organizations. Whether the same applies at the European level requires greater investigation. For example, the informal transnational policy network composed of EU policy makers, member states negotiators, and WTO officials, that simultaneously promoted the modernization of the EU public procurement directives and the Government Procurement Agreement in the WTO (Ladi and Tharouhas, 2017) could be considered a TEN. To summarize, despite criticisms about policy networks’ lack of explanatory capacity, their analysis remains crucial to both the EU and global level. Although network analysis is not a theoretical model per se and needs to be combined with theories of European integration in order to answer broader questions about the nature of the European polity, it is important at the meso-level of policy analysis. Mapping networks and answering questions about the actors involved and their influence on policy making are significant tasks. The same applies at the global level and the analysis of policy networks at the global and transnational levels. The two literatures have been developing in parallel and need to be compared and contrasted. Types of network such as ERNs, which have been mapped at the EU level, may also exist at the global level. At the same time TANs, which have mainly been explored at the transnational level, should be further analysed at the EU level where the literature is mostly limited to the impressive work done about women’s networks (Lang, 2009, Montoya, 2008). Cross-fertilization of policy networks analysis in EU, transnational, and global studies seems indispensable.
17.4. New Institutionalism and Europeanization Since the 1990s there has been a turn in political science in the employment of the three so-called new institutionalisms and their combination with macro-level theories of political analysis such as behaviouralism and Marxism (Hall and Taylor, 1996). European studies have been at the centre of this turn and the three new institutionalisms (rational choice, historical, and sociological) have been applied in the study of EU institutions and their interrelationships as well as in the study of the relationship between the institutions at the different levels of governance (supranational, national, regional, and local) (Pollack, 2009). A fourth institutionalism labelled ‘discursive institutionalism’ has more recently been added to the picture (Schmidt, 2008). Special emphasis is given
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 301 in this section to the study of Europeanization, outlining the way institutions, policies, and norms are first developed at the EU level and then transferred to the domestic level (Radaelli, 2003, Knill, 2001). The uploading and downloading of policies from the national to the EU level and back to the national is a useful heuristic to use outside the EU (Boerzel, 2003). Pollack (2009) argues that the application of new institutionalisms in EU studies concerns all three major functions of government: legislative, executive, and judicial politics. We focus here on the first two, which are more pertinent to Global Public Policy and transnational administration studies. Rational choice institutionalism has been applied more often than any other of the four strands but historical and sociological institutionalisms have also been quite influential, particularly in relation to the study of Europeanization. As far as legislative politics are concerned, rational choice institutionalism has been applied in order to explain legislative behaviour within the European Parliament, the voting power of various member states within the Council of Ministers, and the sharing of power between these two institutions in the development of EU politics (McElroy, 2007). The study of voting behaviour within the European Parliament resembles discussions about national parliaments and the US Congress. A detailed literature discussing voting behaviour at the United Nations General Assembly has also been developed but naturally it analyses the voting behaviour of states or blocks of states, such as BRICS and the EU (Ferdinand, 2014 and Jakobsson, 2009). Its relevance to the less state-centred transnational administration and global public policy is limited. Of more interest to the transnational administration and Global Public Policy literature research is the tradition of consensus decision-making within the Council of Ministers and the hypothesis of the socialization of national officials in the Council and in the various decision-making committees and working groups (Naurin and Wallace, 2008). The key assumption here is that national officials slowly adapt to EU norms and priorities; with this socialization they are inclined to reach consensus with their colleagues from other member states often against the will of their capitals. Qualitative methodologies and in-depth interviewing are often deployed in search of evidence for such hypotheses. Explaining the behaviour of national officials in terms of strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion has already been discussed in relation to other international organizations and not only that of the EU (Checkel, 2005). Extending this discussion in order to explore consensus building in various fora of transnational public administration and in understanding the behaviour of international civil servants and of other global public policy makers in transnational policy networks could prove to be a fruitful avenue for research. The discussion of executive politics in the EU has been focusing on the role of the Commission, the European Central Bank, and other EU agencies in decision-making processes. The principal-agent approach deriving from rational choice institutionalism has been the most developed narrative attempting to understand the relationship between the national and supranational levels. As in the IR literature, the two most common questions in the EU literature are first, why member states (principals) delegate powers to supranational institutions (agents) and, second, what happens if an agent
302 Stella Ladi (e.g. the Commission) behaves in a more independent way than the principals expected (Pollack, 2009). The first question has often been answered by referring to the transaction costs of policy making which assumes that member states act as rational actors and delegate power to supranational institutions because of their increased expertise and because it helps them legitimize their decisions to national publics. The second question about agency autonomy has pointed to information asymmetries which may empower the Commission and the other EU agencies. It emphasizes complex EU regulations, which, depending on the policy sector, often give more policy-making space to the Commission than to member states. Member states find it difficult to deal with complexity and give the Commission the first role. The principal-agent framework has been also influential in explaining international organizations’ autonomy in relation to their principals (states) (Hawkins, Lake, Nielson, and Tierney, 2006). Constructivist accounts of policy making explain executive politics in the EU differently and focus more on the way these fora provide an opportunity for national and supranational actors to deliberate in order to find the best policy solutions (e.g. Joerges and Neyer, 1997). Deliberation rather than delegation is more likely to be observed in transnational administration fora where hierarchies are loose. A more sophisticated framework which can allow for a deeper exploration of deliberation processes is orchestration. International organizations ‘orchestrate’ intermediaries such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and transfer power and activities to them. Orchestration increases the autonomy and influence of international organizations in global governance as they attempt to control and direct the activities of intermediaries towards their aims. Thus they avoid creating new strong institutions and regulations which could be competitive to them (Abbott et al., 2015). This discussion can be expanded in order to explore what is happening in different global public policies without necessarily starting from the assumption that a principal-agent relationship exists between the international and national levels. Transnational administration points to the observation that relationships are not always vertical (from the national to the international); they can also be horizontal (between different levels of governance and actors which are not formally part of a governance structure). Horizontal does not mean that all actors are equal at the global and transnational level but that interests are manifested in different ways. ‘Europeanization’ is one of the most developed strands of European studies (Ladrech, 2010). Europeanization is understood as a top-down but also as a bottom-up process meaning that in order to gain an insight we need to explore the impact of supranational institutions at the national level and vice versa. The metaphor of the uploading and downloading of policies from the national to the EU level and back to the national has been quite successful and it can be interesting in transnational administration and global public policy where processes are often more horizontal than hierarchical. For example, it has been argued that EU environmental policy has been inspired by the ‘green’ member states which managed to upload their policies at the EU level (Boerzel, 2003). Some global policies may evolve in a similar fashion, as some states may be more active than others in seeking to upload their national policies to the global level. Yet, at
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 303 the global level the institutional structure that states can target in order to upload their policies and models is less apparent. The literature on Europeanization proposes a number of mechanisms that range from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ in order to systematize the different ways the supranational level can have an impact upon the national level (Ladi, 2005). Knill (2001) suggests that three mechanisms of Europeanization exist: institutional compliance, changing domestic opportunity structures, and framing domestic beliefs and expectations. Institutional compliance refers to explicit European policies that prescribe a specific institutional model that has to be introduced to the domestic environment. It is the ‘hardest’ mechanism identified by Knill, given that the member states have only limited discretion about how to implement the institutional change (e.g. EU directives). The second mechanism is changing domestic opportunity structures and this process can be placed somewhere in the middle of a scale that descends from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ mechanisms. It describes instances where European policies alter the distribution of power and resources between domestic actors and as a result institutional change occurs. An example here is the strengthening of regions under EU cohesion policy. By directing funds to the weakest regions and not to central governments, the EU indirectly created incentives for a restructuring of regional governance in order to manage the absorption of these funds. The final and ‘softest’ mechanism proposed is framing domestic beliefs and expectations. The EU goal here is to prepare the ground for institutional change by altering the ‘cognitive input’ of domestic actors. The OMC which promotes the exchange of best practices in policy areas such as social policy where the member states are the main policy makers is a good example of the process. The OMC could be transferred to the global level since it is a soft mechanism which allows for the exchange of best practices which may or may not lead to policy transfer.
17.5. The EU as a Global Actor The EU has long been seen as an ascending power in international politics (Galtung 1973; Moravcsik, 2002; Reid, 2004) and an ongoing discussion on EU actorness has been taking place. This discussion is very much connected to global developments but the focus has mainly been Eurocentric. For international law scholars actorness is limited to the EU’s legal personality while for realist International Relations scholars EU actorness is understood in terms of statehood and different versions of power politics. The initial conceptualizations of actorness saw Europe as a civilian power which, having renounced the use of military means among its member states, could legitimately encourage other regions and countries to do the same (Duchene, 1972). Moving away from the distinction between civilian and military power, Manners (2002) described the EU as a normative power whose power originates in the rejection of divisive nationalism. ‘Normative Europe’ is based on core values described in the Treaties and
304 Stella Ladi has the potential to act as a model, as a promoter of its values, and as a counterweight to the United States (US) (Bretherton and Vogler 2006). Understanding the EU as a value-based actor has influenced policy makers but has been criticized by scholars for overlooking other material and interest-based factors in EU power projections (e.g. Hyde-Price, 2006; Zimmermann, 2007; and Meunier and Nicolaidis, 2006). In response, a vast literature on the EU as global economic actor, as a global regulator, as a trade power, and as a market power has developed (for literature reviews, see Young, 2015; and Damro, 2015). Taking into account behaviouralist, structuralist, and constructivist arguments has led to a more rounded understanding of actorness which integrates the international environment more fully. Bretherton and Vogler (2006) have identified three dimensions to actorness: • Opportunity, which relates to the external environment of ideas and events which can constrain or enable actorness during different times (i.e. what happens in regulatory regimes beyond the borders of the EU, potentially encompassing other organizations as well). • Presence, which refers to the ability of the EU, in an intended or often unintended manner, to exert influence beyond its borders (e.g. the Single Market and the spur it has provided for regulatory reform in other regions). • Capability, which sheds light on the availability of policy instruments and the ability of the EU to utilize these instruments, in response to opportunity and/or in order to capitalize on the benefits of presence. There is consensus in the literature that all three dimensions have allowed the EU, depending on the specific case, to act as a global actor or to at least be perceived as one (e.g. Lucarelli and Fioramonti, 2010). Ladi and Tsarouhas (2017) added a diffusion perspective to the understanding of the EU’s global role which pushes the discussion further and aims to avoid a Eurocentric view as the source of policy innovations. Diffusion refers to ‘the process by which the adoption of innovation by member(s) of a social system is communicated through certain channels and over time and triggers mechanisms that increase the probability of its adoption by other members who have not yet adopted it’ (Levi-Faur, 2005, p. 23). Diffusion moves beyond both structural and actor-centred explanations of policy change and helps us elaborate the opportunity and presence dimensions of EU actorness. Structural explanations tend to focus on globalization as a driver of convergence, while actor-centred explanations stress the ability of actors such as the EU to export their own models. Diffusion perspectives allow for broader explanations of the reasons why a specific regulation or policy has been internationalized and helps us explore the role and tactics of the EU within the constellation of other international organizations. Greater attention to the horizontal patters of exchange between international organizations and transnational administration more generally would help map the diffusion of regulatory policies and practices. This is ‘methodological transnationalism’, whereby the interconnectedness of different hierarchical and network structures of both
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 305 a public and private nature at the transnational, international and/or global level is necessary to understand the multi-level complexity of diffusion (Stone and Ladi, 2015). Likewise, Young (2015) claims that in order to understand the EU’s engagement with the world, general theories of international political economy should be employed, not least the changing constellation of power in the world system through the rise of emerging market economies and the interconnections between different international organizations who often pursue parallel policy agendas. The Union has in the recent past often appeared disunited in the face of external challenges, facing severe criticism over its alleged weakness on the international level. This weakness is often assumed to derive from the Union’s low policy coherence (Jørgensen et al., 2011). Official promotion of the EU as the ‘benchmark’ and most advanced model of regional integration once emanated from the Commission, the Parliament, and various other EU funded initiatives, including public exhortations such as Romano Prodi in 2000 stating that the EU Model was an ‘export item’. Today, in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, Brexit, and the immigration crisis, the viability of the European model of regionalization is increasingly being questioned.
17.6. Conclusion While EU studies are distinct from studies on global policy making and transnational administration, they can offer an insight into how we might explore power in non-hierarchical systems and the role of diverse actors and levels in policy implementation. The bureaucratization of EU policy making processes can provide lessons on what not to do in transnational administration, while the frequent achievement of consensus between member states, EU institutions, and interest groups can be seen as an example of successfully managing a complex governance system. At the same time, the more flexible and horizontal mechanisms of global policy making can be of interest to EU studies given that not all areas are equally Europeanized. Indeed, recent tendencies to de-Europeanization may increase the need for more innovative and less centralized administration (Leoditsis and Ladi, 2017). Transnational administration practices beyond Europe may prove to be particularly inspiring for the EU. Moreover, ‘de-Europeanization’ reminds us that global policy dynamics are not teleological. Set- backs and ongoing disjunctures and reversals are more likely the norm. Three different but interrelated areas of EU studies have been discussed in this chapter: EU governance approaches; EU networks; and new institutionalism with a special emphasis on Europeanization. To summarize, the most important finding of this chapter in relation to the potential contribution of EU research to the study of transnational administration and global public policy is that exactly because of the unique character of the EU much policy and theoretical innovation has been taking place. Similar to the EU, at the global level, the two key questions are that of governance effectiveness and governance democracy. In areas where global governance institutions
306 Stella Ladi have been consolidated and thus a separate global level clearly exists, multi-level governance can be a useful framework to understand decision-making processes between different levels of transnational administration (e.g. Zuern, 2010). Experimental governance emphasizing innovative rule-making in the EU can also provide hypotheses, such as the re-regulation of specific policy areas at the global level, or the creation of new regulatory agencies, or even the strengthening of processes similar to the OMC in different international settings. In relation to networks analysis, both EU studies and studies of transnational and global policy making have paid a lot of attention to the creation and importance of different types of networks. Cross-fertilization between these two different sets of literature could provide new hypotheses and tools for mapping the different networks, such as formal (e.g. ERNs) and semi-formal networks (e.g. TANs). Technocratic elites and experts are important in policy making in the EU but also in other international organizations, such as the WTO and the IMF, and it remains important to map their influence in EU and global policy-making via the understanding of their roles in networks. This type of actor does not directly rule and thus needs to be a member of multi-actor networks in order to perform his or her duties. In the ‘differentiated polity’ (Rhodes, 1997) in the EU, and in transnational and global administration more generally, policy making radically differs between different policy sectors; consequently, the analysis of policy networks remains central. For example, networks in EU agricultural policy can be expected to be much stronger than agricultural international networks because the Common Agricultural Policy is one of the most integrated EU policies, engendering strong cooperation and the growth of networks. Similarly, it can be hypothesized that global health policy networks are much more important than EU public health networks since global cooperation on health is quite strong given its developmental character, while in the EU health remains an issue mainly tackled at the member-state level. Such hypotheses need empirical testing and comparative work. Last but not least, issues of legitimacy and accountability of policy networks are important for both the European and transnational and global levels. New institutionalism and, especially, Europeanization can also provide interesting avenues for further development especially as far as the impact of global public policies and transnational administration at the domestic level is concerned. In the case of transnational administration, the target areas often extend beyond national frontiers but this has also been the case with cohesion policy for the regions. Rational choice and the principal-agent models as well as more sociological concepts such as the socialization of policy makers have been applied at the international and European levels. These literatures, which often run in parallel, can be brought together in order to expand on issues such as policy making in more horizontal transnational environments where power is diffused between many different actors. Europeanization literature and its focus on different mechanisms and domestic mediating factors, which produce change, inertia, or even divergence, could provide theoretical propositions about the potential impact of global public policies. The metaphor of uploading and downloading that has been developed in relation to the EU could be a starting point for understanding the different
European Studies as a Tributary of Global Policy 307 roles that states play in the design of global policies and what this actually means for their implementation in different environments.
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Chapter 18
Internat i ona l P olitical E c onomy A Global ‘Policy Turn’? Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo
18.1. Introduction The onset of the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008 caught many scholarly analysts— most pointedly economists–unawares. That we can point a finger at the economist so easily and frequently is because—exuding self-confidence in its own virtues—it were principally responsible for the major sins of commission. Less commented upon were the sins of omission of other scholarly disciplines and fields of inquiry—notably, for the purposes of this chapter, political science in general and scholars of international political economy (IPE) and (global) public policy (GPP) in particular. Unlike the economics community, these two particular fields of inquiry were less sure of, and less accomplished in, their ability to speak truth to power. As a consequence, political science effectively vacated the policy playing field allowing economics to set the agenda free of mitigating counter-arguments from political science and public policy and other disciplines such as philosophy and law. This led to minimal intellectual constraint on economics as theory on the one hand and practical regulatory restraint on economics in practice, on the other. The purpose of this chapter is to look at IPE and GPP as areas of inquiry undergoing transition and ask how they might demonstrate greater policy influence in this era of globalized policy processes. There are important lessons that IPE can learn from GPP, in order to ensure its relevance in global policy debates. We highlight the relevance of three public policy theoretical tools that may benefit IPE: policy complexity; behavioural approaches; and strategic foresight. Not all scholars would agree that attempts to develop a policy utility from scholarly analysis are a good thing. Particularly, there is a deeply problematic relationship between theory and practice in international relations
International Political Economy 311 (Hurrell, 2011). Notwithstanding this tension, analysis may indeed cast policy shadows. Identifying these policy shadows is one thing. Making recommendations on the basis of them, is another. At the very least IPE and (G)PP need to speak to each other. The imperative for this dialogue partly arises from the limits of individual disciplinary responses to the GFC. IPE’s theoretical shortcomings may well predate the crisis but the GFC raised important questions over the ability and capacity of any single discipline to address the complexity and interdependencies involved, not only in global finance, but in many of the transnational policy issue areas in which IPE scholars have tended to focus their attentions (Helleiner, 2011). IPE sees itself as a field of inquiry rather than a discipline (see Higgott 1999) and has since the time of its early pioneers (Strange, 1970, 1986 and Keohane and Nye, 1971, 1974) prided itself on providing a more relevant approach to understanding the interstices of politics and economics at the global-structural level. But its own inability to see the GFC coming or provide policy relevant responses in its aftermath has stimulated internal soul-searching (see Mosley and Singer, 2009; Helleiner, 2011; Drezner and McNamara, 2013). Similarly, students of public policy, struggling to understand the post-GFC policy environment began to look beyond their own field of inquiry; notably to tools from other disciplinary areas, such as complexity theory, behavioural science, and futures studies. The GFC challenged, once and for all, the methodological nationalism that had for so long beset the study of public policy (Stone, 2008). The transnational nature of policy problems has necessitated an outward orientation among policy scholars. What has emerged is an increasingly eclectic and global-oriented approach to understanding specific policy domains. Indeed, it is no longer wishful thinking to talk about GPP as a field of inquiry in its own right. However, such transitions are not necessarily restricted to Public Policy. We argue that IPE is undergoing a similar shift; in both focus and methodology. For sure, some IPE remains engrossed in a ‘critical’ mode that eschews the idea of contributing to policy science. Cox’s once valuable distinction between IPE as critical theory and IPE as problem solving has lost traction in the twenty-first century (Cox, 1997). Nonetheless, some areas of IPE are experiencing a ‘policy turn’; devoting greater attention to specific policy mechanisms and outcomes and expanding the scope of research beyond its traditional focus on structural-systemic variables. Public policy has eschewed erstwhile assumptions of methodological nationalism and now accepts a truism of IPE—that borders are as much conduits as barriers. Equally, recent efforts by policy scholars to address policy complexity may hold lessons for IPE. This chapter examines the growing interaction taking place in the relationship between public policy and IPE. What we are witnessing is not a Kuhnian revolution but neither is it simply marginal adaptation. In order for IPE to ensure an ability to speak truth to power there is a need for reform of some of its core assumptions. This will involve greater attention than in the past to the micro-level of policy making, even as its traditional macro-and meso-levels of analysis are retained.
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18.2. The Multidisciplinary Origins of IPE It is not entirely fair to say that IPE has not addressed complexity in any way in the past. In fact, its inception as a field of inquiry was associated with a frustration with the unwillingness of economists as a discipline to address the political aspects of international economic activity (Strange, 1970). The origins of IPE were therefore focused on introducing a multidisciplinary approach to the complexities and dynamism associated with contemporary international political and economic phenomena, as well as a greater sense of methodological eclecticism than economics. IPE from its origins has always engaged in Hirschmann’s (1981) injunction to trespass. Trespassing has both virtues and downsides. IPE is not homogeneous and suffers many of the theoretical divides of other cross-disciplinary fields of inquiry. Much, probably too much, has been said about the evolution of IPE as a discipline (see Cohen 2008; Higgott and Watson, 2008; Blyth, 2009a and b). IPE has traditionally been conceived as comprising competing theoretical schools (principally realist, liberal, constructivist, and ‘critical’ approaches) and competing methodological schools determined by Cohen’s ‘trans-Atlantic divide’ in which North American IPE is driven by rationalpositivist approaches focused on ‘midlevel’ theorizing, while European (principally British) IPE draws on a wider array of ‘reflectivist’ methods and approaches (Keohane, 1988). Both however resist the separation of economics from politics and the domestic and the international. ‘Rationalist’ approaches to IPE draw on the traditions of economics, especially the maximization of choice under conditions of scarcity. They rely on an assumption of instrumental rationality in the identification of actor behaviour. Rationalists privilege shared knowledge and strategic thinking. These factors come together in the importance rationalists place on game theory to determine actor behaviour. If, it is argued, we understand actor preferences then we can determine strategies and subsequent policy outcomes. Critical approaches to IPE, especially in the form of ‘Dependency Theory’ (Mahler, 1980) and ‘World System Theory’ (Wallerstein, 1974) emerged in the 1970s. ‘Reflectivist’ scholars emphasized the inter-subjective nature of knowledge, without which the world has no material meaning. Constructivists particularly privilege the ‘constitutive’ characteristics of knowledge, identities, and norms that define not only how socio-political actors behave but also the sources of identity of these very actors (Wendt, 1992). This involves applying interpretive and historical methods to the study of the global economic order and its epistemic foundations. This rationalist-reflectivist divide has of late been questioned (Higgott and Watson, 2008; Germain, 2009). Keohane (2009) argues it is showing positive signs of becoming less dichotomous. Methodologies are beginning to encompass both rational-positivist and more reflectivist approaches. This reflects the limits of rationalist IPE, especially in the Open Economy Politics movement. Advances in Open Economy Politics only came
International Political Economy 313 with a concentration on method at the expense of neglecting the identities of actors and the ideas and norms that drove policy (Keohane, 2009). In all cases, IPE remains animated by its core unifying focus on global political and economic structures, although different methodologies take differing normative approaches to understanding such structures. IPE also offers substantial strengths in understanding regional and international organizations (Keohane and Nye, 1974; Keohane, 1982; Higgott, 1998 and Ravenhill, 2008; Broome and Seabrooke, 2012) and with a focus on the role of non-state actors (Cutler 2003; Bieler et al., 2004) as well as the ideational aspects of such organizations (Acharya, 2011).
18.3. A ‘Policy Turn’? IPE’s focus on global structures has contributed to providing a more systemic understanding of globalization than either international relations or economics. But it has not grown an accompanying competence/ability to address in an applied manner the increasingly complex trans-sovereign policy questions thrown up by globalization, such as climate change and financial sector reform. This is even more pronounced in policy areas such as healthcare, social policy, and education. Indeed, it has been noted by one of its leading figures that IPE lacks sufficient focus on specific policy issues and, as a consequence, is not able to predict shifts in the global economy (Helleiner 2011). This has led to calls for a ‘pragmatic IPE’ that places a greater focus on real-time, real-world policy problems (Johnson et al., 2013). There is a growing recognition among IPE scholars of a need to develop a closer understanding of policy processes. While the GFC strengthened the case for a ‘policy turn’, efforts to incorporate policy understanding into IPE do predate it. Initial attempts focused on the potential of IPE—or more precisely micro-economically influenced political economy—for studying issues of politics and policy (see Frey 1984 and Basu 2000). Subsequent efforts are expanding beyond rational choice approaches, to incorporate elements of modern public policy into IPE. Despite the economic interdependency and structural changes that globalization has brought forth and which IPE scholars have addressed, national governments continue to play a crucial role in driving transformation (Weiss, 1998). Analyses sought to reintroduce domestic political and policy institutions into extant IPE analyses often deemed overly-focused on institutional ‘constraints’ at the regional and international levels rather than state capacities and institutions necessary for effective economic development (Weiss, 2003). This focus on state capacities and institutions would be extended to IPE studies on regionalism, particularly those seeking to situate preferential trade agreements within a nation’s foreign policies (Capling, 2008) or address the institutional conditions for states to facilitate trade liberalization and hence ensure their inclusion within global value chains (Neilson et al., 2014; Ravenhill, 2014). There has, hence, been a growing IPE focus
314 Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo on the domestic institutions necessary for states to navigate the global economy. This renewed focus on domestic policy processes has also taken on a micro-level and agent- based perspective, particularly in terms of ‘everyday international political economy’ (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007), Connections between IPE and public policy have also taken on a more ideational perspective over time. The spread of liberal economic ideologies and the influence of such ideologies on policy preferences and decisions have, as a consequence, received greater attention among IPE scholars (Simmons et al., 2006; Drezner and McNamara, 2013) and converged with the policy studies literature on ‘policy transfer’ and ‘lesson drawing’. This emerging focus on the diffusion and spread of policy ideas and institutions across national boundaries has reoriented some IPE towards government policies as well as intergovernmental policy cooperation. There has been a ‘policy turn’ in IPE, with research increasingly focused on domestic institutions and policies (see Milner, 1997). However, as the perceived inability of IPE to adequately address the GFC and its implications (Mosley and Singer, 2009; Helleiner, 2011; Drezner and McNamara, 2013) have shown, this ‘policy turn’ may require further haste and depth.
18.4. Transnationalism and Complexity in Public Policy It is our argument that IPE offers a wider and deeper contextual understanding of the ‘global’ in contrast to the more specified views of international relations on the one hand and international economics on the other. The trade-off to date is that IPE has been less strong on global policy analysis and that faut de mieux, has been left largely to the economics discipline. Such trade-offs are of course not limited to IPE. Most social science disciplines, including public policy, have been prone to wearing conceptual blinkers arising from methodological preferences. While increasingly interested in the growing complexity and intractability of policy problems at the global level, IPE still lack the necessary tools to address them. Conversely, while traditionally lacking an understanding of the interests found in IPE, scholars of public policy are showing an increasing interest in the global or ‘transnational’. This has paved the way for the emergence of a growing interest in ‘global public policy’ as a field of study with its growing interest in transnational policy processes and administrative structures (Reinicke, 1997; Stone, 2008; Stone and Ladi, 2015) have taken on a more internationalist approach in response to the increasingly transnational nature of domestic policy issues. And as IPE scholars have highlighted the growing influence of non-state actors in global politics (Haggard and Simmons, 1987; Haufler, 2001; Cutler, 2003; Bieler et al., 2004) the focus has often been on the interplay between different state and non-state actors (as in international relations) rather than on their joint roles and influences on policy making. Global public policy has placed greater attention on non-state actors, operating alongside traditional state and industry actors in distinct but fragmented sets of transnational
International Political Economy 315 policy processes (Benner et al., 2003, Stone, 2013). This move in GPP is very much in line with pre-existing interests in ‘policy networks’ that comprise both public and private actors (Gaus, this volume; Rhodes, 1996 and 1997; Atkinson and Coleman, 1992) and which are in turn situated within the broader context of ‘policy subsystems’ (Heclo, 1978; Sabatier, 1988; Baumgartner and Jones, 1991; McCool, 1998). Similar efforts can be found in scholarly work on ‘collaborative governance’ (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Flynn and Wanna, 2013) and ‘policy co-production’ (Needham, 2008). In all instances, the focus has very much been on the inclusion of non-state actors in policy making and the collaborative policy making that ensues (Newman et al., 2004; Pestoff et al., 2013; Voorberg et al., 2015; Woo 2015, 2016). Embedded within this growing interest in collaborative policy making is a strong public policy theoretical foundation in collective action (Olson, 1965; Hardin, 1982; Ostrom; 1990, 1994). This growing focus of public policy on collaborative governance and/or policy co-production therefore represents an important theoretical innovation that can enhance IPE’s global policy analysis tool kit. We also want to suggest that IPE will benefit from exploring three recent areas of policy research. These are: (1) complexity; (2) behaviouralism; and (3) strategic foresight. Driven by an increasingly complex and unpredictable policy environment, which has emerged as a consequence of globalization (and its backlash), these three areas represent potential additions to the existing policy tool kit.
18.4.1. Policy Complexity One impact of globalization has been an increasingly complex and unpredictable policy environment. Indeed, policy makers are finding themselves besieged by, ‘focusing events’, ‘black swans’ or ‘wild cards’ and they defy their every effort to pre-empt or ameliorate such unanticipated shocks (Birkland, 1998; Ho, 2008; Taleb, 2010). Much of this has arisen from the ways in which national-level initiatives tend to be either supplemented or supplanted by transnational programmes (Kuhlmann, 2001), or the increasingly iterative nature of policy making, with constant interactions between domestic and international actors leading to less predictable policy outcomes (Cairney, 2012). As a consequence, policy scholars have sought to address what this increasing complexity in the policy environment means for governments, with scholars of public policy, public administration and public management drawing from the natural sciences, especially complexity theory, for potential new ways of thinking about policy making amid complexity (Duit and Galaz, 2008; Klijn, 2008; Teisman and Klijn, 2008). In almost all instances, the focus has been on the development of new approaches that can aid in the resolution of complex policy issues (Howlett, 2011, 2014; Howlett et al., 2015). It should also be noted that policy complexity renders rational–positivist approaches of less utility in the analysis of unpredictable and often ambiguous political events (Geyer and Rihani, 2010). As in IPE, there is a growing emphasis on post-positivist approaches to public policy and the ability of such approaches to provide a richer
316 Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo ‘argumentative turn’ in policy studies (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Howlett and Ramesh, 1998; Schmidt, 2010; Fischer and Gottweis, 2011). Policy complexity with its inherent desire to incorporate a wider array of actors and inputs into the policy process, further heightens the need for such post-positivist approaches. Not surprisingly, collective action problem solving and collaborative policy making are seen as useful ways to address complexity, with the introduction of external expertise and resources as a way for governments to address complex policy problems without over-extending public resources (Innes and Booher, 2010). One insight derived from such thinking on policy complexity is that governments need to reorganize themselves as policy issues become more complex. This includes introducing greater ‘polycentricity’ to ‘design’ complexity in governing systems by incorporating multiple and intersecting layers of decision-making (Colander and Kupers, 2014, p. 28). Others advocate more ‘holistic’ approaches such as ‘joined-up government’ (Clark, 2002; Mulgan, 2009; Pollitt, 2003) that cut across traditional functional areas to foster integrated responses to policy problems. Taking such an integrated and collaborative approach is largely in line with complexity theory’s emphasis on systems thinking over reductionism (Cairney, 2012). Collaboration between public and private actors to address complexity is a theme that has received much attention in financial sector policy with the development of dense state–industry ‘policy relations’ facilitating policy co-creation, which in turn contributes towards more effective financial regulation and governance (Woo, 2015, 2016; Woo and Howlett, 2015). The principle danger here is the opportunity for regulatory capture by powerful private agents in the financial sector In all instances, the response of governments to greater policy complexity has been to introduce more layers of decision-making, break down traditional barriers to cross- functional policy making and foster interlinking ties between public and private actors. What has emerged are more fluid and varied administrative structures. This includes the formation of transnational policy frameworks and institutions such as the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, which through its own administrative machinery, converts agreements into concrete policy at the transnational level (Mamudu et al., 2015). Indeed, international organizations (IOs) have long been seen as intergovernmental responses to policy complexity arising from heightened global interdependency. While IOs have traditionally formed a major component of IPE scholarship these have increasingly received much attention from scholars of public policy and public administration. These have ranged from evaluations of IOs’ performance in policy delivery (Tallberg et. al., 2016), the resources they wield as ‘international public administration’ (Knill and Bauer, 2016), and the varieties of administrative styles among international organizations (Knill et. al., 2016; Trondal, 2016). Indeed, the management of international organizations, especially seen through the lens of ‘international bureaucracy’ or international public administration, is seen as crucial for ‘taming the beast of globalisation’ (Alaimo, 2016). The growing cognizance of complexity in policy environments and processes has therefore resulted in two policy responses: First, there has been an attempt to ‘design’
International Political Economy 317 complexity into the policy process, resulting in more complex policy and political arrangements. Second, and most relevant here, there has been a turn towards IOs as ‘international bureaucracies’ capable of coordinating and organizing policy action at the international level. This second line of research is particularly relevant for IPE. Despite its long history of studying IOs, IPE approaches have tended to be highly structural and characterized by significant state centrism. In deepening the focus on the management and internal processes of IOs, recent studies in international bureaucracy and international public administration provide a significant measure of policy orientation. Given its need to engage more closely with how policies are made and the ways in which policy impacts various actors and situations, IPE stands to benefit from GPP’s reframing of international organizations as bureaucracy. This will allow for a stronger focus not only on international policy processes but on the internal politics of IOs and other regional or international institutions as well.
18.4.2. Behavioural Approaches An important implication of the 2008 financial crises was the realization that fundamental assumptions of the economics discipline—especially the efficient market hypothesis—do not necessarily hold true (Ball, 2009; McDonald, 2009; Shiller, 2012). Given imperfect information and unpredictable actor behaviour, traditional models derived from mainstream economic theory have proven less than adequate in explaining and predicting market behaviour. This led to views that economics, along with its various theories and models, had ‘failed’ as both an academic discipline and a framework with which to understand the making of policy in real-world economies (Colander et al., 2009). What emerged are attempts by both psychologists and economists to understand not just rational, but also the seemingly irrational behaviour of consumers and market actors. Such studies have culminated in the emergence of ‘behavioural economics’ as a sub-field (Ariely, 2008; Thaler, 2015). However, it should also be noted that behavioural economics or, more generally, attempts at introducing psychology into the study and analysis of (economic) policy had in fact existed prior to the financial crises (Camerer et al., 2003; Shafir, 2013) or even prior to such applications to economics themselves (Simon, 1957). In effect, behavioural economics is a misnomer for what is really the application of behavioural or psychological approaches to public policy (Shafir, 2013, p. ix). The imposition of the term ‘economics’ was partly due to the emerging field’s initial focus on economic phenomenon such as economic valuation, but also partly due to what has been seen as the continuing ‘colonizing’ proclivities of economics (Eichengreen, 1998), or the appropriation of behavioural research by economists. Regardless, behavioural approaches seek to address a wide array of policy and political issues that resonate with both public policy’s and IPE’s efforts at melding politics and economics. Behavioural approaches to public policy have gained traction in public policy. This can be seen in the seminal work on ‘nudging’ (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009). Driven by a belief in ‘libertarian paternalism’, nudging advocates the subtle shaping of societal and
318 Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo individual choices by state institutions as a solution to irrational individual behaviour (Sunstein, 2014) with significant implications for global policy processes. For instance, transnational policy instruments, with EU budget support being an example, can often nudge countries towards better governance (Wolff, 2015). Indeed, nudging may prove particularly relevant for transnational policy making, given the absence of a sovereign authority at this level. As Simmons (2000) has argued, international legal commitments are often viewed as ‘signalling’ intents of commitment, rather than actual means through which commitment is enforced. Specific behavioural tools such as framing, default choices, valuation of losses and gains, and presentation of information are held up as potential means of ensuring targeted and effective policy making (Leigh, 2015). There is, among psychologists and behavioural economists, a growing recognition of the need to imbue policy makers with knowledge of behavioural science and develop applicable behavioural research to policy making (Amir et al., 2005). This is particularly relevant in addressing transnational policy issues that require cooperation among states and international institutions but lack legally-binding means of enforcing cooperation. Such constraints on global policy coordination and cooperation have long been noted in IPE, which has often chosen to address this either by taking on realist understandings of power relations and interest-driven alliance building or liberal internationalist hopes of cooperation based on economic interconnectivity and state sovereignty pooling among states. While in themselves useful lens through which international economic relations could be understood, the incorporation of behavioural approaches such as nudging could introduce a significant level of nuance and depth in understanding the behavioural means by which states can influence or shift the positions of other states. Furthermore, explicit efforts to meld behavioural studies with public policy have occurred within the realm of policy design, with research focused on understanding the behavioural assumptions that drive and even legitimize policy instruments (Schneider and Ingram, 1990; Jones and Cullis, 2003; Low, 2011; Madrian, 2014). Nudging has therefore become an increasingly important part of the policy maker’s toolkit (John, 2013), although others have argued that nudging has its limitations when faced with complex policy problems (Selinger and Whyte, 2012). At the transnational level, international policy design could focus on the tools and capacities that IOs may have at their disposal to influence state action and global policy preferences.
18.4.3. Strategic Foresight and Futures A third theoretical movement associated with growing policy complexity is the emergence of ‘futures’ studies. Faced with identifying emerging threats and opportunities on the policy horizon what binds these approaches is a focus on predicting and pre-empting future events that may have a bearing on the policy process. At the broadest level future- oriented research, among policy practitioners at least, is most commonly described as
International Political Economy 319 ‘strategic foresight’. Other concepts sometimes used to describe strategic foresight— horizon scanning or scenario planning—should rather be seen as the tools experts draw on (Fink and Schlake, 2000; Peterson et al., 2003; Mietzner and Reger, 2005). Strategic foresight emerged as a way to address complex policy issues that cut across traditional policy boundaries and government departments. These have included transnational policy issues such as climate change, pandemics and disease control, demographic shifts and migration, and technological innovations, among others. It does so by providing policy makers with more systematic knowledge of emerging trends and facilitating the development of ‘reflexive mutual social learning’ processes among policy makers (Habegger. 2010). Pre-empting emerging trends and developing reflexive learning processes should in theory help policy makers adapt to changes that would supposedly ensure that policies and processes become durable and effective (Leigh, 2003; Habegger, 2010). Indeed, the majority of the changes or shocks that policy makers are expected to face tend to emerge from the ‘external’ environment, imbuing strategic foresight with a significant transnational aspect. Strategic foresight, especially when scenario planning is involved, also contributes towards decision-making by expanding the decision-maker’s mental models (Chermack, 2004). Importantly, there are strong contextual elements to strategic foresight. The social, economic and political context provides data for more effective scenario-building and horizon scanning (Schultz, 2006; Amanatidou et al., 2012). As with behavioural approaches, strategic foresight can add value to public policy and IPE understandings of transnational policy processes. It has, for instance, been noted that strategic foresight and scenario planning can be useful tools for pre-empting potential financial crises and predicting the behaviour of financial sector actors (Cooper, 2010; Phadnis et al., 2015). Given the potential for cross-boundary spillovers, such efforts at pre-empting crises can provide useful tools for transnational policy making. However, applying strategic foresight to the study of global policy issues remains relatively nascent. While strategic foresight focuses on global policy issues and variables, responses formulated by foresight experts tend to focus on state-level responses and policies. Given the existing research capabilities and resources of IOs such as the World Bank and IMF, there is the possibility of introducing foresight activities at the international level. Indeed, both IPE and public policy can benefit from placing greater emphasis on strategic foresight as a policy tool for addressing transnational issues.
18.5. Conclusion This chapter has sought to address the emerging ‘policy turn’ of IPE, emerging methodological innovations in public policy, and how they might serve each other. In both instances the impetus has been to find ways to deal with increasingly complex and interdependent global policy environments. While IPE and global public policy
320 Richard Higgott and J.J. Woo have emerged as lead contenders in the understanding of global policy complexity, more needs to be done to ensure the development of relevant and useful analytical frameworks. There is no doubt that IPE has a more difficult task in carving out a meaningful view of the world given its focus is on both the state and the market and the inseparability of their roles. It is the student of IPE’s lot in life to please neither the economist nor the political scientist (Higgott, 1999). It is their lot in life to sit at the messy interface of economics and politics—but this is where the key to understanding global policy making is to be found. The concern with combining economics with psychology and politics has been a core response to growing complexity as narrow and tightly defined single discipline have been found wanting. Furthermore, methodological developments in IPE and public policy that, once upon a time, led to a growing divide between positivist and interpretivist approaches are now challenged by the need to address enhanced complexity and contextuality in policy making. The methodological innovations outlined in this chapter—policy complexity, behavioural approaches, and strategic foresight—can be seen as further efforts in refining our understanding of global policy complexity. However, these methodological innovations have taken place almost exclusively in the realm of public policy. Similar efforts at theoretical and methodological innovation have mostly been found lacking among IPE scholars, who for too long were more interested in perpetuating and accentuating the positivist-interpretivist divide in their field. This is not the case in all instances of course and pioneering work has been carried out in the domains of finance since the GFC. In order for IPE to gain a firm place at the policy table, it needs to shift its attention from insular theoretical debates to core global policy issues. Emerging methodological innovations identified here can support this process. This will allow for a proliferation of diverse IPE approaches and methodologies, with behavioural IPE, future-oriented IPE, or complexity driven IPE, merely a sample of the various theoretical subsets which might provide useful analyses of transnational policy issues. More fundamentally, there is a need for IPE to expand beyond its traditional privileging of structure at the expense of agency. IPE needs to delve systematically, not just occasionally, into domestic political and policy processes. It can do so by drawing on yet another emerging area of research in public policy, namely policy capacity (Painter and Pierre, 2005; Wu et al., 2015). The emerging literature on policy capacity has already begun to address the various informational and political capacities that are necessary for more effective policy making under conditions of complexity (John, 2013; Dunlop, 2015; Howlett, 2015; Pattyn and Brans, 2015; Woo et al., 2015). In this regard, pioneering work in IPE has been done by those working on the sociology of the professions in international economic organizations (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012; Seabrooke and Tsingou, 2014; Seabrooke and Nilsson, 2015) or the role and influence of domestic state capacities in the global economy (Seabrooke, 2002, p. 2006). There is a continuing need for the conceptual and methodological foundations of IPE to embrace work in contemporary public policy. The contribution of IPE to the study of
International Political Economy 321 transnational policy issues will then be, if not complete, at least better fit for purpose as an important contributor to our enhanced understanding of global public policy.
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Chapter 19
L aw– S pace Ne x u s , G l oba l Governance, a nd G l oba l Adm inistrat i v e L aw Ming-S ung Kuo
19.1. Introduction Resulting from a multinational research project based at New York University (NYU) School of Law, global administrative law (GAL) has become one of the main approaches to thinking through the issues surrounding global governance. In contrast to other approaches, it aims to answer both the practical and normative issues of global governance with no worldwide law-making authority in sight. As the experience of the emergence of the modern regulatory state at the turn of the twentieth century shows, discretion is essential for administrative agencies to accomplish their tasks. Yet, discretion also raises concerns over the abuse of administrative power and how to hold the bureaucracy to account, calling the legitimacy of the modern regulatory state into question. National administrative law is regarded as responding to the issues concerning administrative discretion and accountability through substantive legal principles and procedural rules (Stewart, 1975, pp. 1671–88; Nolte, 1994, pp. 196–7; Sordi, 2010). Paralleling the development in the domestic context, GAL conceives of global administrative law as the answer to the question about the legitimacy of global governance. What makes GAL even more intriguing is that global governance transcends the assumption that the nation state underlies the space of law, whether international or domestic, pointing to a fragmented, multi-layered legal order (Kuo, 2012a, pp. 859–62). Viewed thus, the identification of global administrative law by GAL suggests the changing relationship between law and space. Situating the challenge of global governance in the reconfigured law–space nexus, this chapter aims to shed light on GAL’s uniqueness among various approaches to global governance, with a focus on the unease GAL has expressed with its own constitutional
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 329 implications. The argument proceeds as follows. First, it will be explained why GAL’s approach to global governance echoes the history of responding to the emergence of modern administrative agencies with administrative law in the United States (US). In this historical and comparative light, the way that GAL sees the question of legitimacy in the global context can be illuminated. It is also noted that GAL reframes the world of national legal orders as a ‘global administrative space’ comprising five types of global administration (Section 2). Second, it will be shown that GAL turns to the idea of publicness to address the dual challenge of legality and legitimacy and the question of legal pluralism arising from the heterogeneity of global governance (Section 3). Finally, there is a concluding discussion of the unsettled relationship between GAL and Global Constitutionalism (Section 4). To avoid terminological confusion, ‘GAL’ refers to the aforementioned theoretical project of the same name at NYU, which has brought together scholars from both sides of the North Atlantic and beyond (Kingsbury, Krisch, Stewart, and Wiener, 2005) unless otherwise specified. As regards the actual regulations concerning global governance that inspire GAL, they are called ‘global regulatory norms’ in this chapter. In contrast, ‘global administrative law’ (in small letters) refers to the legal rules and principles that GAL identifies as normatively governing global administration. Notably, not all global regulatory norms can be classed as global administrative law (for a comparison see, e.g. Kuo, 2013; Walker, 2014).
19.2. Legitimacy, The Rule of Law and Political Space: From Global Administrative Space to GAL It has been well argued that the emergence of modern administrative law corresponded to the process of state building (see Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, p. 26; Cassese 2005b, p. 112–13). With the establishment of modern administration and bureaucracy as the underpinnings of the nation state, the question of how to bring it under control became one of the most pressing issues in the design of national legal orders. Uncontrolled discretion amounts to administrative tyranny, putting the legitimacy of the modern state in jeopardy. Thus, control of administrative agencies and of the exercise of their discretionary power by law lies at the heart of the rule of law. Administrative law epitomizes attempts to solve the question of the legitimacy of national administration by the rule of law (Nolte, 1994; Sordi, 2010). That national administrative law is linked to national administrative space, i.e. the sovereign nation state, in order to tame the power of its bureaucrats underpins the prototype of administrative law (Kuo, 2012b, p. 1057). Paralleling the development of national administration, concerns have been raised about the legitimacy of global governance with more and more regulatory powers transferred from the nation state to variegated international organizations, regional bodies,
330 Ming-Sung Kuo and other less formal transnational arrangements. Against this backdrop, GAL proposes an administrative law-based solution to the legitimacy deficit of global governance. As the linkage of the political space of the nation state and national administrative law suggests, the question of how legal space is conceived of in regard to global governance needs to be addressed before GAL as a normative response and the content of global administrative law can be adequately examined. It is noteworthy that while administrative law is conventionally discussed in the domestic context, the nation state is not the only legal space in which administrative law is conceived. Rather, ‘international administrative law’ has long been discussed in relation to formal international institutions and domestic administrative actors when the latter function as part of transboundary regulatory authorities (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 18–20; see also Schmidt-Aßmann, 2008; cf. Esty, 2006, pp. 1493–5). Both jointly constitute ‘international administration’, which is the object that international administrative law aims to rein in. Besides, the rights and duties of employees with international organizations continues to be a lively subject of international administrative law (see Szasz, 1997, p. 32). Administrative tribunals established under various international organizations have played a central role in the development of international administrative law in this regard (Kryvoi, 2015). In line with scholarship on international administrative law, the Heidelberg School, headed by Armin von Bogdandy and based at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, focuses on international public authority and approaches global governance issues from the perspective of international institutional law (von Bogdandy, 2008; see also Cassese 2015, p. 465; and for a comparison with GAL, see Craig, 2015, pp. 623–35). What is distinctive about the Heidelberg School is its exclusion of multinational corporations and other private legal subjects from the composite global governance framework (von Bogdandy, Dann, and Goldmann, 2008, pp. 1383–4), even though they may develop into self-regulatory bodies and serve as the prototype of new administrative organizations (Dorf and Sabel, 1998, pp. 292–314). In contrast, guided by the concept of public authority, the Heidelberg School focuses on international organizations and other non-private institutions (von Bogdandy, 2008; von Bogdandy, Dann, and Goldmann, 2008). Notably, international institutions are one of GAL’s primary research subjects (Kingsbury and Casini, 2009). Yet, in a pioneering work on GAL and global administrative law, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005, pp. 20–3) argue that ‘global administration’ sets global administrative law apart from traditional ‘international administrative law’ (see also Krisch and Kingsbury, 2006, pp. 2–3). In contrast to the old international administrative law and the Heidelburg School, the identity of global administrative law is constructed against the backdrop of a global governance that transcends the boundaries of nation states. Through GAL’s lens, global administrative law is to the administration of global governance (global administration) as international administrative law is to ‘international administration’ (see Kuo, 2011, p. 64). As such, what is it that distinguishes global administration from international administration? This holds the key to understanding GAL and global administrative law.
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 331 According to Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005), ‘global administration’ can be divided into five types. The first two types of global administration are what they call ‘administration by formal international organizations’ (or simply ‘international administration’) and ‘distributed administration’. Notably, these two types of global administration correspond respectively to the two constituents of international administration under international administrative law: formal international institutions and ‘domestic regulatory agencies’ that ‘act as part of the global administrative space’ and ‘take decisions on issues of foreign or global concern’ (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 20–2). In addition, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart identify three other types of global administration. First is what they call ‘transnational networks and coordination arrangements’. As a ‘horizontal form of administration’, they are ‘characterized by the absence of a binding formal decision-making structure and the dominance of informal cooperation among state regulators’ (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, p. 21). An example of this type of global administration is the Basel Committee, under which the heads of various central banks, ‘outside any treaty structure’, are brought together in order to coordinate their policies on capital adequacy requirements for banks among other things (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 20–2). What Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart call ‘hybrid intergovernmental–private administration’ refers to the bodies, which combine private and governmental actors, in charge of various transboundary regulatory matters. For example, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which produces standards on food safety that gain a quasi-mandatory effect via the SPS Agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures—SPS), is composed of non- governmental actors as well as governmental representatives (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005, p. 22). Lastly, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart discuss the private International Standardization Organization (ISO), among other examples, as the epitome of the fifth type of global administration, namely, ‘private bodies’. It is noted that the ISO has adopted a plethora of standards aimed at harmonizing product and process rules. These ISO-generated standards not only have major economic impacts but are also used in regulatory decisions by treaty-based authorities such as the WTO (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005, pp. 22–3). The myriad treaties, statutes, rules, principles, codes, standards, or guidelines produced by the above types of global administration jointly constitute global regulatory norms that are essential to global governance, laying the foundation for the emergence of global administrative law (Cassese, 2005c). What is characteristic of global administration as described above is ‘de- territorializ[ation]’ (Cassese, 2015, p. 466; cf. Ruggie, 1993), levelling domestic administrators and other regulatory players in global governance. A bit more history of global governance will illuminate this aspect and its effect on GAL and global administrative law. Tracing the origin of global governance back to the mid-nineteenth century, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005) regard the variegated ‘international unions’ in areas such as postal services and telecommunication as the predecessor of global
332 Ming-Sung Kuo administration. Examples include the Universal Postal Union (1874) and International Telegraph Union (1865) (see also Weiler, 2004, p. 553). These international organizations, which lay at the centre of traditional international administrative law, did not go beyond the Westphalian system of nation states. Thus, international administrative law derived from the international union-creating treaties that were concluded under the Westphalian system (see generally Reinsch, 1909; Weiler, 2004, p. 555). Notably, administrative tribunals, which are the central player in international administrative law concerning the rights and privileges of international civil servants, are attached to international organizations (Kryvoi, 2015). Moreover, international administrative law only extended indirectly to domestic administrators with limited effects. Specifically, although it has been argued that international unions were trusted ‘with significant powers of secondary rulemaking which did not require national ratification to be legally effective’, these autonomous secondary rule-making powers only existed in fields whose regulatory framework had been set out in treaties (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, p. 19). To address the regulatory issues left out by unratified secondary rules, domestic administrators were included in the notion of international administration. By way of the cooperation of domestic administrators with international institutions, the regulatory objectives of international unions could be fulfilled (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 19–20). Taken together, domestic administrators played the central role in the functioning of international administration while nation states were the masters of international administrative law (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, p. 19). In contrast, the position of domestic administrators in global governance is not distinctive from that of other regulatory players. Rather, these administrators share the centre stage as the main players with other actors from the private realm, which include all non-governmental actors such as multinational corporations, transnational civil groups, and other ISO-like organizations, and international civil service. Domestic administrators, both in international administration that involves intergovernmental organizations established by treaties or executive agreements and in distributed administration or other types of global administration, and other actors are equal players in an extended sphere of global administration, so to speak. Taken together, global administration operates in a ‘global administrative space’ (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 18–19, 20–7), which transcends nation states. As Sabino Cassese (2015, p. 467) observes, although the once all-powerful nation states continue to play an important role in global governance, they are receding to the order of deuteragonist. Seen in this light, the global administrative space appears to herald a post-Westphalian legal order. As the various types of global administration suggest, the global regulatory norms that are needed to address the complex and new transnational regulatory issues extend beyond the scope of international administrative law and are not necessarily in the control of nation states or their delegates (Cassese, 2005a). Instead, many of the rules, principles, codes, standards, or guidelines can hardly be credibly attributed to the consent of nation states, the lynchpin of international law (including international administrative law) in the Westphalian world order. Global administrative space poses challenges to
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 333 the volition-based Westphalian legal order, raising fundamental questions concerning the legitimacy of global governance (Kuo, 2009a). From the perspective of law, two issues stand out from the questions concerning the legitimacy of global governance. First, while global regulatory norms coming out of the variegated global administration are aimed at resolving transnational regulatory issues, they are mainly the creation of specialized bodies that focus on particular subjects. With their impact on more and more aspects of daily life, these global regulatory norms raise the same concerns as the establishment of modern administration: Is the decision taken by administration, whether global or national, an abuse of administrative power or a kind of administrative law-making in response to the practical needs of administration? Where is the line to be drawn between respect for administrative expertise and the control of administrative discretion (Shapiro, 2005)? These issues show that the classical debate between Friedrich (1940) and Finer (1941) remains relevant. Second, as the formation of global administrative space means deviating from the Westphalian model of international law-making, global administration appears to be cut off from nation states. Given that nation states remain the centre of political participation, global administration raises the question of legitimacy and accountability: Can it be held to account? To whom should it be accountable? Is it democratic and legitimate at all (Cohen and Sabel, 2006)? As discussed above, administrative law has tried to answer these questions by framing the administration and its exercise of power within legal rules and principles enacted or authorized by parliament (Craig, 2015, pp. 675–82; see also Ziamou 2001, pp. 56–9). This is the classical model of administrative law, which is characteristic of the development in continental Europe (Nolte, 1994). Notably, these questions are not only the concern of law but also central to studies of public administration (Rosenbloom, 2000). The core of the classical model is to subject administrative decisions to judicial review according to parliamentary legislation and the substantive principles of the rule of law (including reasonableness and human rights). Yet, a closer look at the global regulatory norms emerging from global administration reveals the limitation of the substance-oriented model of administrative law. As Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart (2005, pp. 53–4) note, informality and pluralism, among other things, are characteristic of global regulatory norms. With both conventional international administration and new types of administration involved in the global administrative space, their coexistence illustrates the multifaceted constitution of global administration. The emergence of informal types of administration such as transnational networks and coordination arrangements, hybrid administration, and private bodies suggests that global regulatory norms will be more informal and flexible than international treaties or domestic legislation (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, pp. 16–17, 21, 31, 53–4; Esty, 2006, pp. 1537–42; see also Cassese 2005c, pp. 976–7). As global regulatory norms are created to address the respective needs of the specialized regulatory bodies in global administration, their characteristics of informality and pluralism make the scrutiny of substance difficult and question the effectiveness of the classical model of administrative law (Shapiro, 2001). It is here that the US experience of controlling the emerging regulatory state in the early twentieth century inspires GAL in response to the challenges from global governance.
334 Ming-Sung Kuo One of the primary challenges posed by the emergence of the modern regulatory state in the US at the turn of the twentieth century is the creation of new types of regulatory bodies that transcend the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers as stipulated in the US Constitution. How to hold these new regulatory bodies to account has since been a constant theme in American constitutional and administrative law. The controversy over the president’s power to remove members of the so-called independent regulatory commissions (Strauss, 1984) and the debate surrounding the concept of the unitary executive (Lessig and Sunstein, 1994; Kagan, 2001, pp. 2331–46) are two examples. With more and more law-making powers delegated to the executive branch and new regulatory bodies, the legitimacy of the modern American state became a pressing concern in the early twentieth century (Epstein, 2008). Initially, the US turned to the classical model of administrative law for answers, centring on the congressional control of administrative law-making through statutory legislation.1 Failing to effectively address the deficiency of legitimacy concerning the modern regulatory state, the classical model was eventually dropped in favour of more participation and other procedural requirements in the making of administrative decisions, resulting in the enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946 (Rose- Ackerman, Egidy, and Fowkes, 2015, pp. 38–40, 77–93; cf. Rosenbloom, 2000; Ernst, 2014). The focus on the procedural control of the administrative decision-making process distinguishes the American model of administrative law from the classical, continental model, which emphasizes the substantive review of individual administrative acts (Rose-Ackerman, 1994, pp. 12–13, 15–16; see also Nolte, 1994, pp. 197–8; cf. Craig, 2015, pp. 744–54). Specifically, to address the legitimacy issues facing the modern regulatory state, US administrative law has managed to bolster the legitimacy of administrative decisions by imposing procedural requirements, such as public notice and comment, hearing, reason-giving, and transparency without turning to the classical non-delegation doctrine (Rose-Ackerman, Egidy, and Fowkes, 2015, pp. 75–93). Furthermore, with the focus shifting from specific legislative authorization and substantive review to citizen participation and procedural control, US administrative law is regarded as striking a better balance between respect for administrative expertise and control of administrative discretion than the classical model does (Rose-Ackerman, Egidy, and Fowkes, 2015, pp. 263–67; cf. Kuo, 2012a, p. 864–7). In light of the US experience, the question of the legitimacy of global administration is not so much state control over the variegated transnational regulatory bodies as it is the due process of global regulatory norms. This is considered to be conducive to a more rational and legitimate model of global governance (Krisch, 2006; see also Walker, 2014, p. 104; Craig, 2015, pp. 754–65). Inspired by the experience of how the US reacted to the rise of the modern regulatory state in the early twentieth century (Kuo, 2013, pp. 451–2, 457–8; Harlow, 2006, p. 209; Somek, 2010, p. 271), GAL adopts a non-constitutional, administrative approach to legitimate global governance (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005). By transposing the procedural (as well as some substantive) requirements of national administrative law to global governance, GAL is intended to give legitimacy to the already existing global regulatory norms.
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 335 After GAL’s normative attitude towards actual global regulations is revealed, the content of global administrative law, which GAL helps identify among global regulatory norms, can be determined. Through GAL’s lens, there are two types of norms in global administrative law. The first type consists of traditional domestic administrative law principles that are transposed to the global context, including legality, transparency, due process, publicity, reason-giving, principles of institutional design, as well as human rights (see also Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 37–41). Among them, due process requirements stand front and centre, including notice and comment, consultation, hearing, and other forms of citizen/stakeholder participation in administrative decision-making. Global administrative law in this regard is praised for enhancing the accountability of global administration. It is the process-oriented normative character of global administrative law that has since won GAL approval among many governance scholars (Craig, 2015, p. 808; de Búrca, Keohane, and Sabel, 2013, pp. 737–8). Yet, as GAL’s process-oriented response to the legitimacy of global governance suggests, it recognizes the importance of the already existing myriad global regulatory norms in resolving the diverse transnational regulatory issues. While not all of them can be seen as corresponding to the values and goals at the core of administrative law, treating them as nothing but facts of no normative value would fail to do justice to the reality of global governance and make the problem of legitimacy and accountability even worse. Instead, these norms effectively function as specialized substantive administrative laws of global governance, and should be treated so to the extent that they are subject to the requirements of administrative law rules and principles (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005, p. 16). Embedded in the practice of global governance, these substantive constituents of global administrative law not only embody the rationality of transnational regulation, which adds further legitimacy to global administration (Walker, 2014, p. 104; Craig, 2015, pp. 706–54), but also make GAL an interdisciplinary project (Craig, 2015, p. 570). Thus, in correspondence with domestic administrative law, global administrative law consists of procedural and substantive parts: the former is normative while the latter is of heavily empirical character. In this way, GAL aims to bolster both the legitimacy and rationality of decentred transnational regulatory powers in the variegated global administrative space by means of administrative law mechanisms and principles (Krisch, 2010a; see also Kuo, 2013, p. 444).
19.3. Publicness and GAL: Searching for Legality and Legitimacy in the Post-Westphalian World As the GAL School suggests, global administrative law is a corpus of legal rules and principles discovered in the practices of global governance with the help of administrative law principles. Global administrative law appears to be situated between fact and norm
336 Ming-Sung Kuo (Habermas, 1996). As an approach to global governance based on rule of law, which sets it apart from others, GAL scholars are faced with the following questions. Is it law or simply a body of fact? What is the source of global administrative law? Is it law at all (Craig, 2015, p. 635)? In addition, despite GAL’s claim that global administrative law provides a solution to the legitimacy of global governance, global administrative law faces the challenge of legitimacy. Existing independently of any political authority, what/who gives legitimacy to global administrative law (Craig, 2015, pp. 674–5; see also Somek, 2010)? Taken together, global administrative law faces challenges of ‘legality’ and legitimacy: the former asks how to distinguish law from non-law; the latter concerns the democratic grounding of global administrative law (Kuo, 2012b, p. 1059). To be a complete legal response to global governance, GAL needs to tackle this twofold challenge, facing global administrative law head on. Benedict Kingsbury, one of the founding GAL scholars, attempts to answer this challenge by centring global administrative law on the notion of ‘publicness’ (Kingsbury, 2009a, p. 52; see also Kingsbury 2009b). In the first place, it is noteworthy that the legal character of global administrative law is conceived of from HLA Hart’s strand of legal positivism.2 Given the absence of agreement on content-based criteria and of an agreed political theory, Kingsbury questions whether any approach to law other than legal positivism can provide a baseline acceptability for determining what is law (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 28–9). Abandoning positivism, global administrative law would likely be plunged into ideological wars. Moreover, as global administrative law is situated beyond the control of sovereign will, command theories in the positivist vein do not fit in the search for an analytic framework within which the legality of global administrative law can be reckoned (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 27–8; also Kingsbury and Casini, 2009, pp. 353–4). Given that GAL discovers global administrative law in the practices of global governance, Hart’s positivist conception of law, which is centred on nonvolitional social facts, appears to hold the key to the issues concerning the legality of global administrative law (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 29–30). Yet, as has been discussed in Section 2, GAL attributes the emergence of global administrative law to the normative values of traditional administrative law tools being read into the practices of global governance. Through GAL’s lens, the concept of law in global administrative law goes beyond Hart’s strict separation of the rule of recognition from normative judgment. Thus, Kingsbury reads Hart’s social fact conception of law through Lon Fuller’s notion of the ‘inner morality of law’ with an eye to answering the dual challenge—legality and legitimacy—facing global administrative law. In other words, GAL aims to embed global administrative law in the practices of regulatory regimes that correspond to generality, predictability, publicity, intelligibility, coherence, stability and other requirements, i.e. the ‘inner morality of law’ (Kingsbury 2009a, pp. 30–1). This is where the notion of publicness comes into play in Kingsbury’s attempt to conceive of both the legality and legitimacy of global administrative law in sources detached from the sovereign will of nation states. Specifically, while the ultimate rule of recognition for global administrative law is constructed around social facts and practices, as Hart’s legal theory suggests, they are
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 337 extended to include the notion of publicness. According to Kingsbury (2009a), at the core of publicness are ‘the claim made for law that it has been wrought by the whole society, by the public, and the connected claim that law addresses matters of concern to the society as such’. Thus, a law that answers to publicness will rest on a more solid normative ground than a pure Hartian conception of law, which is ultimately determined by social fact independent of normative judgment. To avoid the challenges facing content-based conceptions of law in the absence of agreement on moral values, however, Kingsbury (2009a, pp. 30–2) contends that the substantive notion of publicness is embedded in the practices of law. Instead of being situated in the normative judgment external to the fact of legal practices, publicness underpinning global administrative law is conceived in the operation of the legal system itself. What is important in Kingsbury’s rescue attempt as regards the legality of global administrative law is that publicness is understood as ‘what is intrinsic to public law as generally understood’ (Kingsbury, 2009a, p. 30). Law is public in nature and thus distinct from private deals for ‘it has been wrought by the whole society, by the public’ and ‘addresses matters of concern to the society as such’ (Kingsbury, 2009a p. 31). A ‘legal’ rule that cannot be attributed to the whole society or does not address public concerns is devoid of the underlying values of the notion of publicness. It is law in name alone. Such a rule is nothing but expression of private preferences (Kuo, 2012b, p. 1062). Notably, in terms of the fragmented landscape of global governance, to speak of ‘the public’ on the global scale is more aspirational than real. Applying it to the landscape of global governance, however, Kingsbury shifts emphasis from the entire world society to individual regulatory regimes, which he argues have brought about individual publics. Thus, the underlying principles of the notion of publicness Kingsbury identifies, including the limitation of power, the requirement of justification and proportionality, the procedural mechanism for deliberate decision-making, and the protection of human rights, reflect the values embodied in the practices integral to the legal system and are thus considered to be ‘immanent in public law’. Through GAL’s lens, current transnational regulatory regimes are mostly oriented towards the values underpinning publicness. Thus, the practices in today’s global regulatory regimes can be construed as effectively indicating the ‘fit’ between Hart’s social fact conception of law and the practices-derived global administrative law (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 30–4). On the other hand, what is characteristic of global governance is the multiplicity of networks of sectoral governance arrangements (Cassese, 2005b, p. 123; Casini, 2015, p. 477). On this view, publicness is rooted in, not imposed on, the ‘publics’ underpinning various sectoral governance regimes that produce the inchoate global administrative law through regulatory practices (Kingsbury, 2009a, p. 56). As the attributes, constraints, and normative commitments associated with publicness are considered to be ‘immanent in public law’, a normative notion of publicness can be added to the components of the Hartian rule of recognition. In this way, Kingsbury reconstructs Hart’s positivism in light of Fuller’s concept of ‘inner morality of law’, bringing the property of legality to global administrative law (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 30, 38–40).
338 Ming-Sung Kuo Seen in this light, the notion of publicness not only resolves the question of legality concerning global administrative law but also suggests an alternative notion of legitimacy in GAL. Through the lens of publicness, the variegated practices of decentred transboundary regulatory regimes can be further divided into those that correspond to publicness and those that do not, resolving the issue of what is (non-)law in the debate over global administrative law. In the meantime, this revisionist social fact conception of law lays the normative ground for global administrative law without being dragged into the debate over moral disagreement. Conceived thus, the notion of publicness appears to provide GAL with an alternative baseline concept of legitimacy, answering the legitimacy challenge that results from the separation of global administrative law from state consent (Kingsbury, 2009a, pp. 39–40). Nevertheless, up to this point, GAL has yet to fully address the challenges that legality and legitimacy pose to global administrative law. In contrast to the nation- state as the traditional administrative space where national administrative law operates, the landscape of global administrative space is one of legal pluralism (Krisch, 2010b). Against this backdrop, the steering of relationships between heterogeneous regulatory regimes in the global administrative space is central to the functioning of global governance, raising the issue of ‘conflicts of laws arrangements’ in the face of the fragmented global governance (Kingsbury, 2009a, p. 56). Specifically, as governance issues become complex and diverse, new arrangements as to the exercise of regulatory power are made in global governance. In the cases where governance issues are intertwined, it is not clear which regulatory body constitutive of global administration holds sway in individual cases. If this inter-regulatory regime relationship were left unaddressed, however, global governance would be plunged into regime collisions as literature on the fragmentation of international legal order suggests. The abovementioned SPS Agreement, for example, which adopts a science-based approach to government measures that restrict trade for the protection of human life or health, may conflict with the precautionary principle under the Convention on Biological Diversity when the trade-restricting government measures concern imported food that contains genetically modified organisms (Winham, 2003). Thus, beyond its original focus on the legitimacy and rationality of transnational regulatory powers, GAL further ascribes the steering of the relations between regulatory jurisdictions in global governance to the function of global administrative law (Kuo, 2013, p. 444). Bearing this landscape of legal pluralism and the issue of regime collision in mind, Kingsbury appeals again to the idea of publicness in his attempted comprehensive jurisprudential account of global administrative law. In addition to the enhancement of the legitimacy and rationality of decisions of individual regulatory regimes, it is suggested that the ‘conflicts of laws arrangements’ of global administrative law pivots on the balance in the inter-regulatory regime relationship in light of the idea of publicness and its associated principles (Kingsbury, 2009a, p. 56; Kingsbury, 2009b, p. 197). To avert the possible regime collisions, the intricate interrelationships
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 339 between regulatory regimes are managed with consideration for the underlying principles of the idea of publicness. Notably, the steering of the inter-regime relations is carried out on a case-by-case basis. In each instance of conflicts of laws arrangements, the laws of two regulatory regimes in conflict are balanced against each other to decide which one to apply in each case (cf. Krisch, 2010b, pp. 277–8). Take the foregoing example of the conflict between the science-based approach and the precautionary principle. To decide whether the trade regime (SPS Agreement) or the environment regime (the Convention on Biodiversity) should prevail will depend on which regime is more in line with the idea of publicness in practice. In other words, when it comes to the conflicts of laws function of global administrative law, GAL relies on the exercise of balancing (Krisch, 2010b, 269–74; cf. Cassese 2005a, p. 680), the result of which is deeply rooted in the practices of global governance. Taken together, GAL has ambitions to embed global administrative law in the actual practices of global administration without reducing it to mere fact by reading Hartian legal positivism in light of the idea of publicness. How much success GAL has in resolving the legal issues surrounding global governance and global administrative law, including legality, legitimacy, and the steering of inter-regime relations, remains to be determined. Yet, GAL’s jurisprudential account of global administrative law, as discussed above, also raises more questions. As global administrative law is deeply rooted in the heterogeneous practices of the fragmented global administrative space, the line is blurry between general public interest and sectoral private preference. Thus, when GAL rests global administrative law on the idea of publicness, it is unclear whether it is the former or the latter to which GAL responds (Kuo, 2011, pp. 81–101; Kuo, 2012b, pp. 1072–4). Construing Hart’s social fact-based positivist concept of law in line with Fuller’s concept of ‘inner morality of law’, GAL risks undermining its positivist stance (Craig, 2015, p. 645). As a result, GAL is dragged into a kind of ideological war, which Kingsbury aims to keep it from with his jurisprudential account of global administrative law, and thus accused of imposing Western values at the expense of value pluralism (Harlow, 2006, p. 207; Barak-Erez and Perez, 2013, pp. 483–5; cf. Chimni, 2005; Marks, 2005).
19.4. GAL and Global Constitutionalism: The (Unanswered) Constitutional Question of GAL As has been discussed in Section 2, GAL draws inspiration from the development of national administrative law. Yet, it parts company with its source of inspiration on one fundamental point: GAL disavows any ‘constitutional ambition’ and focuses on the discovery of global administrative law in the practices of global governance (Krisch, 2010a; cf. MacDonald and Shamir-Borer, 2010), whereas national administrative law has long
340 Ming-Sung Kuo been an integral part of national constitutional orders (see generally Ginsburg, 2010). Thus, GAL distances itself from those attempts to conceptualize global governance from the constitutional perspective under the umbrella of Global Constitutionalism (for a typology see Kuo, 2010 pp. 861–7). Considering its pronounced bottom-up approach to frame global governance in legal terms, GAL’s avowedly non-constitutional stance is not difficult to understand (Stewart, 2015, p. 506). As the constitutional order is tied to the concept of demos, GAL asserts that it is of little use to frame global governance in constitutional terms in the absence of a global political community. Without global demos, the constitution fails to travel from nation states to the space of global governance, which is administrative, not constitutional. Also, the constitutional approach to global governance suggests a legal ‘settlement’ of normative issues, risking the politicization of global governance. Any premature ‘constitutional settlement’ would only exacerbate global inequality. Relatedly, global governance can only be constitutionalized at the expense of its inherent value pluralism, leading to the reinforcement of hegemonic values (Krisch, 2010b, Ch. 2 and 3; cf. Kennedy, 2009). To respond to the practical needs of fragmented global governance, GAL adheres to its pragmatic stance guided by the idea of publicness, not constitutionalism. Yet, it is doubtful whether GAL’s non-constitutional position is tenable in terms of the nature of the issues surrounding global governance. As has been discussed in Section 3, there is no unified global public in the landscape of global governance. In the global administrative space are various regime-centric publics. Thus, to rely on the idea of publicness to resolve the practical and normative issues of global governance begs the question of how to reconcile the diverse publics in the global administrative space (Kuo, 2012b, p. 1063). Besides, GAL’s apolitical stance does not shield itself from political contestation and criticisms of value imperialism even if it proclaims to leave value pluralism unaffected (Barak-Erez and Perez, 2013; Marks, 2005). Moreover, GAL’s scepticism about demos-independent constitution talk, as Global Constitutionalism proposes, more reveals its supposed premise of constitutional order than reflects its non-constitutional stance (Kuo, 2013, pp. 453–8). Seen in this light, GAL appears to be another implicit form of Global Constitutionalism despite its pioneers’ contention to the contrary (Kuo, 2011, pp. 71–80; Teubner, 2012, 50; Möllers, 2015, p. 471). In any event, the debate between GAL and Global Constitutionalism appears to be a recast of what has been going on in democracies: how to govern in a pluralist society without sliding into some form of tyranny, whether it is expert-centred minority or popular majority (cf. Kuo, 2013, pp. 453–64). Notably, in a 2015 symposium published in International Journal of Constitutional Law in celebration of the then ten-year-old GAL, the constitutional question was not dodged anymore. In contrast to the avowedly non-constitutional stance in the earlier development of GAL, most of the contributors to that celebratory symposium have embraced the constitutional question of global governance (Symposium, 2015). Some note that GAL cannot be a complete project without tackling the issues raised by Global Constitutionalism (Casini, 2015, p. 477; cf. Cassese, 2015, pp. 465–6);
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 341 others contend that GAL’s normative approach to global governance needs to rest on a constitutional stand (Savino 2015, pp. 493–6; cf. Chiti, 2015, p. 491); still others move in the constitutional direction in terms of GAL’s inevitable political implications for global governance (Möllers, 2015, p. 471; cf. Napolitano, 2015, p. 484). Nevertheless, when it comes to the content of GAL’s constitutional vision, there is no consensus. The relationship between GAL and Global Constitutionalism remains unsettled (Kuo, 2009b).
19.5. Conclusion As a theoretical approach to global governance, GAL breaks new ground in reconceiving the landscape of global governance as a global administrative space along the law–space nexus. Its contribution lies in its pragmatic approach to addressing normative concerns over the legitimacy and accountability of global governance in legal terms without undermining the rationality of transnational administration when global political community remains an elusive idea. In this way, it seems to have averted the politicization of global governance. Yet, its recent embrace of the constitutional question suggests that GAL cannot leave political issues unaddressed. Whether this constitutional turn in GAL will result in a new paradigm of legal framing of global governance or a rethink of Global Constitutionalism altogether remains an evolving subject in the study of global governance.
Notes 1. This is the core of the non-delegation doctrine, which requires that Congress specifically provide for the major legislative contents and policy choices without delegating them to the Administration (A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. U.S., 294 U.S. 495 (1935); Panama Refining v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388 (1935)). 2. Notably, Nico Krisch, another GAL pioneer, takes a more ambiguous position on Hartian legal positivism as the jurisprudential foundation of global administrative law (Krisch 2010b, pp. 11–12, 96–103). Engaging with GAL, Dyzenhaus (2005, p. 128) suggests a non- positivist normative approach to the legality of global administrative law.
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344 Ming-Sung Kuo Lessig, Lawrence, and Sunstein, Cass R. 1994. ‘The President and the Administration’. Columbia Law Review, 94 (1): 1–123. MacDonald, Euan, and Shamir- Borer, Eran. 2010. ‘Meeting the Challenges of Global Governance: Administrative and Constitutional Approaches’. In Ruiz, Hélène Fabri, Wolfrum, Rüdiger, and Gogolin, Jana (eds). Select Proceedings of the European Society of International Law: Volume 2 2008. Oxford: Hart, pp. 214–36. Marks, Susan. 2005. ‘Naming Global Administrative Law’. New York University Journal of International Law and Policy, 37 (4): 995–1001. Möllers, Christoph. 2015. ‘Ten Years of Global Administrative Law’. International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13 (2): 469–72. Napolitano, Giulio. 2015. ‘Going Global, Turning Back National: Towards a Cosmopolitan Administrative Law?’ International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13 (2): 482–85. Nolte, Georg. 1994. ‘General Principles of German and European Administrative Law – A Comparison in Historical Perspective’. Modern Law Review, 57 (2): 191–212. Reinsch, Paul S. 1909. ‘International Administrative Law and National Sovereignty’. American Journal of International Law, 3 (1): 1–45. Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1994. Controlling Environment: The Limits of Public Law in Germany and the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rose-Ackerman, Susan, Egidy, Stefanie, and Fowkes, James. 2015. Due Process of Lawmaking: The United States, South Africa, Germany, and the European Union. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rosenbloom, David H. 2000. Building a Legislative-Centered Public Administration: Congress and the Administrative State, 1946–1999. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Ruggie, John Gerard. 1993. ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’. International Organization, 47 (1): 139–74. Savino, Mario. 2015. ‘What If Global Administrative Law Is a Normative Project?’ International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13 (2): 492–98. Schmidt-Aßmann, Eberhard 2008. ‘The Internationalization of Administrative Relations as a Challenge for Administrative Law Scholarship’. German Law Journal, 9 (11): 2061–79. Shapiro, Martin. 2001. ‘Administrative Law Unbounded: Reflections on Government and Governance’. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 8 (2): 369–77. Shapiro, Martin. 2005. ‘ “Deliberative,” “Independent” Technocracy v. Democratic Politics: Will the Globe Echo the E.U.?’ Law and Contemporary Problems, 68 (3 & 4): 341–56. Somek, Alexander. 2010. ‘Administration without Sovereignty’. In Dobner, Petra and Loughlin, Martin (eds).The Twilight of Constitutionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 267–88. Sordi, Bernardo. 2010. ‘Révolution, Rechtsstaat, and the Rule of Law: Historical Reflections on the Emergence of Administrative Law in Europe’. In Rose-Ackerman, Susan and Lindseth, Peter (eds). Comparative Administrative Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 23–36. Stewart, Richard B. 1975. ‘The Reformation of American Administrative Law’. Harvard Law Review, 88 (8): 1667–1813. Stewart, Richard B. 2015. ‘The Normative Dimensions and Performance of Global Administrative Law’. International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13 (2): 499–506. Strauss, Peter L. 1984. ‘The Place of Agencies in Government: Separation of Powers and the Fourth Branch’. Columbia Law Review, 84 (3): 573–669. Symposium. 2015. ‘Through the Lens of Time: Global Administrative Law after 10 Years’. International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13 (2): 463–506.
Space of Governance and Global Administrative Law 345 Szasz, Paul C. 1997. ‘General Law-Making Processes’. In Joyner, Christopher C. (ed.). The United Nations and International Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–64. Teubner, Gunther. 2012. Constitutional Fragments: Societal Constitutionalism and Globaliza tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Neil. 2014. Intimations of Global Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiler, J.H.H. 2004. ‘The Geology of International Law – Governance, Democracy and Legitimacy’. Heidelberg Journal of International Law (ZaöRV), 64: 547–62. Winham, Gilbert R. 2003. ‘International Regime Conflict in Trade and Environment: The Biosafety Protocol and the WTO’. World Trade Review, 2 (2): 131–55. Ziamou, Theodora Th. 2001. Rulemaking, Participation and the Limits of Public Law in the USA and Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Cases A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. U.S., 294 U.S. 495 (1935). Panama Refining v. Ryan, 293 U.S., 388 (1935).
Chapter 20
Filling t h e G a p Global Masters of Public Administration and Public Policy Programmes Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim
20.1. Introduction Higher education programmes provide skills, knowledge, and abilities to help students keep abreast of rapidly changing public administration and policy at all governance levels. Accordingly, comprehending the forces that shape the global public sector and its administrative environments is a prerequisite for higher education programmes. This chapter draws out some of the implications for the global MPA/MPP programmes (and their accreditors) in coping with the rapidly globalizing character of public administration and transnational policy-making environments. One of the leading US public policy schools has identified five global trends affecting the public administration landscape. First, technological advancement and its application in our daily life as well as in public sector operations have accelerated (‘technological boom’); second, the requirement of persons to think globally given the ever-increasing hyper-connectivity of our lives across the globe (‘global thinking’). The third trend is that ensuring the sustainability of our society and system beyond the time horizon of the current generation has become a mandatory task (‘sustainable systems’), while the fourth is that the discussion and application of democratization should be based on sufficient understanding of the complexities of local contexts and regional dynamics before transplanting the Western-brewed democracy model (‘democratization’). The last trend is a need to understand how grassroots movements for social change have garnered their momentum via citizen campaigns (‘grassroots campaigns’) (Sol Price School of Public Policy, 2015). Likewise, Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot (2015) argue that understanding the dynamics of globalization is essential for infusing both the theory and practice of public administration and public policy. Given this rapidly changing
Filling the Gap 347 global public administration and policy making environment, it is also imperative to make education programmes relevant and timely, globally applicable, technologically up-to-date, culturally sensitive, and substantively competent in professional knowledge and practical skill sets in their curricula. In spite of these mandates, a gap exists between the demand and supply in global public policy and administration training and education. As a shorthand, we use the phrase: ‘global MPA/MPP’ to refer to a range of Masters of Public Administration or Masters of Public Policy programmes that have been developed worldwide over the past two decades (Pal and Clarke, 2016). It is noteworthy that the influential US News & World Report ‘Public Affairs Graduate Schools Ranking’ does not include a speciality in global policy or global governance. Instead, only the following specialities are ranked: City Management and Urban Policy; Environmental Policy and Management; Health Policy and Management; Information and Technology Management; Non-profit Management; Public Finance and Budgeting; Public Management Administration; Public Policy Analysis; and Social Policy (U. News, n.d.). This ranking implies that the Public Affairs field is conceptually constrained by its domestic boundaries (or by what the editors of this volume refer to as ‘methodological nationalism’—see also Legrand, this volume). Although comparative and international issues are addressed as part of the broad field of Public Affairs, neither ‘Global Policy’ and/or ‘Transnational Administration’ have been considered as significant areas of the Public Administration or Public Affairs field. In this chapter, accreditation systems in the public policy and administration fields are compared with a focus on the accreditor’s interest in incorporating global aspects, before assessing to what extent some leading schools offer a Global Masters of Public Administration (MPA) or Masters of Public Policy (MPP). While there has been a gradual convergence between the MPA and the MPP degrees over the past fifty years (Pal and Clarke, 2016, p. 286), the course offerings of most MPA and MPP programmes overlap to some degree. Even so, MPP programmes still tend to provide more training in policy analysis and policy design while MPA programmes usually provide focused coursework in programme implementation and public management. Third, the size and composition of academic associations focused on global, transnational, or international concentrations are examined before reviewing how the curricula of leading global MPA/MPP programmes are assessed in order to show current trends and future directions of the field. The chapter ends with suggestions for graduate programmes, in particular responses to globalization of the academic fields of public administration and policy.
20.2. Accreditation Systems and Global MPA/MPP Programmes Accreditation systems and associated ranking systems mirror the focus and standards for the quality control of public administration and policy programmes.
348 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim The professional dialogues between major academic accreditors as well as between universities and higher education institutions have contributed to the increase in the compatibility of MPA programme contents across continents (Matei and Matei, 2013). Shared best practices and a global spread of accreditation principles (Pratt, 2004) have spurred higher education innovations not only in the study of global public policy and administration but also teaching and training. This section first compares three major accreditation systems in the public administration and policy fields before discussing lingering accreditation issues regarding the incorporation of ‘global components’ into the existing mainstream field of public administration and policy teaching. For the purposes of our discussion, ‘global components’ means curriculum elements that carry learning activities on enhancing global awareness in the programme.
20.2.1. Accreditation Systems Accreditation systems influence the development of global MPA/MPPs and the conceptual development of ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ by criteria used for assessing accredited programmes, categorization of main concentrations, and guidance on curriculum of the accredited programmes. Accreditation processes are a form of policy transfer from the accreditor to the institution. Accreditation administrates and influences what is or is not an acceptable MPA/MPP programme. Therefore, the review of main accreditation systems and their stance on global administration and policy are a weather vane to observe the direction of the field. The three main accreditation systems in public administration and policy fields include, first, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA)’s Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation (COPRA); second, the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA); and third, the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) and its International Commission on Accreditation of Public Administration Education and Training Programmes (ICAPA). First, in the case of NASPAA’s accreditation, 197 programmes have been accredited as of 1 September 2017 (NASPAA, 2017). About 96 per cent (190 out of 197) of accredited programmes are located in the United States. Nevertheless, NASPAA accredited programmes are expanding to Asia and Africa. Concentrations and specializations offered by NASPAA accredited programmes demonstrate the largely domestic focus of public administration and policy programmes. Its categories include public administration functions (budgeting/finance, human resources, leadership, and organizational management), public policy themes (criminal justice, economic development, education, emergency, environment, health, homeland/national security, information technology, urban, international/global, and social policy), governmental structure and relations (city/local, state, international/global), organizational types (general/public, non-profit, and international/global) and research methods and public policy skills (public policy analysis, and survey methods).
Filling the Gap 349 NASPAA has emphasized the importance of a global education and curriculum as one of its focuses (NASPAA, 2016). Today more than 20 per cent of NASPAA-accredited programmes offer international and global public administration as an available concentration of study. Although COPRA has recently increased its emphasis on the relevance of global components in public policy and administration, its focus remains on domestic public administration. For example, 51 per cent of NASPAA-accredited programmes have general public administration, 60 per cent for non-profit management, 38 per cent for city/local, and 21 per cent for urban studies. Second, the EAPAA is an independent organization for Public Administration programme accreditation in Europe (EAPAA, n.d.). Since 1999, EAPAA has helped European public administration programmes to improve and assure their quality through accreditation. EAPAA has two corporate institutional members: NISPACEE (which is the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe created in 1994) and the European Group on Public Administration (EGPA)/International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). For EAPAA, programme evaluation aims to go beyond a simple check of procedures and formalities. Its work is based on peer review. Programmes under review are assessed by experienced and internationally recognized senior academics in the public administration field, who are knowledgeable about managing and leading a public administration programme. Like NASPAA, EAPAA has largely accredited domestically focused public administration and policy programmes. However, its accredited programme accommodates global policy and administration training and education by offering diverse and hybrid concentrations. Some of the programmes accredited by EAPAA offer concentrations associated with Global MPA/MPP (e.g. Comparative Governance and Global Public Policy). Other concentrations that are not explicitly associated with Global MPA/MPP also incorporate global elements (e.g. European Administration). Third, ICAPA has focused on developing and initiating a process for the accreditation of public administration education and training programmes. Its accreditation process builds upon the Final Report of the Joint United Nations/IASIA Task Force on Standards of Excellence for Public Administration Education and Training (IIAS, 2013). In this report, public service was defined as incorporating ‘local, regional, national and international levels’. Stakeholder communities were identified from ‘the smallest village or city neighborhood to the global community at large’. The standard of balancing collaboration and competition was from a global perspective. Since its inception, the ICAPA Accreditation has balanced its focus between domestic and global public administration/policy as demonstrated by its comprehensive definition of public service and an inclusive approach to stakeholders. Its selection of the first two accredited programmes also shows the diversity of its accredited programme in different continents. The first group of accredited programmes uses international resources and centres for partnerships in their education and training. For example, Brazilian public administration programmes have several collaborative research initiatives with other institutions in Brazil and worldwide (FGV EAESP, n.d.). Similarly, the Public Administration programme at Rutgers
350 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim University-Newark has expanded its collaboration with universities and research centres in Asia including China and South Korea. However, in terms of their concentration and curriculum, these accredited programmes do not offer global public administration/policy-focused concentration and their curriculum itself is not differentiated to any substantial degree from conventional MPA programmes. This juxtaposition of a traditional domestic MPA Degree combined with international collaboration but not incorporating a global MPA/MPP Concentration suggests many programmes may accommodate the increased needs for global-level public administration education but without a desire to reorient or restructure existing programmes. This can be summarized as utilization of inter-disciplinary collaboration network (passive adaptation) rather than fundamental structural change of existing programmes (proactive integration). It remains to be seen whether this passive adaptation is an early stage and temporary phenomenon or will continue to be the perpetual approach of existing MPA/MPP programmes. One of the main reasons of this insufficiency in integrated Global MPA/MPP programmes is that there are not a sufficient number of professors who are professionally trained with a global orientation in their teaching and research agenda. Knowledge of only their home-country’s public management and policy may not be sufficient to prepare graduates for this rapidly globalizing work environment with its unprecedented volume of interactions with/between transnational actors.
20.2.2. G lobal Public Administration and Policy as a Speciality in US News & World Report Ranking? Academic and professional associations have been embracing an irreversible phenomenon: the globalization of their member institutions (Keeler, 2015). As of 2015, around 50 per cent of US-based APSIA member schools (11) and 33 per cent of US based APSIA affiliates combine international and public affairs in their curriculum design and degree options (APSIA, n.d.a.). Furthermore, a substantial number of other traditional Public Affairs units have added at least some global dimensions to their degree programmes (Keeler, 2015). NASPAA has recognized that a substantial portion of its member institutes have been expanding their programme curricula beyond the focus on domestic features of public administration. NASPAA has also been incorporating globalization and internationalization into its focused conference themes. For example, the 2016 Annual NASPAA Conference was themed Grassroots Globalization: Teaching Good Governance and Values in a Connected World. One of its conference tracks was Innovative Internationalization (NASPAA, 2016) addressing how globalization strategies of public affairs programmes are shaped by the local context and how to make these internationalization strategies serve as models for other programmes. The starting point was an observation that globalization influences public service
Filling the Gap 351 professionals in small and rural communities as well as larger urban communities. This includes links among globalization, public administration, and non-profit management. Reflecting this grand change, ongoing debate exists within the American Society for Pubic Administration (ASPA) and NASPAA on whether International Affairs should be considered a ‘speciality’ in U.S. News & World Report rankings of Public Affairs. This debate is significant because these rankings are not only the most widely quoted ranking system on educational institutions in the United States but also are the principal source of college and programme ranking information by students, parents, and educators. These rankings reflect as well as shape the perception of the fields and disciplines in higher education in the United States. To date, the ranking system has not included global public administration and policy as a separate independent ranking category. Yet, the issue of acknowledging global public administration and policy as an independent concentration in the public administration field has attained increased attention in the academic community. At the Donald Stone Lecture in the 2015 American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) Conference, this agenda was advocated as a necessary consideration for the public administration and policy community (Keeler, 2015). Given a remarkable and consistent increase in the global policy and administration in the curriculum of MPA/MPP programmes in the US and worldwide, the time is ripe for global policy and transnational administration to be considered as an independent concentration in the official ranking system. From a benefit–cost criterion, it may be more feasible and desirable to utilize existing networks and their institutional knowledge in higher education accreditation management in public administration and policy. Existing accreditation entities—NASPAA, ICAPA, and EAPAA—could create an additional category (Global MPA/MPP) for accreditation, if these accreditation bodies enhance their capacity to evaluate MPA programmes with a strong degree of global public administration and policy in the curriculum and design of degrees.
20.3. The MPA/MPP Landscape of Associations and Networks One of the supply-side factors affecting global public administration and policy higher education is an increased interaction through professional associations. Increasingly, public administration and public affairs programmes are strengthening and incorpo rating global components by mobilizing professional associations and networks including the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA), the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) partnered programmes, and the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA).
352 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim
20.3.1. IASIA and IIAS Partnered Programmes The most representative professional associations and academic groups in global public administration and public policy are first, the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) and, second, the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA). The International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) is an affiliate of IIAS and an association of organizations and individuals whose activities and interests focus on public administration and management (IASIA, n.d.). Since 1930, the Brussels-based IIAS has been the insurer and standard-bearer of public administration and policy studies worldwide. The emergence of regional-level networks in public administration has facilitated the creation of new global MPA/MPP programmes and added global components to existing programmes (AGPA, 2014). Examples include the Latin American Group for Public Administration (LAGPA), the Asian Group for Public Administration (AGPA), the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), and the Middle East and North African Public Administration Research Network (MENAPAR). These regional sub-groups build networks in their respective regions as well as develop theories and practices in the public administration field through conferences, joint research projects and professional networking. One example of a regional group affiliated to IIAS is AGPA—the Asian Group for Public Administration. AGPA’s website is the window of IIAS in Asia by facilitating academic activities that promote the development of administrative science in Asia. AGPA includes twenty-two institutes from thirteen countries including Brunei, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. These institutes are higher education institutions, government agencies, and national associations of public administration. The common elements and interests of the participating parts in AGPA is to bring ‘good governance’ by enhancing accountability, transparency, participation, rule of law, consensus building, and three ‘E’s (efficiency, equity, effectiveness) through this loose but synergistic network (AGPA 2014). At its sixtieth anniversary, IASIA announced a renewal process ‘to become a major international organization’ to include ‘intensifying the exchange of experiences’ among member institutes as well as ‘what is needed to improve public service delivery worldwide’ (de Vries, 2017). Along with the consolidation of regional networks, the renewal strategy and its long standing partnership with the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations (UNDESA) to initiate the Task Force on Standards of Excellence for Public Education and Training, the IIAS has gradually become more transnational not only in structure but also in its mission orientation.
20.3.2. APSIA Member Programmes and Schools The Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) demonstrates the collaborative efforts of schools of public affairs to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach that crosses national boundaries in public administration, either transnational
Filling the Gap 353 or international. In the mid-1970s, deans and directors from leading schools of international affairs began to discuss informally how they could prepare students better for professional careers in the field (APSIA, n.d.b.). APSIA comprises more than sixty schools in the Americas, Asia, and Europe that focus on professional education in international affairs and are involved in international affairs and the promotion of global public policy. The role of APSIA is to assist its member schools with education in international affairs. APSIA helps the sharing of information and ideas among its member schools and higher education institutions and facilitates interactions in the international affairs community. The increase in the full and affiliate members of APSIA has been remarkable from late 1980s to early 2010s. APSIA members and affiliates including the US and non-US international members have increased almost sevenfold (from 10 to 68) since 1988. This phenomenal growth demonstrates strong commitment to professional education in international affairs by its member institutes. As of 2015, eleven APSIA member schools (50 per cent of the total) and six affiliates (33 per cent of total) in the US have chosen to combine international and public affairs education and many other traditional public administration units have added at least some global components in their curriculum (APSIA, n.d.a.). In late 2016, there were thirty-six APSIA member schools located in eleven countries over three continents: America (Canada and United States); Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan); and Europe (France, Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). Among the countries that have APSIA member schools, the largest number of countries is from Europe (5), followed by Asia (4) and America (2). However, in terms of the distribution of member schools by country, the extensive concentration of schools in the United States is remarkable. The United States is exceptional with twenty-two member schools, in contrast to all other countries having three members (e.g. South Korea) or less (APSIA, n.d.a.). The fields of these member schools are diverse and comprehensive. Among the members, twenty schools are based in global and international fields (International Affairs, Global Policy, Global Service, International Studies, and International Relations), whereas nine schools are rooted in public policy/administration fields (Public Policy, Public Affairs, Government). Five schools were a mix of public and global affairs (International and Public Affairs; International and Development Studies) (APSIA, n.d.a.). Regardless of the variations of their fields, one commonality is that these APSIA schools incorporate both domestic and global issues in their curricula. The main point of difference is where these schools place priority between thematic differentiation and domestic/global differentiation. For example, Duke University’s highly ranked Sanford School of Public Policy is based in the thematic identification of its school (public policy). Yet, the Sanford School adds global and international components into its school programmes by incorporating an international development programme. On the other hand, American University’s School of International Service has been established as a comprehensive and extensive international affairs educational institute. Under the international range, the school includes multiple thematic programmes
354 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim including Development Management; Environment Policy, Religious Studies, Governance, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development, Media, Economics, Business Administration, and Communication.
20.4. Styles of Global MPA/MPP Programmes’ Curricula A typical MPA programme consists of various management courses while a typical MPP programme may include a number of policy-related courses. The design of MPA programmes illustrate the convergence and specificity of continental and national realities. Curricula reveal a merging within public management, public policies, or public affairs and a diversification of the content and methodological focus associated with specific traditions and history of public sector developments (Matei and Matei, 2013; Pal and Clark, 2016). MPA curricula have been designed to develop public affairs professionals who understand the increasingly complex issues shaping local and national level policies and projects and who have the analytical and managerial skills to apply their knowledge to real-world situations. Global MPA/MPP programmes are similar to typical MPA programmes in the sense that both provide practitioner-focused management training and specialized public policy concentrations. The curriculum of major Global Public Administration and Policy programmes has combined both theoretical and practical skill set materials. Professional capabilities and practical skills are consolidated as part of their curriculum through internships (e.g. international NGOs, international organizations, and government agencies in charge of global policies and foreign affairs) and capstone projects on global policies (e.g. immigration, disaster management, global climate change, food crisis in developing countries, humanitarian affairs). An example is the School of Public Policy at Central European University which was deliberately designed to prepare graduates for careers in international organization, regional bodies and international NGOs but which has also been criticized for cultivating global elites (Stone, 2013) Global MPA/MPP programmes have strengthened the global components in management and public policy, compared to the traditional MPA/MPP programmes. The Atlas of Public Management, an online database of pedagogy and curriculum advice, provides a list of public management subjects in the global context. This database points out that public management in the global context addresses the issues of ongoing development in the international political economy (Atlas of Public Management, n.d.). It suggests the following topics that should be covered in global management programmes: (i) the study of international relations, forces, and institutions; (ii) globalization trends, drivers, and consequences; and (iii) international organizations and agreements. Such courses should address the implications of internationalization and
Filling the Gap 355 globalization, including the implications for domestic policy making of an increasingly globalizing economy. Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is one example of a programme focused on a globalised education provision. Its MPA in Development Practice trains practitioners to be specialists in the design and management of integrated, results-based approaches to sustainable development challenges. By contrast, the MPA in Environmental Science and Policy, housed in Columbia University’s SIPA and designed by the Earth Institute, trains public managers and policy makers to apply innovative, systems-based thinking to environmental issues. SIPA students can choose to concentrate in a particular policy field. Courses include: Economic and Political Development, Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy, International Security Policy, Energy and Environment, International Finance and Economic Policy, and Urban and Social Policy. This is a strategy to globalize course offerings. In the United States, the Maxwell School’s top-ranked Masters of Public Administra tion recently merged their Public Administration and International Relations faculty. Similarly, Baruch College renamed its Public Affairs Programme the ‘Public and International Affairs Programme’ by strengthening its global component (Baruch College, n.d.). About fifty graduate programmes in Public Policy, Public Service, Public Affairs, and International Affairs target Returned Peace Corps Volunteers as their main prospective students, as they have become partner institutes to the Peace Corps (Peace Corps, n.d.). These are strategies to re-engineer degree structures and organizational logics around globalization dynamics. Other examples of programmes focusing on global public administration and policy include a Masters of Global Policy Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Public Policy in International Policy at the Australian National University, and a Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. With financial incentives from both the European Commission through its Erasmus Mundus scholarship scheme and a philanthropic benefactor with global ambitions (George Soros), there are new MPA/MPP programmes at Central European University that take a globalized orientation (Stone, 2007, 2013). Royal Holloway University London has launched a MSc in International Public Policy to develop synergies with its research Centre on International Public Policy. Many other examples could be given. The focus of these programmes is to provide professional skills, applied academic training and effective networking for students’ international careers. These programmes are interdisciplinary and offer a wide array of customized specializations. Global MPA/MPP Programme curricula are characterized by the following five fields. First, Global MPA/MPP programmes have a common core curriculum along with quite differentiated concentrations and specializations. A wide spectrum and breadth of concentration includes but is not limited to conflict resolution and peace building, economic development, international finance and economic policy, energy and environment, gender, globalization, human rights, international security, international organizations, and civil society and NGOs. For instance, students in Masters of Global
356 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim Policy Studies of the University of Texas, Austin, can take advantage of flexibility in designing a programme of study based on their interests and experience. All global studies programme students supplement core requirements with specialization courses. These non-core courses can be selected from Schools outside of the LBJ School to maximize the flexibility and customized fit of students. Each specialization requires fifteen credits for students’ in-depth knowledge of a particular global affairs area. Customized specializations include Gender and Development, Biological and Chemical Proliferation, and Global Water Policy. Dual degrees can also be pursued by combining allied professions (e.g. business, journalism, law, public health, energy/earth resources) or geographic concentration (e.g. Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies) within the University of Texas at Austin. Second, Global MPA/MPP Programmes intensively mobilized partnerships with other higher education institutions, think tanks, and transnational organizations to design their curriculum to provide relevant field experience in global public policy. One of the most representative partnership cases is the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN). The GPPN network promotes international debates, comparative perspectives and research on the most pressing global policy issues. This network also provides a multidisciplinary and multicultural approach to policy making. Through the GPPN, the MPA runs a series of exchange and dual degrees programmes with selected partners, by mobilizing a global network of some of the most prestigious public affairs schools in the world. Students in these dual degree programmes study at two different institutions over the course of their two-year programme and receive two degrees from two different institutions. This network started as a partnership between the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, and the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po. It has since grown to include the Hertie School of Governance, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo, and the Fundção Getulio Vargas (FGV) at the Escola de Administração de Empresas. Another smaller-scale but similar partnership example is between University College London (UCL)’s School of Public Policy and the NYU Wagner School. These two schools run a joint Executive Program in Global Public Policy and Management (Global EMPA). This programme requires students to spend semesters both at the NYU Wagner School in New York City and at UCL in London. Students work on client-based capstone projects by taking advantage of summer sessions in the other part of the globe. Third, Global MPA/MPP programmes also proactively collaborate with international organizations, NGOs, governments and multinational companies. For example, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and the MPA Programme in Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs utilize their geographical advantage at the hub of global governance to offer collaborative projects and internship opportunities in partnership with international organizations. By utilizing regional or liaison service offices, these programmes maximize the internship opportunities or collaboration with agencies in the field. Related examples would be the Maxwell School and the
Filling the Gap 357 Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Both schools operate a fully staffed office in Washington, DC, to benefit their graduates’ internship, field experience, and networking in their professional areas. Fourth, Global MPA/MPP programmes incorporate an exceptional breadth of the research centres and policy ‘labs’ found within universities working on topics from international security, environment, energy, technology, health, leadership, disaster management, and non-profit management. For example, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Pittsburgh is housed with multiple inter-disciplinary research centres including the Shale Gas Governance Center, the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, the Ford Institute for Human Security, the Center for Metropolitan Studies, the Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership, and the Center for Disaster Management. The Maxwell School sponsors or co-sponsors research institutes including the Aging Studies Institute, the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration, the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media, the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, the Programme for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration, the Alan K. Campbell Public Affairs Institute, and the Center for Policy Research. A wide spectrum of multidisciplinary research centres and institutes creates synergy effects and positive spillovers into teaching. Fifth, Global MPA/MPP programmes aim at producing highly skilled professionals in multi-layered and multi-sectoral fields involving municipalities, regions, states, and international organizations. For example, the Master’s programme in International Public Administration and Politics at Roskilde University prepares students and professionals to manage public and non-profit organizations in cross-border and transnational projects such as environmental sustainability, transportation, education, social welfare, trade, immigration, security policies. The graduates of this programme are equipped with the following skills: public administration in a cross-border context, consultancies, international mentoring, policy advisory, international coordination, fundraising, and project management. More generally, selection procedures for student recruitment and hiring professors of practice who have work experience in global policy communities and international organizations, is a further strategy to enhance the ‘global components’ of Global MPA/MPP Programmes.
20.4.1. Complementarity with other Degree Programmes and Initiatives Education and training in global public administration and policy could be taught at multiple levels. Higher education and its degrees serve different purposes. From this perspective, undergraduate degree programmes should also be contemplated from the view of a grand and sequential educational map. Undergraduate programmes provide more
358 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim fundamental and comprehensive knowledge that aims to nurture potential future public officials whereas Master’s programmes directly aim at providing practical and professional skills for current officials or who will be immediately entering the public sector. For example, some undergraduate public administration programmes in South Korea, including the Department of Global Public Administration at Yonsei University (Wonju Campus), have led the globalization of the public administration curriculum at the undergraduate stage. The label Global Public Administration was chosen to highlight the addition of the global component to the existing traditional public administration curriculum. The global component includes overseas volunteering, oversees career exploration, and an internship abroad programme partnering with international organizations and NGOs with financial support from the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). Its curriculum provides a broad interdisciplinary and pre-professional education for students interested in the analysis of solutions to society’s contemporary political, social, and economic problems. It offers various tracks for undergraduate students that will educate and train leaders who are able to address the significant challenges of governing, managing, and building communities. The Department of Global Public Administration offers not only ‘a public management track’ but also four additional tracks (a public policy track, international development track, social policy track, and urban and local administration track). Especially, the international development track prepares students for the fight against international and national inequality, the eradication of poverty and its causes, and the expansion of human development in the form of expanded rights and freedoms—civil and political, as well as economic and social rights and freedoms. A substantial number of universities and higher education institutions mobilize global initiatives as a complementary measure of incorporating global components into their existing educational system and programme structure. For example, the university-wide Global Programme of Rutgers University of New Jersey in the United States utilizes strategic partnerships with universities and international organizations such as the United Nations (Rutgers University, n.d.). As another example, Kean University’s School for Global Education and Innovation in New Jersey in the United States takes a pioneering approach to global education and contemporary learning technologies. It allows undergraduate and graduate students to combine global education, learning technologies, and world languages to maximize their learning outcomes (Kean University, n.d.). In addition to previously mentioned individual institutions’ initiatives, there is ample opportunity amongst other networks of higher education institutions for collaborative initiatives with international organizations. For example, the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) is a global initiative that aligns higher education institutions with the United Nations.
20.4.2. Potential Future Trajectories of Curricula Development The curriculum composition shows that Global MPA/MPP programmes may have the benefit of an ‘economy of scope’ with existing MPA/MPP programmes. The subjects
Filling the Gap 359 of public and international affairs, if they are combined and offered in joint or affiliated programmes, may not only provide the benefit of reduced average total costs of production but also offer more synergistic and comprehensive curricula for students. For example, if non-profit management courses in conventional MPA/MPP programmes were offered in tandem with transnational immigration policy courses, this mix would make a perfect complementary product that serves tailored interest with reduced costs. As another example, management and organizational theory courses rooted in conventional MPA programmes would provide a more relevant curriculum to capture the ongoing global policy and administration initiatives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals if they were jointly offered with development policy courses. The average and total costs would be reduced if they can be affiliated with public administration and policy fields rather than if they were offered in isolation. Research and teaching would be more effective and relevant if these two fields were combined for real-world policy involvements and community engagements. The production costs would be reduced because the incorporation of these two fields would obviate unnecessary duplication of costs in physical and human resources. In addition, interaction and collaboration in research and teaching in these two fields would produce more creative and comprehensive solutions for society and more effective teaching for students’ learning. Existing public administration and policy schools and programmes may be able to find better solutions in addressing the unmet needs in global public administration and policy areas by incorporating global MPA/MPP programmes into the Public Administration and Policy field. These may include the creation of an interdisciplinary school of public administration/policy and international affairs (e.g. two independent but interdisciplinary programmes in a School of Public and International Affairs) and the creation of new concentrations or specializations of global public administration and policy (e.g. Global Policy concentration within the MPA/MPP degree). In either case, the Global MPA/MPP programmes need to be regarded as an independent area for evaluation of MPA/MPP programmes (e.g. accreditation or ranking systems). The curriculum design of Global MPA/MPP programmes should be based on the assessment of the following three Ps—Profession, Preference, and Priority. First, the curriculum should serve as guidance for a certain vocation requiring knowledge and skills to be fulfilled by the combination of courses and trainings in Global MPA/MPP programmes (Profession) (Henry et al., 2001). Public Administration has been established as a professional field of practitioners (ASPA, ICMA) and its education has been intended to strengthen public servants’ professional competences (NASPAA) (Green, Wamsley, and Keller, 1993; Beaux, Clynch, and Morris, 2003). Second, the curriculum should also be flexible enough to tailor to individual students’ interests and career plans (Preference). The key idea is that respective programmes should provide service as a creative ‘curator’ not as cookie-cutter training programmes. Students should be considered as ‘curasumers’ not passive ‘consumers’ in designing their concentration and courses. The term ‘curasumer’ refers to the compound word of ‘curator’ and ‘consumer’ (Lee, 2012). Students should be respected as proactive and creative decision makers, not as a passive receivers of prototyped static curriculum options. Individual students’
360 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim interests, experience, and strengths should be the main focus of this tailored style of curriculum design and concentration options. Third, the Global MPA/MPP programme should also provide professional guidance that offers decision-making criteria to help individual students to design their career path based on the needs assessment of the community, cost-benefit analysis of students’ own choice, and logic model of education/training programme (Priority). This principle implies an increased emphasis on an evaluation and evidence-based curriculum to secure accountability for students’ learning outcomes (Levin, 1998).
20.5. Conclusion In a turbulent global environment with mounting socio-economic and political problems and escalating demands of society, higher education institutions for public administration and policy have taken up the task of scanning the changing public policy environment and assessing the capacity of public administration institutions and the capability of public officials. Public administration and policy programmes have been adapted to offer global and transnational issue-focused education and training programmes. In a nutshell, to disseminate best governance practices and to deliver practical skills and knowledge to current and future practitioners and professionals in this globalized environment, the roles of higher education institutions in creating global public administration and policy programmes have been pivotal and critical (Stone, 2007). The supply in higher education has consistently increased with the recognition of, and response to, the demand for such training in global public administration and policy, which is coming from international NGOs, regional bodies (like the European Commission), international organizations, as well as global business and civil society. As the first supply-side evidence, this chapter examined major accreditation entities’ (e.g. NASPAA, EAPAA, and ICAPA) evaluation criteria and their emphasis on global components in their review processes. These accreditation entities, to various extents, have commonly acknowledged the significance of incorporating global components through the adoption of new concentrations, the creation of new programmes, or the re- adjustment of existing programmes. They have accepted the importance of embracing globalization awareness as part of the assessment criteria. This chapter has also probed the professional networks of schools that incorporate public and international affairs, for example, IASIA and APSIA. The size of these professional networks has tangibly increased and the network has geographically expanded over the past two decades. Within professional associations of public administration and policy, debates on global public administration and policy as an independent subsection are already in progress. In future, existing accreditation entities will play more proactive roles in incorporating and expanding global components. This chapter also reviewed the curricula of newly emerging Global Public Administration and Policy programmes. Not unlike traditional programmes, Global
Filling the Gap 361 MPA/MPP programmes are practitioner-focused and aim at producing high-skilled professionals in multi-layered and multi-sectoral fields involving municipalities, regions, states, and international organizations. As noted previously, not all MPA/MPP programmes have embraced global policy and transnational administration or the necessity of teaching about civil servant interaction with global spaces, actors, and issues. Where such programmes exist, they offer a wide spectrum and breadth of concentrations; intensively mobilized partnerships with other higher education institutions, think tanks, and transnational organizations; and proactively collaborate with international organizations, NGOs, governments, and multinational companies. The creation and incorporation of Global MPA/MPP programmes will be able to maximize the benefit of ‘the economy of scope’ with existing MPA/MPP programmes. The curricu lum design of Global MPA/MPP programmes should be based on the assessment of the following three Ps—Profession, Preference, and Priority. ‘Profession’ refers to vocational and practical training that provides knowledge and professional skills in the field. ‘Preference’ indicates a curriculum and concentration tailored to individual students’ interests and career plans. ‘Priority’ means evidence-based decision-making to maximize students’ learning outcomes. The main implication is that student-centred reorientation and timely adapting re-structuring are essential for the establishment of a more effective MPA programme. From this perspective, the incorporation of a Global MPA/ MPP programme and the creation of a Global Affairs field within a ranking system are highly recommended. An important question remains. Is conventional public administration and policy training able to capture the important global dynamics or will the field of study continue to be bound and constrained due to its microscopic, domestic-focused, and static theories and disciplinary training? Is it possible to move beyond the ‘small-scale, disparate, noncumulative, descriptive field’ of public administration (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012, p. 78)? The adoption and offering of global public administration/policy in existing accredited programmes has not been able to innovate or match the rising levels of not only student demand for Global MPA/MPP programmes, but also growing demand from national bureaucracies and international NGOs and other international actors. This is due to path dependencies and constraints rooted in the discipline’s existing methodological focus on the nation state and theoretical paradigm. In keeping with the demands for global training and education, higher education institutions may consider adding a curriculum on global public administration policy to the existing MPA/MPP programmes or creating an independent Global MPA/MPP programme (Kim and Myeong, 2014; Raadschelders and Vigoda-Gadot, 2015). While the existing MPA/MPP programmes have focused on providing skills, knowledge, and abilities to work with government bureaucracy and public/non-profit sector accountability in a local and domestic boundary, the new global programmes should extend the boundary to the regional and global level. It may also include core competencies for the management of international organizations, the operation of regional regimes, or governance of transnational actors (Kim and Kochegura, 2017). The more challenging part is that higher education institutions should perform this task without an increasing
362 Bok Jeong and Pan Suk Kim substantial financial burden or mobilizing new resources of donations. The MPA/MPP programme has been facing the double tasks of adapting to the changing environment with the increased global public administration and policy demands but in a budget squeeze. Given these double tasks, a more innovative approach will be needed to provide more relevant services and to adapt the programmes to these global and regional needs in the changing landscape of public and international affairs.
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Chapter 21
G l obal P ol i c y a nd Transnat i ona l Adm inistrat i on Intellectual Currents in World Making Diane Stone
21.1. Introduction There are many different venues where conceptual thinking has been undertaken to give intellectual substance and normative resonance to the notions of global policy making and transnational administration. Often these venues are elite in character, given the high-level participation of prominent figures from both the private and public sectors. By no means are the ideas of ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ consensual. Instead, there is considerable debate, differences over terminology and definitions and, indeed, resistance to such ideas. This chapter cannot do justice to the diversity of intellectual inquiry and scholarly engagement in this field. Moreover, the emphasis is on ‘global policy’ concepts rather than ‘transnational administration’ as the former is slightly more developed, notwithstanding significant overlaps between the fields. As a number of chapter contributors have noted, the approaches to the subject-matter of this handbook are riven by different disciplinary settings as well as by what Sending refers to as administrative ‘differentiation’ whereby ‘ever more actors perform ever more specialised tasks of both analyzing and engaging in policy making’. Yet, such ‘puzzling’ over the specialized tasks of transnational administration and disciplinary interpretations of global policy generates a ‘world making’ dynamic. Starting with academic narrations of the world already in existence—such as the extant scholarship and policy analysis on global governance generated by universities, governments, and international organizations and a range of advocacy-oriented NGOs—world making in the relatively rarified scholarly and policy making contexts
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 365 entails ‘re-making’ through negotiation, construction, and deconstructing existing knowledge, norms, and practice (Nünning et al., 2010, p. 6). There are two halves to the discussion. The first section concentrates on scholarly journals and the character of academic publication on global policy and transnational administration. It leaves aside an assessment of the burgeoning interest of students in global policy studies, innovations in curriculum, and the equally fast growth of graduate degrees in this area as it is covered in another chapter of this Handbook. The second section (composed of two sub-sections) goes beyond the academy to focus on the roles played by think tanks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in developing the idea of global policy. These bodies are usually non-state actors but they often collaborate with international organizations and governments on global and regional policy initiatives, transnational dialogues, and task forces or other partnerships. Consequently, the concern with policy and practical application is the subject of the second sub-section of Section 2 whereby international organizations also experiment with ideas of global policy and deliberate on the challenges of ‘transnational administration’.
22.2. Advancements in Academia and Scholarly Journals Since the turn of the millennia, there has been increasing use of the term ‘global public policy’, less so ‘transnational administration’. Notwithstanding the occasional adoption of these phrases, the tendency within policy studies has been to elide conceptualization of ‘global policy processes’ with attention directed to assessing empirical phenomena such as ‘global policy networks’ or ‘global public–private partnerships’. What is (global or regional) public policy, where is it enacted, and who executes and manages such policies? These are traditional questions of policy studies. However, there is a dominant tendency towards ‘methodological nationalism’ whereby the conceptual default position is to treat the state as the unit of analysis and the locus of power and authority. The idea of ‘methodological transnationalism’ has had relatively little academic purchase, as yet. In methodological nationalism, public administration is viewed as being the sole responsibility of states, or of the capacity of state actors to operate internationally. The state is treated as a cartographic territorial unit where legalist notions of sovereignty prevail and policy making is contained. By contrast, in methodological transnationalism, public administration is recognized as being structurally interconnected in a kaleidoscope of shifting hierarchical and network structures of both a public and private nature at different scales of governance: the transnational, international, regional and/or global levels. Methodological transnationalism permits the identification and analysis of multiple and simultaneous forums of policy making and administrative practice, within
366 Diane Stone what are evolving rather than static socio-spatial jurisdictions, without prejudging the hierarchical primacy of one of them (Stone and Ladi, 2015, pp. 842–3). Public administration and policy scholars have stopped short of suggesting that there is a separate and distinct global public domain defined by its own policy processes and administrative functions that are distinguishable from those processes that occur between nation states or within and between international organizations: an additional space and place of mixed public and private activity and interaction (termed a ‘global agora’ in earlier work, Stone, 2013). It is a significant conceptual step to suggest that policy making and public administration can be conducted outside of, and separate from the nation state. This is not to suggest policy processes are either national or global but that there has emerged a vast range of both formal and informal institutions, norms, and processes between these poles. As fields of inquiry, public policy and public administration have concentrated on public policy making inside the nation state and the administrative processes of public sector agencies. Although a long-standing strength has been comparative studies between nation states, the policy studies scholarly communities in Europe, North America, and elsewhere have been tardy in the systematic analysis of cross-border policy problems and transnational management practices. These fields of policy studies and public administration have tended to leave what happened beyond the nation state to the scholar of International Relations, international development, or international law (Higgott and Ougaard, 2002). Even political geography has made more head-way assessing ‘policy mobilities’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015). The study of public policy has been a prisoner of the word ‘state.’ (Stone, 2008, p. 19). In 2011, a team of Asian public sector management scholars beseeched both the editors of, and contributors to, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (or JPART) to consider the need ‘for public administration with a global perspective’. (However, this was more the case that anglocentric scholarship needed to broaden its focus to other political geographies and to ‘examine issues across national and ethnodemographic divisions’.) In a companion JPART article, another author noted that globalization has brought about ‘globalized public management’ requiring a response from the academy to develop an ‘interdisciplinary design science’ to build institutional capacities for such new global modalities of management rather than simply treating global trends of public sector reform as a unit of analysis (Walker, 2011). Yet, ‘The “global” in governance remains largely terra incognita et obscura for many academics’ in mainstream policy studies and public administration (Coen and Pegram, 2015). Why have scholars in public administration, public management, and policy studies vacated the field mostly to other disciplines? One reason that can be posited is the ‘common perception’ in policy studies that ‘policy’ is the ‘product of a type of governmental structure that does not exist in the anarchic international order’ (Soroos, 1990, p. 309). Another reason is that nation-state sovereignty remains the dominant reality in policy and administration. The retreat from the multilateralism evident in the 1990s and early twenty-first century alongside the challenges to both global governance institutions on the one hand, and international elites and experts on the other, fuelled by
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 367 populist-nationalist politics epitomized by BREXIT and the Trump US Presidency, has also discouraged scholarly exuberance from making a case for global public sector management or transnational decision-making. Nevertheless, de facto global policy practices have emerged. According to Marvin Soroos (1990) in one of the earliest studies of the idea of ‘global policy studies’, these practices have emerged with governments, international organizations, and non-state actors responding to three types of policy problem: • ‘transboundary problems’ of cross-border-movement: money laundering, pollution, refugees, or drug trafficking; • ‘common property problems’ regarding oceans, Antarctica, the atmosphere, and the uses of outer space; • ‘simultaneous problems’ of nations experiencing similar problems in areas of education, health, welfare, urbanization, illiteracy, an aging population and population growth. It is the emergence of these types of problems that generate global policy processes, sometimes by default or other times by experimentation. Soroos (1986) argues that policy scholarship is gradually shifting its stance from one that focuses on the ‘organisational aspects’ (how international organizations emerge and function) to a stance that addresses the interdependence of ‘global issues’ that confront the international system and humanity in general (1986, p. 14). But as a consequence of the focus on problems, the field of global policy studies ‘tends to be issue-driven, rather than theory-driven’ (Baumann and Deardorff Miller, 2012, p. 4). There is an abundance of literature on ‘global governance’ which can be thought of as the meta field of study. Within it there are small tributaries of thinking regarding varieties of transnational administration and policy making. For instance, there are now many volumes on the Europeanization of public administration (Ladi, this volume). Yet, the EU is in many respects sui generis. Its variant of supranational is not one that can be templated onto either other regional institutional configurations or simply ‘scaled up’ to the global level (Stone and Ladi, 2015). Nevertheless, scholarship on European administrative systems is currently informing new work on ‘international public administration’ (Bauer, Knill, and Eckhard, 2017). Since the mid 1990s, a number of academic journals have come into existence. Global Governance: A Review Multilateralism and International Organisation was one of the first initiatives in 1995. While Global Governance has attracted International Relations scholars in the main, the journal encourages a multidisciplinary focus that goes beyond the journal’s subtitle. It aims to address new organizational manifestations such as informal intergovernmental arrangements like the Group of Twenty as well as ‘ad hoc transgovernmental collaborations’; ‘translocal bodies like the World Organisation of United Cities and Local Governments; interregional constructions like the Asia– Europe Meetings; private global regulatory agencies like the International Accounting Standards Board’ as well as: ‘deeper structures: for example, the informal networks of
368 Diane Stone what some have called the “global managerial class”; and the reigning policy discourses of what many have termed “neoliberalism” ’ (Scholte et al., 2006, p. 3). A pioneer, Global Governance was soon followed by the creation of other journals such as Global Networks, and also Global Social Policy both established in 2001 and Global Policy in 2010. The latest journal in this small constellation is Global Summitry, launched in 2015. This journal seeks to highlight the substantial administrative machinery that underpins summit decision-making today, broadening attention away from the usual focus on leaders summits’ and international organizations to address ‘the “rise of the informals” wherein traditional diplomacy that in the past was conducted primarily by foreign ministers and their officials has been remade through the rise of meetings of national leaders, mainline ministers, and their officials—finance and trade, central bankers et cetera—and get-togethers of interested and informed actors, both public and self-regulatory’ (Alexandroff and Brean, 2015, pp. 4–5). Global Networks (2018) recognizes that transnational policy ‘actors enter into the spaces opened up by the intersection of corporate capital, labour mobility and the new information, communication and transportation technologies’. Global Policy (2018) aims to ‘analyse both public and private solutions to global problems’ in order to understand ‘globally relevant risks and collective action problems; policy challenges that have global impact; and competing and converging discourses about global risks and policy responses’. Global Policy has made the most of social media, and consequently has a more journalistic style but at the same time greater reach or public engagement. This has been enhanced by the manner in which the journal website has developed as a platform for policy briefs, teaching tools, data shots as well as comment and opinion. While each journal has strong disciplinary disposition—such as geography and sociology in the case of Global Networks and social policy in Global Social Policy—the editors of these journals have sought to prompt investigation into new ways of thinking about transnational policy problems that take into consideration practical considerations of how they are managed and administered. These journals also have affiliations or they partner with other bodies. For example, Global Governance is published by a commercial publisher in conjunction with the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS). Even so, within these journals, conceptual and empirical themes concerning ‘international civil service’ or the administrative life of international organizations are rather sparse. Generally, these journals overlook transnational administration, such as the ‘international bureaucracies’ of international organizations as well as the new administrative arenas of the informal international organizations and global public– private partnerships (discussed by Vabulas as well as Huckel Schneider in this handbook). These informals are generating global administrative spaces. Likewise, the International Review of Administrative Sciences encourages ‘international comparisons’ and has only just begun to publish on what might be considered ‘transnational’ administrative concerns from 2013 with a special thematic issue on The World Bank’s Approach to Public Sector Management.
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 369 These journals are significant for pushing the boundaries of scholarly understandings in this field. They are ‘world-making’ in the sense of carving out new understandings of the domains of policy making. So too have a number of monographs: a landmark text was Global Public Policy by Wolfgang Reinicke (1998) which provided a study of economic globalization and its implications for public policy. Another— Towards A Global Polity (Higgott and Ougaard, 2002)—queried the prospects of the institutional and policy evolution of polity-like structures. However, these books were preceded by a decade by Marvin Soroos (1990) who sought to develop a theoretical framework for global policy studies. In his book Beyond Sovereignty (1986), Soroos was the first who made the call for extending the foci of policy analysis beyond its traditional national and subnational foci. There is also a little known edited collection by Stuart Nagel (1991). Yet, Nagel’s notion of global policy was rather more limited than the one adopted by most chapters in this Handbook, as he limited the responsibility for the resolution of global policy problems to international institutions composed of member states. Despite these early works, scholarly writing on global public policy was sporadic last century. Although Nagel (1991, p. xix) notes ‘the beginnings of a study group on Global Policy Studies within the International Political Studies Association’, there was no steady flow of new monographs entitled ‘The global public sector’ or ‘global administration’. These are strong terms. They invite objection. As noted in one literature review of ‘global public policy’, scholars have a tendency to ‘dance around the concept’ (Baumann and Deardorff Miller, 2012, p. 6) rather than use the term. Indeed, a number of individual contributors to this handbook insist on the primacy of state capacity and sovereignty and differ over the degree to which administration may have been transnationalized or the extent to which global policy processes have become entrenched. Methodological nationalism infuses not only academic worldviews but is also institutionalized in national (social) science funding regimes that may have a bias towards research in the national interest, while faculty recruitment and hiring patterns in national higher education systems are often geared around servicing local and national communities and professions. This is not to say there has been no development of the ideas of global policy and transnational administration; rather it is to say it has been low-key. The introduction notes that many textbooks on public policy and administration devote a chapter or two to ‘globalization’ (see inter alia, Kennett, 2008; Moran et al., 2006). Policy making sovereignty as a responsibility of national governments, while it is recognized to be challenged in practical terms by global pressures and regionalization dynamics, remains a central tenet and assumption in these texts. Likewise, another study has noted of public administration that: ‘. . . administrative studies of the global South have fractured into small-scale, disparate, noncumulative, descriptive, and noncomparative field dominated by researchers with Northern institutional affiliations’ (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012, p. 78). Methodological nationalism is entrenched in curricula, in the national structure of most scholarly professional associations and the contents pages of textbooks, and is compounded by the lack of a common lexicon for emergent processes.
370 Diane Stone The confusions and conflations of terms across the social sciences, and administrative, management, and policy studies specifically, about the meanings associated with key words like ‘global policy’ complicate matters in establishing a common and stable lexicon. The worldwide spread of a policy approach or tool is not global or ‘globalized policy’. It is international diffusion or policy transfer. A chapter entitled ‘Public Policy and Administration in an Era of Globalisation’ (for example, Klassen, Cepiku and Lah, 2017) has quite different meaning and analytical intent to one that might be entitled ‘The Transnational Administration of Global Policies.’ The former posits globalization as an exogenous force impacting upon the domestic policies and administrative systems of nation states whereas the latter title represents a significant analytic move to address new spaces of power and authority. There are a few important conceptual works that moved beyond the more standard understanding of ‘internationalized policy’ that is seen in most volumes (inter alia, Kim, Ashley and Lambright, 2014; Farazmand and Pinkowski, 2006). A rich vein of analysis emerging in the late 1990s with a distinct global social policy focus has come from Robert Deacon and Nicola Yeates. Their work is notable in the sense of taking a system- wide perspective addressing administrative ‘logics’ and structural dynamics of global or transregional policy making across a number of policy sectors. In other words, they see a core problem in discerning global policy processes lying in the entrenched ‘methodological nationalism’ of the social sciences. What is needed, they argue is a new ‘conceptual grammar’ and analytical framework of ‘methodological transnationalism’ to focus on the ways in which national welfare states and systems and social policies are shaped by global politics and by transnational flows of capital and finance (Yeates, 2008). Early studies addressed global social policy as the conduct of supranational institutions in global social regulation and redistribution—elite bodies such as the Bretton Woods institutions. Since then the concept has broadened to include the role of other agendasetting and implementing actors such as NGOs, business, and civil society dialogues (see Deacon, 2007 ). Rather than specific disciplinary schools of thinking being the central source of innovation in the concept of ‘global policy’, certain empirical fields of research have provided new conceptual pathways. The study of policy diffusion and policy transfer stands out with studies such as the policy transfer of the ‘New Public Management’ paradigm (Pal and Ireland, 2009) or the practice of diffusion by international organizations such as the OECD (de Francesco, 2013), the World Bank (Stone, 2013) or the European Union. Likewise, the burgeoning field of regulation also provides a thematic route into the analysis of global policy (see inter alia, Büthe and Mattli, 2011; Kerwer, 2005; and Scherrer, Palazzo, and Baumann, 2006) much of which is showcased in the journal Regulation and Governance. Notwithstanding the significant conceptual gains of global social policy or regulatory studies communities, much more frequently seen are academic studies that take a sector-specific focus. This policy-sector focus is symptomatic of the ‘differentiation’ which Sending identifies in his chapter on knowledge networks. There are a plethora
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 371 of studies of global health policy (Šehović, 2017). Likewise, the now extensive study of global environmental policy (or climate policy) is particularly noticeable (inter alia: Axelrod and VanDeveer, 2014; Biermann, 2009). Other smaller but significant bodies of research concern global refugee policy (e.g. Baumann and Deardorff Miller, 2012) or global education policy (e.g. Verger, Altinyelken, and Novelli, 2012). These sector-specific global studies of constellations of policy communities (Thynne et al., 2013) are indicative of the fragmentation of the study of global policy and transnational administration as an analytic endeavour. As noted a few paragraphs earlier, the choice of terminology is important. It is relevant to reflect on whether or not the term ‘policy’ changes meanings when it is adopted in combination with other cognate terms. For instance, are there important differences between: ‘global policy,’ ‘social policy,’ and ‘global social policy’? (Baumann, and Deardorff Miller, 2012, p. 7). Likewise, the phrase ‘global policy’ delimits what might be a troubling set of questions about the idea of a ‘global public’ in the phrase ‘global public policy’. Another component of ‘differentiation’ comes with the scalar dimension discussed in the chapter by Will Coleman. And while fragmentation, differentiation, and multi-level governance may be an increasingly noticeable feature of policy development and administrative practice, the day-to-day interactions of agents who operate at different scales may be limited. As noted in one Global Governance editorial, via ‘The various trans- world regulatory institutions and structures . . . global administrators neglect to develop positive connections and collaborations with their relevant counterparts at other levels of governance’ (Scholte, et al., 2006, p. 4). Significant questions about the legitimacy of ‘global administrators’ become knotted between the different scales of governance. Taken together, these scales and separate policy sector studies are suggestive of the emergence of a global public sphere. ‘Traditionally, the rights and responsibilities of “the public”—as well as the citizen—have been associated with a sovereign order’ (Stone and Ladi, 2015, p. 840) and operationalized inside the nation-state container. Rather than perceiving globalization as threatening the public domain of nation states, instead it is possible to shift analytic focus to suggest that it is ‘stateness’ that is under stress whereas public-ness is expanding or evolving (Stone, 2008, p. 29). In other words, methodological nationalism treats the ‘nation state’ as a closed container for the public sphere while a position of methodological transnationalism considers new forms of cross-border, regional, or interregional public spaces. The notion of a ‘global public sphere’ is increasingly gaining traction, especially with scholars of a cosmopolitan and deliberative democracy disposition. It is but a short conceptual step to give consideration to the idea of a ‘global public sector’ populated by ‘global managers’ (Patriotta, Castellano, and Wright, 2013) servicing ‘international bureaucracies’ (Biermann, 2009). However, those who populate the ‘global public domain’ (Drache, 2005) are not citizenries. As outlined in the next section, this sphere is composed primarily of relatively elite individuals, organizations and their policy networks.
372 Diane Stone
21.3. International NGOs, Think Tanks, and Global Programmes To make a distinction between the conceptual approaches to ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ that are emerging from within academia as opposed to those created in policy-making contexts is somewhat artificial. The discussion does so here for heuristic reasons recognizing that such a distinction creates a false ontological divide between knowledge creation and policy power. In reality, the definitional debates and conceptual challenges concerning policy practice are mutually constitutive for ‘world making’. Academic accounts and analyses are often in response to policy developments, whilst policy practitioners have often drawn on these accounts in a circular process to clarify and crystallize their own positions and provide explanation for (or gain legitimation from) clients and constituencies. The remainder of this section provides a broad-brush overview of a few leading non- state actors and non-governmental organizations that have sought to shape or inform global policy development. Attention is directed in the first sub-section to think tanks and international NGOs as well as significant global dialogue initiatives. The discussion leaves aside the growing role of consultancy firms on the one hand, and business associations on the other, given they are the subject of other chapters in this Handbook. The second sub-section addresses the so-called ‘global programmes’ or ‘global public– private partnerships’ of international organizations to consider the thinking behind such labels. As with the previous section concerning journals and monographs that have adopted a transnational focus on matters of administration and policy making, a convenience sample is taken. It would be ideal, for example, to examine the entire population of think tanks (numbering 7,000+ worldwide—Stone, 2013), international NGOs and International Organizations, but these populations are too large for the remit of this chapter.
21.3.1. The Private Sector and International Civil Society The word ‘global’ has cachet and a variety of non-state actors have adopted it in mission statements or policy advocacy. Utilizing the phrase ‘global policy’ might reflect organizational efforts to be inclusive or expansive in covering all geographical domains that might come under their remit. Alternatively, the adoption of ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ might reflect donor-funding priorities directed toward understanding or navigating globalization dynamics. Whatever the motivation, the slipshod use of the prefix ‘global’ does little to add specificity to the notion of ‘global (public) policy’ across public, professional, or scholarly debate.
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Think Tanks Think tanks are an excellent bellwether of the transnationalization of policy analysis. Globalization and regionalization dynamics have reconfigured the research activities of these organizations propelling them to look beyond local and national matters to address transborder policy problems. Think tanks are a diverse category of organizations—mostly based in civil society and claiming autonomy from vested political and economic interests. Nevertheless, in contemporary times, certain think tanks are located in government departments (especially in Asia) as well as in universities or corporations. As global civil society evolves, so too do think tanks. Nevertheless, institutes generally remain committed to the nation state where they are legally constituted. It is rare to encounter think tanks that are constituted as regional or global operations. Even so, the 100+ year old Carnegie Endowment for International Affairs has internationalized its organization into a global network with policy research centres in Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, India and the United States. Similarly, RAND has internationalized to Europe and Australia. Usually regarded as an iNGO, the International Crisis Group has been portrayed as a transnational think tank with field analysts positioned around the world in conflict zones (Kostić, 2014, p. 635). Extensive think tank networking within the EU reflects the deepening of European integration, where think tanks have gravitated towards EU policy research agendas or have been drawn into the orbit of the European Commission. These bodies have also been key informants in European harmonization of national structures through cross- national processes of policy transfer, going beyond detached policy analysis to spread certain European regulations and benchmarks. Other regional associations— the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union—have also become centrifugal forces for think tank activity (Stone, 2013). At a global level, think tank networks have coalesced around international organizations—such as the Think20 around the Group of 20. There are watchdog bodies of the United Nations like the Global Policy Forum which deal in detail with the idea of ‘global taxes’. In 2013, the BRICs set up a think tank council. In the ‘global South’, since the turn of the millennia, there are now many think tanks and various networks that match in number those found across the OECD (for detail on think tank evolution see Stone, 2013). These examples are simply illustrative of the considerable ferment of transnational policy analysis undertaken by think tank consortia oftentimes commissioned by governments or international organizations. As a consequence, transnational knowledge networks of think tanks and other partner organizations have proliferated. But do these organizations or consortia propel innovative thinking on the ideas and practices of global policy and transnational administration? The Global Public Policy Institute was one of the first of a new generation of think tanks looking at global problems. GPPi emerged out of the Global Public Policy Project as a one-year initiative to analyse the potential of building networks between public,
374 Diane Stone private and civil society actors to address global challenges, and to make recommendations to the United Nations, which was the main funding body. GPPi did much to raise the idea of ‘global public policy’ in international policy consciousness which was also fuelled by the book of one of its founders Wolfgang Reinicke (1998). Today the GPPi is oriented more towards consultancy for government agencies and international organizations and the pursuit of traditional foreign policy questions concerning the practice of diplomacy, development cooperation, and humanitarian action. Two university-based institutes with suggestive names are the World Policy Analysis Institute at UCLA and the Global Policy Institute (GPI) at London Metropolitan University. World policy analysis at the Institute involves gathering and transforming massive quantities of legal and policy data into accessible, user-friendly resources. With a different set of objectives, GPI focuses on what it identifies as the ‘post-globalization era’ and the potential of regionalization as a more effective realm for responses to global problems. In usual think tank fashion, analysis is directed at decision takers in business, government, and NGOs By contrast, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, dating back to 1973, is an independent left-of-centre think tank that focuses on the global South and strengthening international social movements with rigorous research and sound analysis to advance progressive, democratic policy change and common solutions to global problems. While its research agendas are ‘transnational’ and it supports much work on global crime and global drug policy, it is similar to many think tanks in leaving the theoretical work and philosophical meanings that might be attached to ‘global policy making’ and ‘transnational administrative architectures’ to one side.
Non-State Actors and Initiatives Already facing competition from universities and their ‘policy labs’, think tanks are also confronting competition from large international NGOs that house policy analytic units. Transparency International, Oxfam International, and the World Economic Forum are some of the ‘big name’ NGOs connected with global policy issues. The Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals have driven interest in ‘global’ development. For instance, the World Future Council has a ‘global policy action plan’ to focus on international commitments outlined in the SDGs but also a deeper concern with intergenerational justice (World Future Council, 2018). More generally, NGOs are regarded as key actors—as either advocates, implementers, or monitors—of global policy on matters of economic development, humanitarian affairs, or environmental issues, although ‘serious weaknesses have been exposed in the sector in terms of accountability, transparency, and ability to address equity concerns’ to such an extent that ‘they have lost the favourable view once held uncritically by the international community’ (Tortajada, 2016: p. 272). Notwithstanding the criticisms that have emerged, there is recognition that ‘global policy making requires a mastery of “network diplomacy”—the negotiation of a wide range of relationships with state, NGO and commercial actors’ (Bolton and Nash, 2010). At the turn of the Millennium, a series of commissions were launched by governments and international organizations concerning new transboundary policy problems,
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 375 often with support from private donors or foundations. A number were initiated in particular to address the idea of global public goods. Other bodies are more issue specific; for instance, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law is an independent body, convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on behalf of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Some private initiatives have mimicked the approach of these official gatherings. One of the more notable has been the Global Drug Commission, a private body seeking to shift national and international policy agendas and policing towards the paradigm of harm reduction. It is a body which has high-level participation from several former presidents (Alimi, 2015). Such commissions and task forces are usually temporary, constituted on an ad hoc basis and can be contrasted to more permanent dialogue venues. Well-known initiatives include the World Economic Forum (WEF) convened in Davos, and at a regional level, the Boao Forum in Asia. The latter is a high-end dialogue platform among leaders within national governments, industrial and business circles, and select sections of the academic community, primarily from Asia but also beyond. WEF meetings in Davos are regarded by many as the premier non-state venue for global agenda-setting and private-public collaboration via the integrated concept of high-level meetings, research networks, task forces and digital collaboration. WEF describes itself as ‘the International Organization for Public–Private Cooperation’. While its web-site (WEF, 2017) refers to concerns about ‘the future of global society’ and sees ‘global governance’ as being shaped by ‘new geo-economic competition, new regionalism and new actors’, and design initiatives such as its ‘Network of Global Agenda Councils’, there is little to no mention of ‘global policy making’ or ‘transnational administration’. This swift overview of a small constellation of NGOs and other non-state actors that have used the phrases ‘global policy’ or ‘global public policy’ suggests that it is done so in an instrumental manner. Little conceptual meaning is imbued. Instead, these phrases are usually used as an alternative term to global governance when the desire or analytic intention is to emphasize the policy making dimensions of, or challenges and contests over, decision processes and resource allocation, bureaucratic dynamics or implementation issues beyond the state. Rather than organizations, individuals sometimes capture the attention of publics or policy communities by dabbling with new concepts. To take but a few examples: Fareed Zakaria commands a substantial following for his daily ‘global briefing’ via his ‘Global Public Square’ website on CNN. In the case of HIV-AIDS, a number of individuals, such as Peter Piot (see Coleman this Handbook), have had significant impact as agenda setters in bringing to world attention the plight of Persons Living With AIDS. Likewise, the Pakistani educational activist and Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai, sparked a world- wide campaign on the education of women and children. Policy entrepreneurs such as these introduce, translate, and help implement new policy programmes or ideas for reform into public practice. But policy entrepreneurship can also be vested in teams of people and organizations: the ILO leadership has been portrayed as a collective policy entrepreneur with its agenda on ‘decent work’ (Di Ruggierio et al., 2015), as could ‘eminent persons groups’ such as those initiated by the Commonwealth and ASEAN.
376 Diane Stone A related concept to policy entrepreneurs, but one that connects to ideas about the global ‘power elite’, is that of ‘policy flexians’ (Wedel, 2009; Stubbs, 2014; Kostić, 2014). Operating at a global or regional level, these individuals are international political operators who seem to move seamlessly among roles in government, business, think tanks, and media to advance their personal agendas alongside the interests of the organizations they represent or head. Examples are said to include Larry Summers and billionaire philanthropist, George Soros. In the case of the latter, both the worldwide network of Open Societies Foundations and the Central European University, which he has funded, serve as a platform for Soros. Larry Summers has his multiple professional appointments between the World Bank, US Treasury, Harvard University and various private sector financial institutions. These cross-affiliations contribute to the value acceptability of their ideas for global policy by broadcasting and amplifying them. University connections provide a scholarly backdrop (and legitimacy) to their pronouncements on the global order. These individuals, the dialogues they participated in, the think tank research initiatives and the labels adopted by international organizations and iNGOs all contribute to a collective ‘puzzling’ and a dynamic of ‘world-making’ on the idea and practices of global policy. Such developments are neither consistent nor consensual. Nor does such puzzling necessarily clarify or lead in teleological fashion to a more sophisticated conceptual understanding. Nevertheless, these lexical experiments are world making in the sense that a heterogeneous set of words are transformed into a more or less coherent set of terms that are informed by the lived professional experiences of those using them. World making is imbued with values and interests; inevitably it is implicated in power relations (Nünning et al., 2010). The transferral of terms with standard usage at the nation-state level, has a different set of ramifications at the global, regional, or transnational level. To make the term ‘global policy’ socially meaningful and politically salient, is to turn it into a ‘fact’ that is recognized in a shared world of ideologies and interests. As any constructed world serves particular interests, it is important to defend the plurality of words (and worlds). Policy narratives as much as scholarly ones are at work in processes such as identity formation, ordering phenomena, systematizing data, or constructing versions of the (developing) world. Not using the term ‘global policy’ is equally significant. Non-use or dropped-use can signify the presence of institutional interests opposed to the symbolic power that might be accorded to the term ‘global policy’ and by the same token, ‘transnational administration’. In other words, some political and policy actors veer away from these terms because of the implicit challenge to established institutions of authority that the terms represent. For example, discussion of administrative sovereignty forces a rethink of not only the simple territorial or treaty boundaries of sovereignty but of the practices and capabilities of sovereignty. As outlined by Muth in his chapter, ‘administrative sovereignty is a function that a state, state-like, multiple-state or other actor can maintain with a reasonable measure of autonomy, credibility, and reliability over time’. In this understanding, sovereignty is a spectrum of capacities; that is, the ability to implement. Transnational actors
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 377 with administrative sovereignty could include the credit rating agencies and other types of ‘reputational intermediaries’ such as international accreditation bodies in the higher education sector (Verger et al., 2012). The extent to which accruing administrative sovereignty (and dispersing to other actors) becomes a strategic endeavour is best seen in international organizations.
23.3.2. I nternational Organizations and Global Public– Private Partnerships To date, international organizations disdain the language of ‘global policy and transnational administration’. Instead, the phrase ‘global governance’ is embedded in the policy lexicon. The reasons are no doubt multiple and cannot be condensed to one causal dynamic. In terms of ‘world making’, however, the two terms implicitly represent a challenge, or threat, to the sovereign powers of national governments; that is, the member states of international organizations posit realms of administration, public sector management, and decision-making that lie outside or beyond established institutions. As a result, international organizations also ‘dance around terms’. The meaning that is given to ‘global policy’ or ‘global programme’ shifts over time and across organizational activities. As noted by the World Bank of its own initiatives, ‘the definitions of global programs and institutional partnerships are ambiguous at the operational level, as is the extent to which global programmes are expected to focus on global public goods’ (OED, 2002, p. x). This lack of definitional exactitude may be one reason why the phrase ‘global public policy’—which was to be found in Bank publications in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see, for example, Gerrard et al., 2001)—slipped from usage in favour of ‘global and regional partnerships’ a decade later (IEG, 2007). For illustrative purposes, some of the 120 or so ‘global programmes’ financed by the World Bank are listed below to give a quick impression of the range of partnership activity:
• • • • • •
Global Animal Health Initiative; Global Donor Platform for Rural Development; Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery; Global Financial Management Initiative; Global Forum for Health Research; Global Road Safety Facility.
The World Bank Group plays many roles in these global and regional partnership programmes depending on the particular programme—as convener, financial contributor, trustee, member of the governing body, chair, host of the secretariat, administrative support and/or implementing agency. Even though the Bank’s role may change, collectively these programmes create transnational administrative spaces.
378 Diane Stone Whether the professionals employed by partnership programmes think of themselves as transnational policy makers is moot. Yet according to Broome and Seabrooke, ‘transnational policy training’ programmes such as those convened by the IMF through its Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), are ‘more directly connected to the everyday business of policymaking, and establish relations that may become more consequential over time in future policy dialogue processes between IOs and national officials’ (2015, p. 959). The JVI has a ‘world making’ function, inducting developing country political and bureaucratic elites into the IMF’s way of thinking on management of the global economy and global financial system. By contrast, the UN Research Institute on Sustainable Development (UNRISD) has been supportive of the concepts and frameworks developed by the global social policy research community. Instead of the presumed ‘globalized identity’ of public and private sector professionals found in transnational policy communities, ‘global public policy’ has often been conflated with an abstract concept—global public goods. United Nations agencies, and especially UNDP (Kaul et al., 2003), have been at the forefront of researching and articulating not only dimensions of ‘publicness’ in the global sphere but also questions of operationalization. That is, how international organizations and non-state actors create and finance global public goods, or seek to regulate the adverse effects of global public bads. The World Bank has frequently cast its operations in terms of delivering global public goods. The publication, Too Global To Fail (Evans and Davies, 2014), is exemplary of this tendency. There is also a considerable amount of academic critique that puts the World Bank centre stage in constructing ‘transnational policy paradigms’ (Babb, 2013) or engaged in hegemony-construction through ‘transnational policy networks’ (Goldman, 2007). At an institutional level there is international devolution of authority and supra- national delegation of governance to a wider range of stakeholders and non-state actors. This fragmentation (and sometimes duplication) often takes form via the modality of ‘global public policy networks’ sponsored by international organizations. Whether the global programmes or partnership programmes of the United Nations Foundation for Partnerships, or the EU’s partnership instruments develop an internal organizational discourse on the definitions for, and practices of, global policy’ is a research agenda awaiting substantive scholarly attention.
23.4. Conclusion: World Making Consequences of Global Policy Concepts The small knowledge ecology that has emerged around the notions of global public policy and transnational administration has diverse tributaries of intellectual
Global Policy and Transnational Administration 379 sustenance, and equally varied organizational manifestations. This scholarly niche emerges not only from the academy but also from within international organizations, and the wider professional circles of leading international NGOs, think tanks and civil society dialogues. While the journal, Global Policy, is particularly effective in melding scholarly and practitioner insights, these communities usually function separately. Not only have separate disciplines generated different terms and categories for labelling ‘global policy processes’ so too the policy lexicon of international organizations and transnational policy communities is replete with differing sets of models and practices for global policy. By no means is the idea of ‘global policy’ agreed upon. Methodological transnationalism is in its nascence as a research agenda and approach to policy studies. Once a transnational frame is adopted, then the idea of policy makers and administrators encapsulated within discrete but legally equivalent national administrative domains is problematized. Despite the legal constitution of national borders and state sovereignty, public sectors increasingly come to inhabit transnational spaces in the modern world as policy problems and public action move across borders. The intersectionality of policy and administration across levels of governance is an evolving world making project that is public, performative, and experimental. What ‘global policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ becomes will depend on the interactions of others who not only bring into being these new public spaces of our world through their transnational engagements, debates, and policy practice, but also through the analytic interpretations and scholarly perspectives that accompany these developments in the global agora.
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382 Diane Stone Tortajada, C. 2016. ‘Nongovernmental Organizations and Influence on Global Public Policy’. Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, 3 (2): 266–74. Verger, A., Altinyelken, H.K., and Novelli, M. (eds). 2012. Global Education Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues and Policies. London/New York: A&C Black. Walker, R.M. 2011. ‘Globalized Public Management: An Interdisciplinary Design Science?’ Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 21 (suppl_1): i53–9. Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market, Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books. World Bank. 2004. Global Monitoring Report: Policies and Actions for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals and Related Outcomes. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Economic Forum, Our Mission, https://www.weforum.org/about/world-economic- forum, accessed 20 November 2017. World Future Council. 2018. ‘About, https://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/about/, accessed 25th January. Yeates, Nicola. ed. 2008. Understanding Global Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press.
Chapter 22
Kn owled ge Net work s , Scientific C ommu ni t i e s , an d Evidence-I nforme d P olic y Ole Jacob Sending
22.1. Introduction Transnational networks have had a lasting influence on world politics: merchants and missionaries engaging in trade and proselytization were central vehicles of imperial expansion and colonial rule (Bebbington and Kothari, 2006). At the end of the nineteenth century, an emerging network of international lawyers, aided by peace movements on both sides of the Atlantic, inaugurated a shift towards rule-based governance and conflict resolution that resulted, inter alia, in the establishment of The Hague Tribunals. When the League of Nations was established with a permanent secretariat in the 1920s and 1930s in Geneva, a new professional group was established—international civil servants—that were to have lasting impact on post-WWII international politics (Sending, 2015). As the editors note in their introduction, however, the transnational character of policy making has become more deeply institutionalized and is more consequential than in earlier periods, thereby making political and economic boundaries more porous. At least two implications follow. First, our understanding of public policy making cannot necessarily rely on established distinctions between the national and the international. Second, we must look beyond diplomacy—which most students of world politics focus on—and draw on insights from the study of public policy to better understand the dynamics of world politics. This chapter focuses on the role and functioning of transnational knowledge networks and the role of ‘evidence-based’ policy making. It does so in part because international
384 Ole Jacob Sending scientific cooperation has been an integral part of the emergence of transnational policy making. One highly influential view holds that the very character of science and knowledge production defies national boundaries and so they are ideal vehicles for social integration that will, in turn, foster political integration (Deutsch, 1957). The European Union is a case of seeking to create such political integration through social integration among experts and civil servants. A modified version of this view is found in the literature on epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), where consensus and social integration within expert groups form the basis for their success in shaping international policy, and in institutionalizing their views within international institutions (Cross, 2013). However, the transnational character of public policy making that these groups have helped institutionalize has—paradoxically—rendered our theories about their role and functioning in need of updating. That is, to the degree that transnationalism is increasingly the name of the game, we need to rethink the utility of analytical concepts that are premised on a sharp delineation between the national and the international, and between state and non-state actors. Commencing with a review of core contributions to the study of knowledge groups in transnational policy making, the chapter then moves on, following the editors call to highlight key issues for debate, to three aspects of the role of knowledge networks that merit scholarly attention. Using the case of humanitarian relief as an illustration, these aspects are: (i) how the role of knowledge is shaped by the values that underwrite the activities and objectives that we can identify within different issue-areas, since the implication is that there is significant variation across issue-areas in what type of role knowledge networks, and experts, play in shaping policy; (ii) how the emergence of evidence-based policy both reinforces the idea of expertise and yet undermines the role of expert judgement, and (iii) how the transnationalization of policy processes is one of differentiation, and the competition between professionals has eroded the importance not only of national boundaries but also fractured established boundaries between public and private, as well as between markets and states.
22.2. World Politics and the Role of Knowledge Networks The study of knowledge networks in International Relations was for a long time implicit rather than explicit: references could be made to certain groups of like-minded experts or diplomats that had been able to shape foreign policy decisions or international policy. But there was no theoretical framework that specified how and why this could be the case. This was largely because the dominant description of world politics was premised on the idea of anarchy: because the realm between states lacked an overarching authority, states were assumed to be driven by systemic pressures to protect themselves and to maximize their interests, hence leaving little room for expert groups having
Knowledge Networks 385 any leeway to shape foreign policy decisions. This is not entirely correct: there was, of course, important work being done by David Mitrany, whose A Working Peace System of 1943 suggested a functionalist theory of international integration where cooperation between technical—and thus expert-packed—agencies was the central force. Karl Deutsch’s concept of a security community (1957) similarly suggested that one could develop, and deepen, international cooperation through the forging of loyalty and trust, where expert groups figured prominently as vanguard actors for socialization within such a security community. These early efforts to pin-point the role of non-systemic drivers of international politics would later be picked up by students of world politics when they sought to develop specific theories of the role of expert groups. Yet such work did not appear until a more pluralist view began to make headway within debates about world politics. The pluralist tradition, from David Easton and others, saw the state as a reflection of the larger political system, thereby questioning the view of the state as an independent and pre-constituted entity standing above or outside society (Mitchell, 1991). Applied to the study of world politics, this meant considering how non-state actors, as specifications of the broader political system, shaped the state and the decisions of state actors. Nye and Keohane’s work on non-state actors (1971) was important in this regard, for it suggested that there was more to world politics than the relations between states. This work paved the way for the analysis of intermediary or structuring institutions in the realm between states, such as regimes (Krasner, 1983). Taken together, these developments painted a picture of world politics that was not necessarily reduced to states responding to systemic pressure, but which included a range of non-state actors, and that was structured by the institutional arrangements that states had set up for multilateral cooperation. This was the context in which the study of the relative importance of expert groups and knowledge networks began to emerge in the early 1990s. Ernst Haas’ book When Knowledge is Power (1990) was important, as it further elaborated the conditions for, and dynamics of, international organizations as sites for the emergence of Deutsch´s ‘security communities.’ Haas was at pains to show how organizational features of international organizations could either facilitate or hinder learning based on expert knowledge. John Ruggie introduced the term ‘epistemic communities’—expert groups that share a body of knowledge and an attendant policy agenda—already emphasizing in the mid-1970s how broad visions of social reality could come to be expressed and institutionalized by a smaller group of actors (1975, p. 570). Such groups’ operations and influence have been found in many issue-areas, including international trade (Drake and Nicolaidis, 1992), nuclear arms (Adler, 1992), population control (Sending, 2015), and European integration (Cross, 2013). Peter Haas and colleagues made the concept of epistemic communities important as an analytical framework for understanding the making of public policy beyond the state (Haas, 1992). It was the first specific theoretical formulation about the role and functioning of expert groups among students of world politics. It took for granted that world politics is a space characterized by strong systemic pressure where state decision-makers
386 Ole Jacob Sending know how to best achieve either welfare or security for their populations. But Haas introduced an important qualifier by suggesting that decision-makers may sometimes be uncertain about the proper course of action. It was this reference to uncertainty that made it possible to stay within the parameters of established world politics theories yet still introducing a new type of actor, in the form of epistemic communities that could reduce uncertainty and shape international policy decisions. This theoretical formulation was part of a broader push to consider non-systemic factors in the study of world politics, and in the same decade other scholars pointed to other non-state actors that could be said to shape international policy outcomes. The most prominent of these was the advocacy network framework (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), formulated with inspiration from the research programme on contentious politics developed by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). While this body of scholarship all but overlooked many insights from the study of public policy about the political conditioning of expert knowledge or the institutional structuring of how expert groups are consulted, it formed part of a broader shift in the study of world politics that made it more amenable to considering the very processes by which national and international policy were being made. An important contribution in this regard was the research on international organizations (IOs), where Barnett and Finnemore (2004) played a crucial role in suggesting that IOs are bureaucratic organizations with a level of authority over states. Once one could consider IOs as bureaucratic, it was but a small step to bring in more substantive insights from studies of public policy about organized hypocrisy (Brunsson, 1998; Weaver, 2008) or principal-agent problems (Koremenos et al., 2001) within international organizations (see also Sending 2017). This scholarship, which emerged through engagement with then-dominant theories about world politics, is distinct from the research that emerged from within sociology and political science on public policy, and which then moved to ‘transnationalize’ and ‘internationalize’ their empirical and theoretical focus on the role of experts. The role of (transnational) regulatory networks was one strand of research (Newman, 2008). Another was the research on think tanks and policy networks that became increasingly transnational (Stone, 2001). A third was the focus on professions, whose role and functioning could best be understood as being engaged in transnational jurisdictional expansion and competition (Fourcade, 2006; Quack, 2007). A third component of the evolution of the research on experts in transnational public policy was linked to the broader debates about the contours and functioning of global governance. This grew out of a focus on how globalization affected the very infrastructure of political rule, both nationally and internationally. James Rosenau’s work on ‘spheres of authority’ (1992) suggested that it was an empirical question whether state actors were always dominant in shaping the contents of governance arrangements. The UN’s Commission on Global Governance defined global governance as: . . . the sum of many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse
Knowledge Networks 387 interests may be accommodated and co-operative action taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest. (1995, p. 4)
This definition has also been adopted by students of world politics through a focus on increased complexity (Karns and Mingst, 2004), the effectiveness of regimes in acting on global challenges (Young, 2010), and the role of civil society actors in shaping the agenda and the implementing capacity of international actors (Scholte, 2002). The focus of students of global governance has thus, by and large, been on how, for example, non-state actors of different stripes interact with, and may have influence on, state policies. Or the focus has been on how public–private cooperation, and ad hoc multilateralism, can enhance or undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance arrangements beyond the state. Important insights have been produced through such a perspective on, for example, the power of international organizations (Kahler and Lake, 2013; Coicaud and Heiskanen, 2001), on the legitimacy of non-governmental organizations (Bernstein, 2011), and on the emergence of private authority (Cutler, 2003; Hall and Biersteker, 2002). What has been much less prevalent is the exploration of how the very process of policy making is transformed when it takes place through transnational networks rather than the interaction of either state or non-state actors. The contrast with the literature emerging from institutional and organizational studies, or within public administration, is striking. In the former case, the international is a political space where cooperation has to be explained, and where the power of non-state actors similarly has to be accounted for. In the latter case, international cooperation is not something to be explained. Rather, transnationalization is considered as a significant process that renders the question of interstate cooperation less acute, and questions about how organizations or professions work in a transnational era more pressing (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012; Seabrooke and Henriksen, 2017). This includes how the categories for understanding and assessing public policy are in need of updating as a result of transnationalization (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Pierre, 2000). This has grown to become a highly productive research agenda, where the dynamic of policy making is seen to take on a distinct character when it is driven by, or takes place within, transnational networks. Indeed, as Stone and Ladi note, . . . adopting the terms ‘global public policy’ and ‘transnational administration’ forces consideration of public problems extant beyond the state, where a vastly reconfigured international civil service works alongside new transnational actors of administration . . . where public administration is not viewed simply as being the repository of states, or state actors operating internationally . . . (2015, p. 1).
This argument captures the public policy dimension of what students of international law call ‘global administrative law’ (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart, 2005). Global
388 Ole Jacob Sending administrative law denotes the increased codification and standardization of administrative aspects of global governance in terms of rules about transparency, participation, review, etc. In this view, global governance is administrative action, thereby privileging the policy (and administrative) aspect over the political aspect of global governance (see Kuo, this volume). On this basis, students of expert groups and knowledge networks have broadened their focus beyond scientific expertise to consider the role of civil servants (Sending, 2014; Vauchez and Sacriste, 2007), professions (Seabrooke, 2014), consultants (Seabrooke, 2015; Morgan et al., this volume), and hybrid categories such as think tanks that span the boundaries between knowledge production and policy (Stone, 2002). An important aspect of this development is that the very categories of ‘knowledge’ and ‘experts’ are no longer taken for granted, but are instead, made the primary focus of analysis: the international or transnational character of these networks is part of the explanation for the boundaries and contents of the expertise in question (Fourcade, 2009; Stampnitzky, 2013; Sending, 2015). There are nevertheless some assumptions that are shared by scholars from both public policy and international relations, chief among them that knowledge networks are powerful in no small part because they are transnational or international, and that the transnational or international are distinct political spaces. There are good reasons to make these assumptions. First, the very institution of science is based on the idea that scientific validity is universal, and so if a body of knowledge is located within a transnational network, it reflects the underlying belief in the universal scope of the institution of science and is less subject to claims of it being national and thus particular. Second, the transnational and the international—while different from one another (more on this below)—are distinct social spaces that are understood by the actors themselves to be different from national ones. There is nevertheless quite a lot to be said about what is at stake in these assumptions, to which the discussion now turns by focusing first on the push for ‘evidence-based policy’ and then drawing on examples from the field of humanitarian relief. While the trend towards evidence-based policy does not reflect the full gamut of issues pertaining to expertise and policy making, it is nonetheless a distinct development that is argued here to be intimately tied to the transnationalization of policy making. Moreover, while humanitarian relief is a distinct, and perhaps unique, policy area, it does capture very well the transnational character of policy, and raises questions about the link between expertise and accountability that is highly likely to be central to future scholarly and public debates about how governance is organized.
22.3. Values and Knowledge Extant research on the role and functioning of knowledge networks tacitly assumes that such expertise is linked to scientific knowledge of some sort. There are good reasons to make such an assumption, since most expert groups, and professions, are based on some type of abstract knowledge which sets them apart from other actors (Abbott, 1988).
Knowledge Networks 389 Moreover, some of the most deeply institutionalized issue-areas are based on a fairly homogeneous and hegemonic body of knowledge. This has been found to be the case in trade, where a distinct body of knowledge is seen to underwrite the work of the World Trade Organization (Eagleton-Pierce, 2013), in international public health, where the World Health Organization has historically been the organizational home and clearing house for international expertise on public health (Hanrieder, 2015), and in international economic governance, where the work of the International Monetary Fund is similarly anchored in a particular type of economic knowledge that has been found to be hegemonic (Chwieroth, 2008; Djelic and Quack, 2010). In such cases, one can trace the causal role of knowledge and expert groups, in much the same way as the literature on epistemic communities, in shaping policies and institutional frameworks of governance. In all these cases—trade, health, economic governance—the body of knowledge is controlled by historically powerful professions, who work to produce and maintain the disciplinary boundaries of what constitutes valid knowledge (Abbott, 1988). What is less well understood are cases where an issue area becomes institutionalized and is organized around specific normative objectives or values rather than a specific body of knowledge. The case of humanitarian relief offers an interesting contrast in this regard. Humanitarian relief expanded and became institutionalized after WWII. It was organized around a set of normative commitments to help ‘distant strangers’, and there was no identifiable group or network that operated on the basis of a shared body of scientifically produced knowledge. Rather, humanitarian relief has been driven and institutionalised by a variety of actors—state and non-state—where moral principles and practical experience have been driving forces (Barnett, 2011). Indeed, the institutionalization of humanitarian relief was built on a certain devaluation of knowledge claims produced through scientific methods: the arch-typical humanitarian expert was the humanitarian professional in flak jacket, moving from one crisis to the other, not having time to consult expert knowledge when working to save lives under pressure. The fact that humanitarian relief was first institutionalized as a system without a clear-cut or homogeneous body of knowledge brings us closer to an explanation of why its expertise has traditionally not been linked to science. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake here, which scholars have thus far largely overlooked. This concerns what types of ultimate values or ends undergird different issue-areas and how these are reflected, or hidden, in the assumptions and categories of expertise. Producing knowledge about suffering is a clear example of how normative commitments more directly influence this sector than other issue-areas. When we describe or analyse human suffering, there is an expectation that observation can somehow be fused with action. In Boltanski’s formulation, the analysis in such cases cannot solely be factual, but pushes the analyst towards the identification of alleviating suffering (1999, p. 24). In that sense, the production of knowledge about humanitarian relief and about humanitarian crises is engaged in the production of ‘motivated truth(s)’ (Redfield, 2006). Humanitarian actors are not alone in this, of course. As Habermas noted in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), interests or ideology always underwrite knowledge production in some way (he identified three: control, understanding, and
390 Ole Jacob Sending enlightenment). Partly as a consequence of the genesis and moral commitments that helped define humanitarianism as a distinct field of activity, humanitarian actors claim their authority not from abstract or generic knowledge, but from having access to and proximity to those in need (Sending, 2015). Hugo Slim has observed, for example, that the stress on moral purity by humanitarian actors is part of how they maintain their authority vis-à-vis others (2005). Liisa Malkki (1996) has described how the continual construction of humanitarianism as outside politics affects how humanitarian actors categorize, understand, and interact with refugees. Humanitarian practices of organizing and producing knowledge of refugees work to silence the refugees’ own histories, privileging instead ‘physical, non-narrative evidence’ since the latter operates at the level of the moral and humanitarian, not the historical and political. Attention to how knowledge networks and ‘science’ operate and are valued within different issue-areas is important for the advancement of the scholarly debates about transnational governance. It is so, first, because knowledge is always produced in a context defined by non-scientific norms, and it is produced and used by actors within institutional contexts that exhibit path dependencies. In some issue-areas, policy (or governance) is first and foremost done through negotiated treaties between states (such as non-proliferation). In others, voluntary standards and market-based mechanisms dominate, as is the case in climate policy. In others still, governance is performed through a combination of financial transfers and expertise, as in development assistance. Taken together, the status of value commitments, the cast of actors involved (state, non-state, and firms, etc.) and established policy practices shape the conditions under which transnational knowledge networks and scientific groups operate. Research on how these non-scientific factors shape the role and function of knowledge networks has tended to focus on the conditions under which an identifiable expert group may shape policy outcomes. An important next step in such research is to broaden the scope of inquiry to also include what constitutes ‘expertise’ in the first place, and to capture the variation in the status and role that expert groups have in different issue areas (Sending, 2015; Stone, 2013).
22.4. The Idea of ‘Evidence’ and the Decline of Expert Judgement In the 1970s, what is known as ‘evidence-based medicine’ (EBM) emerged as an important area of research and medical practice (Cochrane, 1972). Over time, this idea also spread to areas outside health and medicine. At one level, it is a hallmark of modernity that policy is to be based on knowledge. But the idea driving EBM was also to help practicing medical doctors draw on a broader set of data than their own experience in their treatment of patients. This idea later took hold in debates about the process of public policy making. In the late 1990s, the Blair government in the UK published a White
Knowledge Networks 391 Paper ‘Modernising Government’ which included specific references to the need for the more systematic use of ‘evidence’ in making public policy (Parsons, 2002). As described in contemporary policy debates, evidence-based policy making (EBPM) aims to reduce waste in public resources, spur innovation through learning from evidence and past mistakes, and to increase accountability (Pew/MacArthur, 2014). The debate about the use of evidence in policy making touches on core issues of public policy, notably the relationship between democracy and technocracy (Laswell, 1951). The debates about evidence-based policy making is pertinent for the present discussion beyond the fact that new modes of governing in key OECD countries tend to find their way into transnational networks. It is also important as perhaps the most clear-cut expression of a broader trend of relying on numerically represented knowledge, typically in the form of indicators and benchmarks, as a basis for rendering the world legible in the first place. Consider the UN Secretary-General’s report A World That Counts (2014), which was prepared as an integral part of the UN’s work to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It notes, for example, that ‘whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured’. The report moves on to state that ‘[n]ever again should it be possible to say, “we didn’t know” ’ (UN 2014). States have produced statistics about the types of issues mentioned in A World That Counts for centuries. Moreover, the UN, IMF, and the World Bank have also produced statistics since their formation, mostly relying on nationally produced statistics as a key source of raw data. What is distinct about the developments over the last two decades is that rankings and indicators have become an ubiquitous feature of transnational and international policy. Virtually every international organization now produces indicators and rankings of the phenomenon over which they claim jurisdiction (Engle-Merry, 2011; Cooley and Snyder, 2015). Firms and non-governmental organizations use them as key tools to secure their position as a reference point for debates about a particular phenomenon or problem (Broome and Quirk, 2015). Presenting the world in terms of indicators shifts the register of public policy to the extent that they become important as a source for assessing different policy options. Indicators may serve to de-politicize particular issues by presenting a phenomenon in terms of purportedly ‘objective’ numbers that can be monitored and tracked for policy purposes (Flinders and Wood, 2015). How and to what extent indicators do indeed shape or determine international or transnational policy is not well known, however, and appears to be an important area for future research. A brief discussion of how the introduction of so-called ‘needs assessments’ in humanitarian relief can serve as an illustration of the changes that such technical tools to produce evidence inaugurates, and what they imply for our understanding of the functioning of transnational networks. Humanitarian organizations started in the 1990s to develop standards for how humanitarian relief could be delivered. A central impetus for this was the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda (Borton, 1996), the third study report of which advanced the idea of formulating standards to be used in delivering and prioritizing humanitarian relief and to produce accountability vis-à-vis donors among donors.
392 Ole Jacob Sending That donors were inclined to push for such changes in the humanitarian sector must, in turn, be linked to the more general trend towards an ‘audit culture’ (Strathern, 2000) and to debates about EBPM elsewhere (Bradt, 2009). The most significant outcome of these efforts to establish professional standards for humanitarian relief is the Sphere Project, which brings together most of the major humanitarian organizations. Sphere aims to ‘improve the quality of humanitarian assistance and the accountability of humanitarian actors to their constituents, donors and affected populations’ through establishing shared professional rules and standards for analysing, reporting on, and operating in humanitarian crises (Sphere, 2000, p. 1). Other important initiatives include the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP), and efforts by the UN-led Inter- Agency Standing Committee (IASC) to establish professional standards and codes of conduct for humanitarian agencies, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN´s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (Harvey, 2010). A key feature of these new standards was the introduction of technical tools to measure, as well as undertake, so-called ‘needs assessments.’ What constituted ‘needs’, how they should be prioritized and balanced, had previously been a decision in the hands of humanitarian professionals, based on their experience and judgement. One study noted that: ‘Without accurate and timely information about humanitarian needs, it is not possible to provide effective and efficient responses that meet those needs’ (Currion and Willits-King, 2012, p. 1). Another study brings out the extent to which the introduction of technical needs assessments is tempered by the previously dominant category of humanitarian actors’ experience-based judgement, and notes that ‘. . . needs assessment in these environments is not an exact science. Good approximations, based on sound judgement, experience and analysis, are the basis of appropriate responses’ (Darcy and Hofman 2003, p. 9). The introduction of needs assessments, and the attendant ‘trust in numbers’ relative to the practically grounded judgement of humanitarian actors, indicates a change in the humanitarian field about where the authority to formulate and implement governance measures is located. That is, judgements on what to do and how to do it are increasingly seen to flow from technically derived—and thus objective—measures of humanitarian ‘needs.’ The Sphere project was a controversial one. Some organizations, like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), withdrew, arguing that it took attention away from suffering individuals in need. It also resulted, over time, in a transformation of how humanitarian organizations operate. With needs assessments becoming the major tool for resource mobilization, combined with stronger emphasis on accountability vis-a-vis donors and larger humanitarian budgets, other professional groups have risen to prominence within humanitarian organizations. Humanitarian organizations are now recruiting people with backgrounds in business and logistics, and important decision-making processes have—at least as seen from the viewpoint of humanitarians that work in crises settings—shifted towards headquarters.
Knowledge Networks 393 Humanitarian relief is not unique here. In virtually any issue-area, we see the emergence of global benchmarks and indicators, some of which are linked directly to incentives—as with the World Bank—along with others which are not. But these are all now part of the template for how transnational and international actors are supposed to operate (see Engle-Merry, 2011; Broome and Quirk, 2015). The upshot is that the very episteme within which transnational policy is made now looks different. It is less the idea of the expert whose judgement is of the essence. It is more the attempt to externalize and render objective and accountable the adjudication between different courses of action through some set of benchmarks. The trend towards evidence- based policy therefore points—perhaps paradoxically—in the direction of expertise being comparatively less important, and numerically presented data (‘evidence’) becoming more important. This constitutes an important area for research, particularly as to whether the rise of indicators represents a sign of strengthened transnational networks, or whether using such indicators is a sign of not having other tools with which to act. Most analysts tend to assume that the rise of global indicators represents a distinct form of power in the hands of those that produce them. Policy space seems to be shrinking because transnational networks use such indicators as they seek to advance their vision of how governance should be done (Cooley and Snyder, 2015). But this assumes that these indicators have power in conjunction with other governance tools, which is quite often not the case (Sending and Sande Lie, 2015). At least two issues merit further attention. The first is that indicators may be a ‘weapon of the weak’—a policy tool that is used by actors that do not have coercive or regulatory power. In this sense, the use of indicators and the integration of ‘evidence’ in transnational policy making may signal a shift in how governance is performed, away from interstate treaty making and towards market-based, voluntary governance (Abbott, Greene and Keohane, 2016). Second, the use of indicators and numerical representations may undermine the idea that some actors have more knowledge than others, which in turn authorizes them to make judgements on what constitutes the best course of action (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Friedman, 1990; Sending, 2015). This was at least in part what pushed the call for accountability of humanitarian organizations, where donors requested ‘objective’ measures to justify resource allocations: the authorization of some actors was to be based on readily accessible representations of the world, in the form of numbers and ‘scientific’ assessments rather than the judgement of individual experts or professionals. This is a paradoxical development, in that knowledge and expertise is becoming both more and less transparent to the broader public. It is becoming more accessible and ‘democratic’ to the extent that numerical presentations, and benchmarks, allow everybody to assess progress and hold decision-makers to account. But it may also become less transparent because the technical operations that go into the production of such numerical presentations make it difficult to assess their validity for those on the outside. This is all the more so if the use of indicators, and evidence, is supported by a hegemonic body of knowledge that leaves less scope for contestation and critique.
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22.5. Transnationalization and Differentiation In some areas, the relationship between expertise and policy may be heavily institutionalized and dominated by a singular profession, such as economics and health (although in the latter, this is increasingly not the case). In other issue-areas, such as cyber security, or different areas of climate governance, the relationship between practice and expertise is different, being less firmly institutionalized and more open to competition and cooperation between state actors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and firms. The evolving relationship between expertise and practice can best be described as one of increased differentiation, where ever more actors perform ever more specialized tasks of both analysing and engaging in policy making. More technically, governance, or policy, used to be dominated by a principle of segmentary (territorially delimited) differentiation, where states governed on their own territory, and engaged in rule beyond state borders only (or mostly) through international treaties. As the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, however, there is increasingly functional differentiation, where specialization and division of labour transcend national borders (Buzan and Alberts, 2010). At one level, this is what students of globalization and the process of transnationalization have told us for at least two decades (Stone, 2002). At another level, however, the full import of differentiation as an integral part of—perhaps the key driver of—the transnationalization of public policy has arguably not been fully understood as outlined below. It is useful here to reflect on the historical evolution of the state as the dominant form of political organization. As many scholars have noted, Max Weber (1978) perhaps most famously so, the very process of state formation was one of specialization of tasks and codification of behaviour through rules. Before the emergence of the state as a political organization, groups were organized in clans, later in tribes, some of which later became polities. This process was in large measure one of differentiation of tasks first from the sovereign (mostly ‘the King’) to (mostly) his brothers, then to non-kin advisors, which was followed by the establishment of schools to train advisors to the King. From a small group of the sovereign and his or her advisors, grew a state apparatus, in time organized into ministries and specialized professions (such as military and law). Over time, this mode of organizing the state—and of ruling more generally—diffused through isomorphism so that all states, regardless of variation in capacity and regime type, share the same institutional form (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). This does not mean that there is homogeneity in how public policy is made. Far from it, as students of comparative public policy have shown (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012). But, it does mean that there is an expectation about how public policy should be presented and organized. A similar process can now be observed at the transnational level, where ever more issue-areas are differentiated (or fragmented) into smaller niches of specialization. Take security: it used to be dominated by a fairly homogeneous group of military officers and
Knowledge Networks 395 security experts, who covered all or most aspects of national security. Today, both the study and the practice of security has grown into a plethora of sub-fields such as terrorism, piracy, cyber security, and peace operations. The same can be seen in the area of climate change, where the cadre of specialist organizations that have emerged provide advice and services on any number of issues relating, inter alia, to sustainable food production, climate insurance, forest management, and renewable energy (Abbott, Greene and Keohane, 2016). This has significant implications, for it means not only that the practice of public policy has undergone a process of differentiation that transcends national borders, as can be seen in how line ministries coordinate directly to regulate different issue-areas, and that that there is a plethora of actors involved in shaping transnational policy. It also means that the study of these activities is now taking place within ever more specialized sub-disciplines. Taken together, therefore, the very process of differentiation challenges our analytical vocabulary to understand the role and functioning of knowledge networks in transnational policy, at the same time as there is every indication that such networks become more and more important. More specifically, the boundaries between knowledge production and governance, and between knowledge production and market dynamics, appear to be increasingly blurred. Think tanks are a clear example of the hybrid form of expertise that has emerged with force over the last half century or so (Stone, 2008). Think tanks thrive on the blurred boundaries between detached analysis using scientific tools and the making and negotiation of public policy. Seen as a process of differentiation, the more recent calls for ‘science diplomacy’ by the European Union and other international organizations represent a similar trend whereby the boundaries between established practices are blurred and where ‘science’ is sought, harnessed, and brought directly to bear on the practice of diplomacy (van Langenhove, 2016). In humanitarian relief, this is perhaps best expressed in how the push towards objectification and the reliance on technical ‘needs assessments’ has morphed into a key tool for resource mobilization from prospective funding agencies and for positioning on the global humanitarian agenda vis-à-vis other humanitarian organizations that compete for the same funding sources. In both humanitarian relief and in development policy, another and related trend is worth noticing: a range of firms have emerged that are now competing with established humanitarian NGOs and also with intergovernmental organizations for attention and funding. Crucially, the key claim to expertise and competence that these firms bring to bear is the ability to produce or otherwise acquire knowledge in some form and re-package it as part of a strategy to increase market shares. This represents another type of differentiation, where not only market mechanisms become central to knowledge production, but where a different type of knowledge production which is not scientific but resembles it, is made an integral part of business models. Firms like KPMG and Ernst & Young now compete with research institutes and NGOs on tenders to conduct evaluations of humanitarian relief and development projects. And as discussed in the chapter by Morgan, Sturdy, and Frankel, large consultancy firms like Adam Smith International, and Coffey
396 Ole Jacob Sending sell ‘expertise’ on development issues to both states and to international organizations (Seabrooke, 2015). This process can be analysed in terms of established categories of public versus private, or states versus markets, as implied above. But doing so misses the point about the driver or dynamic of the process by which different types of activities, or practices are re-packaged and moved from one domain to another.
22.6. Conclusion For quite some time now, students of transnational policy, in different sub-disciplines, have excelled in demonstrating the proliferation of non-state actors and their power to shape policy. What we know much less about—in part because scholarly focus has been on the types of actors we can observe rather than the processes that make these actors into what they are—is how specialization and competition drives actors to innovate very much in terms of seeking to expand and hone their tool box. And when they do, they draw upon ways of doing things that are found in other domains, as when diplomats promote the idea of science diplomacy, or when consultancy firms draw upon the idiom of development or humanitarianism and adapt their expertise on, say, accounting and financial planning to expand their services. Research on the transnationalization of public policy that focuses on how established categories are being re-worked and moulded as different actors seek to develop and institutionalize new ways of governing seems important. This chapter has focused on humanitarian relief as an illustration of a much broader phenomenon. It follows that while humanitarian relief may be unique in certain respects, it offers a good example of how normative commitments serve to organize and shape how knowledge production is used and linked to policy. Human rights is a case in point. It similarly emerged through a strong normative commitment, albeit with the difference that legal experts cum advocacy groups were central in pushing for its international institutionalization (Hopgood, 2006; Madsen, 2007). But the same issue is at stake in, say, economic policy. Underneath scholarly disagreement between prominent economists and historians (think Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson), there are also ideological or normative divides that manifest themselves in different approaches to, say, austerity or trade. The larger issue at stake here—and which has not been studied in much detail—is the considerable variation between issue-areas in how value commitments are configured with knowledge production, and how that configuration shapes the role, status, and functioning of transnational knowledge networks. If transnationalization spells increased functional differentiation in the way described above—then a central task of future research is to identify how the very process of (scientific) knowledge production is being transformed by transnationalization. It is not surprising that public agencies would seek to integrate some element of continuous learning and use of evidence into their way of assessing and conducting policy. Indeed, scholars have sought to convince policy makers of the importance of listening
Knowledge Networks 397 to their findings and advice, often without being heard. But this process of integrating some types of knowledge as a tool for governance also means that the boundary between knowledge, on the one hand, and policy or governance, on the other, is less strict and perhaps being replaced by another distinction. That distinction appears to be one between the knowledge that is deemed relevant and which is linked ever closer to policy, and knowledge that is the result of more analytical distance and a critical attitude towards established institutional frameworks. This, in turn, raises questions about the accountability of the role of the expert, and of the expert being someone on the outside looking in, or of one being on the inside shaping policy.
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Chapter 23
The Imp orta nc e of Informa l Intergovernme nta l Organiz at i ons A Typology of Transnational Administration without Independent Secretariats Felicity Vabulas
23.1. Introduction: The Rising Importance of Informal Intergovernmental Organizations International relations and public administration scholars are increasingly recognizing that informal governance structures are changing the institutions that affect world politics (Abbott and Snidal, 2009; Avant and Westerwinter, 2016; Chwieroth, 2013; Christiansen and Neuhold, 2012; Christiansen and Piattoni, 2003; Keohane and Nye, 1974; Kleine, 2013; Stone, 2011, 2013). One important aspect of the growing trend toward informal cooperation is the proliferation of informal intergovernmental institutions (IIGOs) including the Proliferation Security Initiative (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2009), the G7 (Gstohl, 2007), and the BRICS. IIGOs are explicit but non-legal arrangements where states regularly interact but do so outside any permanent organizational structure; that is, they have no independent secretariat (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). States strategically use IIGOs to complement or supplement the dominant form of interstate cooperation, which to date has focused on formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). What has perhaps been underappreciated
402 Felicity Vabulas thus far is that states make a key design choice in creating and using IIGOs: they purposely choose to organize without delegating independent functionality to a secretariat. The fact that IIGOs do not have a treaty is also important, but this chapter’s focus on transnational administration lends a focus to organizational capacity and secretariat functions. Yet in order for states to meet at summits, produce best practice findings, and issue joint statements, they often still need some sort of administrative apparatus. For example, as noted by Cooper in this volume, the G20 (along with the G7) have established an elaborate interaction of ‘sherpas’ and other technocratic officials to coordinate logistics. This chapter details how states administer transnational decisions in IIGOs without delegating to an independent secretariat. While scholars have identified international cooperation as increasingly informal, little attention has been paid to the inner- workings of these informal institutions. Heretofore, existing IGO scholarship has created a false dichotomy: either an intergovernmental organization has an independent secretariat or it does not. Indeed, the Correlates of War, the dominant empirical dataset on IGOs (Pevehouse, Nordstrom, and Warnke, 2004) does not even include groups of states if they lack an independent secretariat. Dominant research on IGOs uses this dataset as a starting point, so IIGOs have therefore lacked theoretical and empirical analysis to date, despite their increasing use in world politics (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). This chapter starts by defining IIGOs with rich examples. It then goes on to review what we know about the role and influence of FIGO secretariats, civil servants, and their leaders—which arguably is still limited. Importantly, the potential influence that each of these actors can have on FIGO outputs is what states purposefully try to override, supplement, or complement by using IIGOs. This chapter shows that states use the specific administrative design of IIGOs to cooperate without creating an autonomous secretariat that could become a runaway bureaucracy (Hawkins, Lake, Nielson, and Tierney, 2006; Pollack, 1997) which can be subject to mission creep or the competing demands of multiple principles (Barnett and Finnemore, 1999). However, this chapter also reminds readers that IIGOs are not a panacea: not all international secretariats are ‘bad’. The wide expanse of FIGOs shows that states still need this different kind of organizational capacity too, just at different times. This chapter outlines a high-level typology of three different ways that states interact with IIGOs to successfully administer global public policy. First, states may choose to leverage an existing organization (e.g. a FIGO) to provide technocratic support without any independent functionality. Second, states may lean on another state to host a technocratic secretariat; particularly when that state has more capacity but also a greater vested interest in supplying the club or IIGO’s public good. Third, states may set up a rotating chair that allows the state in charge to exert influence while still balancing the need for perceived equity. This chapter concludes by underscoring the need to pay more attention to IIGOs, including their inner workings. By bringing together International Relations and public administration scholarship, we can better understand how this growing set of institutions is administered. In doing so, researchers and practitioners alike can unpack how
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 403 players exert control over cooperative outcomes in the shifting nature of global governance. By opening the black box, this chapter highlights that the form and function of transnational administration—in both IIGOs and FIGOs—matters. This is because the operational set-ups that states choose to use in different kinds of IGOs affect how states project their power, preferences, and (im)partiality.
23.2. Definition of an IIGO Most of the research on IGOs to date has focused on formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) (Abbott and Snidal, 1998; Barnett and Finnemore, 1999; Goldstein et al., 2000; Hawkins et al., 2006; Keohane, 1984; Koremenos, Lipson and Snidal, 2001; Thompson, 2009). Pevehouse et al. (2004) lay out what has become the standard definition of a FIGO, which is operationalized in the Correlates of War International Organisations dataset (Pevehouse, Nordstrom, and Warnke, 2004). A FIGO is defined as: 1. A formal entity (formed by an internationally recognized treaty) 2. With three or more states as members and 3. A permanent secretariat or other significant institutionalization such as a headquarters and/or permanent staff. Standard examples of FIGOs include the World Bank, the North Atlantic Fishing Organization, the United Nations, and the Caribbean Community. In contrast, Vabulas and Snidal (2013) define an IIGO as: 1. An entity with explicitly shared expectations 2. With an explicit association of three or more states 3. Who have regular meetings but do not have an independent secretariat. The set of IIGOs is modest but growing rapidly over time. In fact, the rate of growth since 1990 is over 200 per cent whereas the 300+ cohort of FIGOs has largely levelled off (Vabulas and Snidal, 2017). There are over a hundred historical cases of IIGOs including entities as old as the Concert of Europe (1815) (Vabulas and Snidal, 2017). Others include the Council of Foreign Ministers which allowed states to begin to determine a post-Second World War order (Van Meter, 2005) and the Weimar Triangle (Shalal, 2016) which began after the end of the Cold War to help Europe deal with new challenges. In order to better understand IIGOs, it is worth unpacking the three-part definition both for comparison to FIGOs and to create distinct analytical scope. It is worth stressing, however, that both FIGOs and IIGOs are ideal types; no empirical instance necessarily fits either conception perfectly. Instead, international institutionalization
404 Felicity Vabulas varies along a spectrum with FIGOs and IIGOs occupying intermediate points along the way (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). In reality, there are all sorts of possible and realized institutional forms in between. First, FIGOs are established by international treaties, which are legally binding agreements among states (UNTS website, 2016). The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defines treaties as: ‘an international agreement concluded between States in written form and governed by international law, whether embodied in a single instrument or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation’. Unlike most international treaties, however, FIGO treaties are special because they establish an organization that serves as the administrative apparatus to govern and implement the treaty. By contrast, IIGOs have no formal legal basis but rather rest on an explicit understanding among states. These explicit shared understandings can take different forms, including declarations, memoranda of understanding, joint statements, communiqués, and press releases (Vabulas and Snidal, 2017). Each serves a coordinating function without creating any legal obligations. An example is the Missile Technology Control Regime. This IIGO explicitly specifies that it ‘is not a treaty and does not impose any legally binding obligations on Partners (members) . . . it is an informal political understanding among states that seek to limit the proliferation of missiles and missile technology’ (MTCR website, 2016). Despite the lack of a treaty, the Regime rests on members unilaterally adhering to a common export policy (the Guidelines) which is then applied to an integral common list of items, (e.g. an Equipment, Software, and Technology Annex). The second definitional characteristic is that FIGO membership is defined by states ratifying the underlying treaty. In general, state-level membership of a FIGO is well defined and relatively permanent. Membership in IIGOs also occurs at the state level between Heads of Government or State, Ambassadors, and high-level Ministers including Finance or Foreign Affairs. Focusing on IIGOs therefore sets aside technocratic or regulatory meetings among lower level governmental officials, such as subnational ‘transnational networks’ (Slaughter, 2009; see also Legrand, this volume). This focus on state-level entities does not ignore that there has been a massive proliferation of non- state actors in world politics (Abbott and Snidal, 2009; Borzel and Risse, 2005; Hall and Biersteker, 2002; Keck and Sikkink, 2014; Reinicke and Deng, 2000; Stone, 2008). Instead, honing in on major forms of cooperation between sovereign entities allows a direct comparison between FIGOs and IIGOs. The third definitional feature is that FIGOs have an independent secretariat—usually with a permanent headquarters, significant staff, and a budget. In contrast, IIGOs hold regular meetings, but have no independent secretariat. Regular meetings do not have to be on a fixed schedule but there must be a common expectation that there will be ongoing meetings. Not having a secretariat is a deliberate choice. One implication of (and reason for) this is that IIGOs have minimal independent agency: there is no IGO agent with significant capacity to act, only the collective meetings of states unmediated by any agent. This directly allays any possibilities or concerns about runaway organizations (Hawkins et al., 2006).
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 405 The fact that the G20, for example, has no permanent secretariat is not by chance, as the idea has been raised, and later set aside. South Korea, France, Brazil, and China have supported the idea of a permanent secretariat to no avail. South Korea has even proposed a ‘cyber’ secretariat but that idea has not caught hold either (Chosun Media, 2010). Instead, the G20 is managed through a rotating secretariat, the so-called troika, where the state chairing each year’s meeting provides a temporary secretariat to organize and coordinate summit activities. The rotation itself is organized to ensure that no one regional or other grouping has continuity of control over the meetings from one year to the next.
23.3. The Role of Secretariats in Formal IGOs The third part of the FIGO and IIGO definitions above focuses on the presence (or not) of an independent secretariat and will be the focus of the rest of the chapter. Secretariats— also known as international public administrations or international bureaucracies— are collective entities comprised of non-elected officials or international civil servants. Secretariats exist to support states in the operations of IGOs (Busch, 2014). Their tasks range from generating and processing data, to providing information for administrative, technical or legal support in negotiations, and ensuring monitoring compliance with multilateral decisions (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009). Given the centrality of this institutional feature—and the very real fact that international secretariats touch on almost every detail of day-to-day operations within FIGOs—it is unfortunate that so little academic research systematically evaluates international bureaucrats’ roles. As detailed later, most of the inattention from IR scholars is due to state-centric assumptions about the main players in international politics. This downplays any attention to bureaucrats as independent, purposive actors (Barnett and Finnemore, 1999). Similarly, public administration scholars have also been slower to analyse international civil servants because most attention has focused on the national or subnational levels (Bauer, 2007; see Legrand, this volume). The global policy and transnational administration focus that this handbook is advancing has the potential to shift some of these disciplinary habits and mindsets. While there has not been much historical attention to IGO secretariats, this chapter leans on a slowly developing set of research that seeks to unpack the black box interior of IGOs (Johns, 2007; Johnson, 2014; Johnson and Urpelainen, 2014). By examining this emerging scholarship on FIGO secretariats, we can understand how IIGOs operate without them. This exercise is useful for comparison but also for contrast. The goal of the following sections is to think about what states try to avoid by not delegating to an independent secretariat when they use IIGOs. It also recognizes, however, that to regularly meet with a shared, explicit set of expectations, states still often need some
406 Felicity Vabulas minimal administrative enterprise to facilitate cooperation. As articulated below, states accomplish this through IIGOs using at least three different design choices. The perhaps counterintuitive point worth emphasizing is that by keeping a state-centric focus to analysis—and trying to understand how and why they would choose to use IIGOs—we can understand more about the importance of the transnational administrators ‘behind the scenes’. IR and public administration scholars who have paid attention to IGO secretariats underscore the importance of their studies by pointing to the advantageous assets that international bureaucracies possess (Ege and Bauer, 2013). Secretariats control information, have authority, and often espouse an entrepreneurial spirit which can catalyse institutional influence (Bauer, 2007; Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009; Depledge, 2007; Sandford, 1994; Young, 1991). Citing fifty years of studies, Eckhard and Ege (2016, p. 922) conclude that international bureaucrats indeed influence policy making although this influence varies with the political salience and scope of the decision in question. Because of this, Guzman (2013) articulates that states face the ‘Frankenstein problem’ when they create IGOs: by creating IGOs, states hope to address a common problem. Once created, however, the new entity can develop a life of its own and cannot be fully controlled by individual states. So one of the fundamental trade-offs facing states is the need to give the IGO enough authority to be effective while still guarding against the risk that it will become a monster (Guzman, 2013 p. 1000). Yet many (IR in particular) scholars remain unconvinced about the independent effect that secretariats may have, instead considering them reflexive shells of interstate relations. The handful of rich reports on secretariats actually pales in comparison to the abundant IR work that concludes IGO secretariats have minimal influence. This is especially frustrating to the public administration discipline: ‘Many current accounts either dismiss secretariats as faceless clerks, concerned chiefly with convening debates among states, or lionise them through empirical descriptions of influence’ (Manulak, 2016, p. 1). Often, then, IR scholars argue that when state principals do delegate to IGO agents (secretariats), they maintain a tight balance of discretion and control (Hawkins et al., 2006; McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984). Still, recent research (Manulak, 2016) has been more nuanced, with scholars noting that states may often be content with creating autonomous secretariats when they can buffer the shortfalls of agent slippage by ensuring powerful states have informal influence (Stone 2011). Conclusions about the influence of secretariats have therefore remained tentative probably because much of the existing work leans on historical and descriptive case studies and has usually focused on specific policy areas (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009; Bhattacharya, 1976; Jinnah, 2010; Pitt and Weiss 1986; Mathiason, 2007; McLaren, 1980; Weiss, 1982). Accordingly, this has limited our ability to make broader conclusions. Moving beyond just looking at secretariats writ large, research has also paid attention to the role that individual bureaucrats play in shaping IGOs (Gould, 1970; Reymond and Malick, 1986; Udom, 2003) or how internal personnel structures, inequities and decisions may alter IGO legitimacy (see Moloney (2011) as well as Bowman, West, Moloney,
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 407 this volume). For instance, specific civil servants have led international negotiations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), European integration, and ozone accords to success (Hampson, 1995; Sandholtz and Zysman, 1989). Moreover, scholars have shown that the uniform preferences of groups of international civil servants—such as at the World Bank (Moloney, 2011) and the IMF (Nelson, 2017)—play a strong role in shaping the outputs of IGOs. Further research has paid particular attention to the role of leadership in secretariats, including Secretaries General (Cox, 1996; Young, 1991; Moravcik, 1999; Weiss and Jordan, 1976). Importantly, some of this later work is multidisciplinary in nature, making a strong argument that we can better understand global public policy by integrating public administration and international relations research (Moloney, 2011; Weller and Xu, this volume). There is also an evolving literature on the role of the Chair in formal IGOs (Tallberg, 2010; Blavoukos and Bourantonis, 2015; Metcalfe, 1998; Odell, 2005). For example, the European Union (EU) has a six month rotating Presidency and World Trade Organization (WTO) global trade round negotiations are chaired by the host government. The dominant theory of why states delegate responsibility to a Chair in formal IGOs is that this leadership position helps overcome institutional failures such as agenda setting, brokerage, and representation (Tallberg, 2010). This functional theory also argues that the Chair in formal IGOs has influence, and furthermore, that the way states select the chair should matter for IGO outcomes. These scholars have a basic premise that ‘the Chair matters’ because they possess informational and procedural power resources that may enable them to steer negotiations toward their preferences. But again, most of this research is explorative. Despite these contributions, there is a lacunae of research on the role of the Chair in informal IOs and analysis of the administrative functions within IIGOs. We do not have a good understanding of what transnational administration in IGOs might look like beyond (and sometimes even including) FIGOs. As discussed below, just because states do not want an independent secretariat when they form an IIGO does not mean that administrators do not matter. In fact, in many ways, the role of informal IIGO Chairs or other ‘bureaucrats’ may matter even more than in FIGOs. This is because, for example, the Chair in informal IOs takes on more operational functions, has more discretion over summits, and can better use the leadership position to steer outcomes.
23.4. Transnational Administration without an Independent Secretariat As this chapter has highlighted, states are increasingly seeking opportunities to cooperate through bodies that do not lock them into a FIGO—that is, without a treaty, and without an independent secretariat. In these instances, they often create IIGOs to
408 Felicity Vabulas supplement, complement, or override existing institutions (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). They therefore make purposeful, strategic decisions about how to organize, operate, and administer global politics, even in the absence of an independent secretariat (Dijkstra, 2015). While IIGOs have no independent secretariat, some minimal organizational apparatus is necessary to call a meeting, operationalize the agenda, and perform the necessary administrative tasks of having an international conference or summit. Indeed, IIGOs reflect one spot along a spectrum of administrative set-ups. It is on this point that the rest of the chapter will focus. One reason that IIGOs are created in the first place is to avoid creating an independent secretariat, as is the practice with FIGOs. This motivation is paramount when states do not want their sovereignty to be constrained, particularly when we consider that international bureaucracies have the ability to create autonomy from states (Bauer and Ege, 2014). An interesting case is the Eurogroup, an informal group of Eurozone Finance Ministers that was created at the request of the French government in 1997. It was designed as a forum for policy coordination and consultation about specific Eurozone matters, recognizing that the Eurozone territory was often incongruous with the EU (Federal Trust, 2016). In its early years, the group met informally in advance of Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) sessions. In 2009, the Lisbon Treaty changed the Eurogroup’s structure to legally mandate that the Eurogroup ‘informally meet’ (Europa, 2016) but it still did not have a formal secretariat. After Jean-Claude Juncker was reappointed as Eurogroup president in 2010, he emphasized the need to increase the scope of the Eurogroup’s activities in coordinating economic policies and representation. Juncker proposed creating a small secretariat for the group of four to five civil servants to prepare the meetings. However, although France and Spain supported such plans, Germany expressed worry that strengthening the group could undermine the independence of the European Central Bank (EU Observer, 2016). Another way that states risk losing sovereignty when creating IGOs is that emerging research shows that international civil servants can be (and indeed are mandated to be) more loyal to the institution than to their state (see Bowman, West, and Moloney, this volume). Furthermore, international civil servants are generally selected for technocratic expertise, which means that member-state influence can be stifled. This emphasizes that there are important times when member states will not run the risk of creating a chain of delegation to international civil servants that might become more empowered (Gould and Kelman, 1970).
23.5. The Variety of IIGO Administrative Apparatuses By taking a closer look at the administration of informal IGOs, we can better understand what states are trying to escape in FIGOs, the ways in which states attempt to
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 409 control outcomes, and the limitations of these set-ups. Empirically speaking, there are at least three different ways that states choose to set up administrative functions in IIGOs without delegating to an independent secretariat. This section lays out a high-level taxonomy. The three primary ways are: 1. relying on an established organisation to host the IIGO; 2. relying on a state to provide a technical secretariat; 3. creating a rotating Chair where leadership revolves between members.
23.5. 1. Relying on an Established Organization to Host the IIGO First, some states choose to rely on an established organization to host the IIGO and perform ‘usual’ secretariat functions. For example, many IIGOs operate separately from, but leverage FIGO facilities. States are most likely to use this administrative set-up when they have heavy logistical needs but also have strong concerns for maintaining sovereignty. Using the FIGO’s conference rooms and telephones, for example, sets up a focal point place to meet without having to start from scratch. Meanwhile, states can avoid some of the downsides of independent bureaucrats that are articulated above. The Budapest Process (BP)—a consultative forum established in 1993 of fifty-two governments and ten international organizations exchanging information and best practices on migration issues—is an example of an IIGO that leverages a FIGO (The International Organization for Migration) for secretariat services (Budapest Process, 2016). BP states have used an informal arrangement because they needed flexibility for intergovernmental dialogue amidst the dynamic development of migration policy. The BP’s informal structure has allowed it to develop more fluidly alongside the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the enlargement of the European Union, without being tied down by bureaucratic hurdles. A second example also illustrates the phenomenon whereby IIGO states ‘borrow’ administrative capabilities from existing institutions without setting up an independent secretariat. A group of twenty-three states formed the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) in 2009. This IIGO promotes policies and programmes that advance clean energy technology, helps share lessons learned and best practices, and encourages the transition to a global clean energy economy (CEM, 2016). The CEM uses the International Energy Administration (IEA) to host a small, flexible team that is not intended to be an independent implementing entity. This set-up is action-oriented and flexible to support the CEM’s distributed leadership approach. There are no negotiated texts or binding agreements to control the arrangement, but instead, any government interested in furthering a substantive idea on a clean energy technology is encouraged to identify willing partners and proceed.
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23.5.2. Relying on a State to Provide a Technical Secretariat The second way that states ensure they can administer IIGOs is by relying on one specific government to provide leadership, sponsorship, and administrative functions. This particular kind of administrative set-up may be chosen when one state has disproportional preferences (or even capacity) to ensure the organization succeeds. Instead of acting alone, the state knows that bringing in a cooperative dialogue can help the legitimacy of the outcome—much like the laundering role that FIGOs can play (Abbott and Snidal, 1998). Supplying the technical secretariat is one way the lead state can maintain a tight handle on the IIGO’s direction. For example, the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF), a meeting of the seventeen largest economies of the world, and intended to facilitate a candid dialogue and generate political leadership on climate change, has strong ties to the US. The creation of the grouping in 2009 was heavily inspired by the US, which provides secretariat functions through the US State Department (MEF, 2016). Even though the location of Leaders’ meeting changes multiple times throughout the year, whenever the host is a non-US state, the US is the co-Chair for that meeting. This set-up has worked particularly well for the US, which has historically had a stake in pushing climate change policies that do not infringe too much on its sovereignty. Another example of an IIGO that has no secretariat but leverages a government for coordination is the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). ‘Distribution of the Regime’s working papers is carried out through a Point of Contact (POC), the functions of which are performed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France. Intersessional consultations also take place monthly through POC meetings in Paris, occasionally reinforced with capitals-based officials’ (MTCR 2016). Canada also provides other technical services such as maintaining the website.
23.5.3. Establishing a Rotating Chair The third way states can organize without delegating is by setting up a rotating sequence of temporary ‘secretariats’ through a Chair. The Chair usually hosts the next conference and provides the administrative support needed to undertake the organizational tasks for that meeting. This particular kind of transnational administrative set-up may be a solution to portraying procedural justice in decision-making (Viola, 2017). Rotating control may be one way to handle concerns about equity, especially for developing countries or rising powers. These challenges have been endemic to the multilateral institutional order but have become particularly pronounced in the twenty-first century. States that are frustrated with immovable voting rules or quotas (for example, in the UN security Council or IMF) may find solace in this solution. Despite informality, IIGOs often have quite a structured process for how states will chair the organization. For example, the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 411 International Monetary Affairs and Development (G24), which coordinates the position of developing countries on monetary and development issues for Bretton Woods Institutions, has an organized ‘Bureau’. This executive arm of the G24 consists of the Chair, First Vice-Chair, Second Vice-Chair, and two previous Chairs. The Chair country takes responsibility for preparing meetings and running the press conference, together with the two Vice-Chairs. The Minister of the Chair country serves a one-year term from the conclusion of the Annual Meeting of Ministers to the subsequent year’s Annual Meeting. One country from each of three regional groupings is always represented in the Bureau to maintain continuity in its operations. A second example of a rotating Chair occurred in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the IIGO that preceded the formal Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from 1973 to 1994 (OSCE, 2016). In the CSCE, the Chair rotated alphabetically among states to ensure that East–West blocs were not maintained. While member states knew the rotating chair set-up might be less efficient—and that ‘the work of the conference may suffer as a consequence’ (Sizoo and Jurrjens, 1984, p. 64)—it helped reinforce the equality principle (which was also maintained through a consensus set-up). During the Cold War time frame when patterns of dialogue had been carried on between military blocs, this set up ensured that the smallest state would have as much say as the largest, and a neutral state as much as an aligned one. While a big part of the rotating Chair set up appears to be the need for equality of decision-making, this does not mean that the Chair is always neutral. Instead, it might mean that preferential discretion just rotates instead of remaining strictly in the hands of one state. Just as we see national fiefdoms in FIGOs (Kleine, 2013)—where member states tolerate one another’s control over different divisions—the rotating Chair may also provide an ‘implicit exchange of administrative control among governments’ (Kleine 2013, p. 322). Moreover, the Chair of an IIGO may have an even more powerful role than in a FIGO. First, IIGO chairs have agenda-setting power at summit and plenary meetings including the opportunity to make the opening remarks or a keynote speaking position. This may provide the Chair with the chance to frame the programme—not only for the actual meeting but also for future activities—as well as the attitude, priorities, and outlook of the IIGO for the Chair’s term. This stands in contrast to the agenda-setting capacity of FIGO chairs where their power is mediated by international bureaucrats (Johnson, 2014). IIGO Chairs may also command power because they are in charge of issuing the Chair’s Summary of the Meeting for plenary or Ministerial gatherings. This affords IIGO hosts the chance to document the meeting minutes through their eyes, which may have a significant effect on decisions made by the group and outsiders. This places a large role for the Chair on consensus gathering—the usual mode of ‘decision-making’ within IIGOs. It should be noted that when consensus is needed in FIGOs, this might limit the scope of the Chair because they are slowed down and have to find mutually agreeable results (Tallberg, 2010). In contrast, consensus in IIGOs does not mean unanimity.
412 Felicity Vabulas As articulated in the case of the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, for example, ‘The participants noted with satisfaction that the Working Group reports were presented to the Plenary Conference without separate or dissenting views. As with all consensus documents, this did not mean that every Working Group member was in full agreement with every word or endorsed in every case the particular form of expression chosen’ (IAEA, 2016). Further evidence of the Chair’s ‘stamp’ on outputs is the fact that declarations or important communiques that come out of the meeting are often named after the host state. For example, when Afghanistan hosted the 4th G7+ Ministerial Meeting in March 2016, they concluded with the Kabul Communiqué which promoted their own goals. This stands in contrast to FIGOs where bureaucrats who operate with FIGO-focused goals document and communicate for the group. The IIGO Chair can also powerfully shape outcomes by playing a gatekeeper function. For example, members wishing to join the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group must apply in writing to the President (who then consults with other member countries). The President is also responsible for inviting Observers. In contrast, Chairs within FIGOs rarely play a role in membership decisions. Instead, formal voting procedures decide new members (Blake and Lockwood-Payton, 2015). The Chair may also gain power through their provision of the temporary secretariat (in their home country) and by supplying staff. For example, the country that holds the chair in the G20 is responsible for setting up a temporary secretariat in their country. In contrast, most FIGOs have rules governing staffing including country quotas, target ranges, or secondment from states. This widens the purview of the Chair to place favourable staff in control for their tenure. Last, the Chair or meeting host may also reap power from their sometimes role as spokesperson representing the IIGO at other IIGO or FIGO meetings. For example, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building in Asia (CICA) chairman ‘represents CICA in the United Nations and other international forums’. In this way, the state who is Chair is seen as the face of the IIGO rather than an international bureaucrat. In sum, there appear to be at least three transnational administrative options that states choose when setting up IIGOs. States purposefully avoid setting up an independent secretariat, but still want to ensure an organized set-up to aid operations. Each of these three design choices reflects a particular need from state members while also having implications for how global solutions are administered.
23.6. Conclusion This chapter argues that informal intergovernmental organizations are not only rising in magnitude but also in importance. And yet, we need to go beyond just recognizing
Informal Intergovernmental Organizations 413 the existence of this set of institutions and understand how the various actors work within IIGOs to ‘administer the global’. By focusing on how states set up administrative apparatuses in IIGOs—particularly without independent secretariats—we can also get a clearer sense about what states are trying to back away from or correct for in formal IGOs. This chapter started by defining IIGOs as strategic and purposeful organizational choices versus FIGOs. It then emphasized that one of the things states try to avoid when setting up IIGOs is an independent secretariat. While states have an array of different tools to monitor the principal-agent challenges of independent secretariats, sometimes the best solution is to organize without delegating. IIGOs fill this role. But the sheer act of organizing means that there is often still a large need for administering transnational outcomes. States set up at least three kinds of administrative functions in IIGOs which underscores the need to look at secretariats along a continuum of design choices, rather than just a binary indicator. First, states sometimes choose to leverage the secretariats of existing FIGOs for minimal bureaucratic support. Second, when they need to exert more power, states might instead lean on a particular state for a technocratic secretariat. Third, when procedural justice or equity within the group is important, states in IIGOs may administer through a rotating Chair. While this chapter has attempted to open the black box of transnational administration in IIGOs, it is a cautionary first step. Furthermore, the choice to use IIGOs should not be normatively treated as ‘better.’ IIGOs are not based on treaties, so states may not have to operate by hard-and-fast rules or subscribe to norms of transparency (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013). Furthermore, while this chapter calls for more attention to be paid to the ‘goings on’ in IIGOs, it is important to recognize that the informal nature of these operations may preclude clarity on what goes on behind the scenes. Indeed, if whistleblowing is hard in formal IGOs, for example, (Moloney, Bowman, and West, 2016), it may be near impossible in IIGOs. In trying to create a high level taxonomy of the ways in which states choose to ‘design’ IIGOs, some of the important nuances of administration get lost. While there are benefits in determining categories so that we can generalize, it is worth noting that each administrative design decision can vary in subtle but important ways. Moreover, the three types of administrative set-ups articulated in this Chapter can still overlap in messy ways. One of the reasons IR scholars have ignored transnational administration in IGOs is due to the discipline’s state-centric focus. On the opposite end of the spectrum, public administration scholars often resist this focus. This chapter has attempted to bring both disciplines to the forefront: by focusing on the administration of IIGOs—whose members are states—this chapter shows that international civil servants can be strategic actors in world politics. Another reason that IR scholars in particular have avoided opening the IGO black box is that administration is often perceived as ‘boring bureaucracy’. But this chapter highlights that it is not just the pejorative ‘administration’ that plays out in IIGOs. Instead, transnational administrative design choices reflect complex decisions to guard sovereignty, project power, or maintain equality, which underscore three of the fundamental
414 Felicity Vabulas tensions in international politics. In other words, even when transnational administration appears, at face value, to matter the least (because IIGOs have no independent secretariat and have thus far been underappreciated in the set of IGOs guiding cooperation between states), the choice of this particular kind of administrative set-up possibly matters the most. This chapter (like others in the handbook) echoes previous calls that ‘much can be gained from a scrupulous dialogue between IR and PA’ (Bauer and Ege, 2014). In particular, future research should take seriously the need for more qualitative work to explore the ‘goings on’ within IIGOs. This is no small feat since, by definition, IIGOs do not have independent secretariats where we can go and immerse ourselves in archives and interview bureaucrats. Future research should also seek to better understand interactions of IIGOs with other informal actors such as global public–private partnerships. How and when do states orchestrate this complex balance of informal and non-state actors to still achieve their end goals? Last, scholars should aim to examine how transnational networks that operate below the state level still (or not) parallel IIGOs. An effective cross-disciplinary interaction can continue to enhance this research agenda to better understand global public policy.
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Chapter 24
Transnati ona l Administrati on from the Begi nni ng The Importance of Charisma in Shaping International Organizational Norms Jill L. Tao
24.1. Introduction Scholars of public administration are well versed in Max Weber’s oft-cited model of legitimate authority. But studies of the transitions between Weber’s three types of authority—charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational—are not as common. This may be due to the concentration within the discipline on Weber’s endgame: bureaucracy as the ideal-type of legal-rational authority. However, there is an argument to be made that there is much the field can learn from examining Weber’s reasoning about how one type of authority transforms into another, and the expectations provided by this reasoning. Anthony Downs is an exception to this observation. He has explored the implications of the transition from a charismatic to a traditional system of authority (1967), or as Weber calls it, ‘the routinization of charisma’ (as cited in Downs 1967, p. 5). Downs posits that bureaus, or public organizations, have a life cycle that may begin with this process, and that they therefore exhibit certain characteristics that shape their behaviour from conception. One of the most salient characteristics is the dominance of advocates and zealots during the early stages of a bureau’s life, and the stamp that such progenitors place on the organization (Downs, 1967, p. 5–8). If, indeed, the beginnings of public organizations are shaped considerably by those charged with their initial creation and operations, then there is much to be learned from the examination of the early stages of bureau life. This chapter will explore this idea
420 Jill L. Tao within the context of international organizations that may be considered transnational in nature, and the unique circumstances that surround their creation. While there is a substantial literature on bureau creation and consequent influence on organizational culture and norms (e.g. Seidman, 1998; Nakamura and Smallwood, 1980; Kaufman, 1967), there is relatively little exploration of this idea for organizations conceived in international forums, such as the United Nations (Gareau, 2002). What might we learn from examining the early years of such organizations, especially as their role in a globalized system of governance becomes increasingly important? This chapter will examine two such organizations from different time periods: the creation and early years of the International Finance Corporation (IFC); and the creation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Since the IFC is already well into middle age, examining its inception offers some expectations for the GCF, which is still in its infancy. Using Downs and Weber to frame the examination yields a set of clear constructs that may be tested in future studies. The implications for transnational governance are then posited and discussed.
24.2. Transnational Organizations and Administrative Behaviour To begin an examination of a topic that is in flux demands definition of terms. As outlined in Stone and Ladi (2015), transnational organizations are both metaphorically and literally beyond the reach of states and most of the models that we have for explaining their behaviour (Evans, 1999). These models are rooted in the concept of ‘Westphalian sovereignty’, which makes discussion of shared governance problematic (Stone and Ladi, 2015, p. 840). As they note: ‘This serves us poorly in contemporary times with regard to what can constitute the public domain and the remit of public policy when new public places and spaces are being carved out by, first, the international activities of governments, business and non- state actors, and, second, the cross-border movements of goods, organisms, and information’ (pp. 841–2). Likewise, Huddlestone has argued as follows: ‘Sovereignty is an outdated notion. Those who pursue it are chasing the ghost of another century’ (2000, p. 670). Transnational organizations can, therefore, take many forms that go beyond our traditional demarcations between public and private, and challenge our conceptions of the ‘uniqueness’ of public sector organizations in new ways (e.g. Perry and Rainey, 1988; Lan and Rainey, 1992; Rainey and Bozeman, 2000). Ostensibly, intergovernmental organizations, such as the two discussed in this chapter, are public entities, but they interact and often partner with non-state actors. The consequences of lacking a shared set of understandings as to what might constitute a transnational space, increasingly populated by a diverse set of actors, is laid out by Kingsbury et al. (2005): This situation has created an accountability deficit in the growing exercise of transnational regulatory power, which has begun to stimulate two different types of
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 421 responses: first, the attempted extension of domestic administrative law to intergovernmental regulatory decisions that affect a nation; and second, the development of new mechanisms of administrative law at the global level to address decisions and rules made within the intergovernmental regimes (16).
In traditional models of public administration and policy (and. indeed, political science), the question of ‘who benefits’ from a given set of decisions, rules, or policies, is how questions of accountability are determined. Thus, which public is served shapes the nature of the benefits that are offered, and, as Stone and Ladi argue, the nature of ‘public’ changes at the transnational level in fundamental ways. But this is only part of what determines the nature of benefits. The other piece of the puzzle lies in the hands of the provider. Who provides benefits, and through what mechanisms, are matters of long-standing concern to policy implementation scholars (Bartik, 1991; Mazmanian and Sabatier, 1989). There are two separate approaches to examining the impact of the choice of agency when addressing a given public problem within the confines of a state. First, a problem may be delegated to an existing agency, where the choice may be made based on a combination of political, administrative and logistical concerns (Seidman, 1998). Second, an agency may be created specifically to deal with a particular problem that is viewed as beyond the purview of existing agencies (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984). Although Pressman and Wildavsky, and indeed most policy implementation scholars, do not discuss transnational administration or even international organizations, certainly many problems that trespass national boundaries have led to the creation of international organizations to address those problems and bridge those boundaries. Thus, when Pressman and Wildavsky note the barriers to realistic problem solving inherent in using existing authority structures, there is definitely common ground for discussion of such barriers within the transnational context. The similarities can be illustrated by the following example. As both Downs and Pressman and Wildavsky note, when agencies are created to address specific problems, the approach they take can be markedly different from that of an existing agency tasked with solving a new problem that may stretch the limits of its mandate. New agencies are far more malleable, with more discretionary space, and the range of controls exercised by leadership has profound influence over the way an agency develops its repertoire of approaches for achieving its objectives, as well as its ‘rules-in-use’ regimes (Weible, 2014, p. 4; Lipsky, 1980; Mazmanian and Sabatier, 1989; Downs, 1967). Thus the brand new organization carries little (or less) organizational cultural baggage, and its way forward will bear the marks of its founding members.
24.2.1. Organizational Life Cycles and their Consequences Once an agency is created, according to Downs, it changes as it ages, especially in terms of its personnel characteristics, which may, in turn, affect the way in which it carries out
422 Jill L. Tao its mandate. Older organizations are, as Downs puts it, subject to the ‘Law of Increasing Conservatism: all organizations tend to become more conservative as they get older, unless they experience periods of very rapid growth or internal turnover’ (Downs, 1967, p. 20, italics in the original). They go through adolescence, with all the giddiness and experimentation that implies, and then enter adulthood, middle and old age, where the Law of Increasing Conservatism strengthens. But at the beginning, Downs posits particular conditions for hatchling public organizations: The ideas upon which a new bureau is based have generally originated with some group of zealots. In many cases, the leading proponents of these ideas are immediately put in charge of the bureau. In any case, whoever is running a bureau entrusted with a new function soon finds that his recruiting efforts are most successful with men who have a proclivity toward that function—including the zealots who started the idea, or their disciples. Moreover, since the top administrator and his staff will normally be judged by their success in carrying out this function, they also tend to become strong advocates themselves’ (1967, p. 7).
Downs outlines five ‘ideal-types’ of bureaucrats that populate public organizations. They fall into two categories: ‘purely self-interested officials’, or those concerned ‘almost entirely by goals that benefit themselves rather than their bureaus or society as a whole’ (p. 88); and ‘mixed-motive officials’, or those who ‘have goals that combine self- interest and altruistic loyalty to larger values’ (p. 88). Climbers, motivated by power, income and prestige, and conservers, motivated by convenience and security, occupy the first category. The second contains zealots, motivated by ‘sacred policies’ that are narrow and particular, advocates, ‘loyal to a broader set of functions or to a broader organization’, and statesmen, ‘loyal to society as a whole’ (p. 88). Each is presumed to be utility- maximizing, and this drives their behaviour within the organization. Thus the new organization has a core of both self-interested and mixed-motive leaders, all of whom are driven by the idea that a new organization is the best vehicle for carrying out their shared vision of what needs to be accomplished. This may be due to the perception that existing organizations have either tried, or failed, to adequately address the mission in question, or that the mission is entirely new, and therefore requires a new vehicle, or policy tool, to be successful. Either way, new organizations have what Downs calls ‘dominance’ by zealots (p. 11). He categorizes charismatic leaders who push for the creation of new agencies as zealots, and their followers as ‘disciples’ (p. 6). In addition, the new organization must seek ways to support itself and its mission. How it does so depends greatly on the way in which the charismatic leader and his (or her) disciples perceive the threats to the new organization’s survival. Downs is clear in identifying the means by which such survival can be assured: those who use the organization’s services ‘become convinced of their gains from it, and have developed routinized relations with it’, lobby political masters in its favour (p. 8). So a premium is placed on identifying stakeholders and establishing relations that can quickly
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 423 become ‘automatic’. New organizations that fail to perceive the threats to their survival may perish at an early stage. These concepts and categories have resonance for understanding not only the creation of traditional international organizations, but also new varieties of transnational agencies such as those discussed in chapters on informal international organizations (by Vabulas in this volume) and transgovernmental network dynamics (by Legrand in this volume). In particular, the relationships between the new agency and its external sources of legitimacy, both in a legal and a resource-dependent sense, may help identify the influence of such factors on agency efficacy and the means for overcoming problems like mission drift.
24.2.2. Routinization of Charisma Downs was clearly influenced by Weber’s definition of charismatic authority when constructing his theory for organizational life cycles, but there are components of Weber’s ideas that should be revisited at their source. For example, what precisely is charisma, and how is it thereby, routinized, which is almost a contradiction in terms? Weber defines charisma as follows: Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint. The holder of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission. His success determines whether he finds them. His charismatic claim breaks down if his mission is not recognized by those to whom he feels he has been sent. If they recognize him, he is their master—so long as he knows how to maintain recognition through ‘proving’ himself. But he does not derive his ‘right’ from their will, in the manner of an election. Rather, the reverse holds: it is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader (Weber 1968, p. 20).
Thus, one cannot claim oneself as charismatic; he or she must be recognized by others, and linked to a specific mission that requires their help to fulfil. And the mission is neither mundane nor routine; it requires extraordinary efforts and therefore relies on motivations that go well beyond ‘private gain’ or ‘pecuniary compensation’: In order to do justice to their mission, the holders of charisma, the master as well as his disciples, must stand outside of the ties of this world, outside of routine occupations, as well as outside of the routine obligations of family life . . . All of this is indicative of the unavoidable separation from this world of those who partake of . . . charisma. (Weber 1968, pp. 21–2)
This means that charisma is, by definition, antithetical to organizational life. The pressing question then becomes: how does it become ‘routinized’? Weber looks at the example of the monarch, who rises to power through war or the staving off of disaster, such as famine, whose followers then become a ‘ruling caste’. The followers then seek
424 Jill L. Tao some kind of stability for the interests they have vested in their leader (who may not be stable in nature). So the followers seek legitimacy in the definition of the characteristics of the ‘charismatically qualified ruler’ (p. 27). In this way, the nature of charisma is pinned down and institutionalized in ‘rational discipline’—followers no longer need the charismatic leader, since his or her qualities can be fulfilled by anyone fitting the job description. What are the implications of these ideas for transnational organizations? There are some clear conceptual points of agreement from these two lines of thought. First and foremost, the characteristics of early leaders shape the organizations in important ways: the norms for behaviour are established by the relationship between the leader and the ‘disciples’; formal and informal goals are laid out; and, the incentive structure (including sanctions and inducements) is generally put in place. Second, these ‘blueprints’ for the organization are carried forward and influence its ability to remain relevant and effective as the organization ages. For transnational organizations, this means that the decisions as to who benefits are most likely defined in practical terms during organizational youth, when the relationships between beneficiaries and benefactors are routinized. For transnational organizations, establishing where such formative actions take place can be tricky. Many transnational organizations are created as intergovernmental bodies through agreements between member states, and are thereby collective creatures with a somewhat legalistic set of founding rules, and a governing board to ensure that actions taken represent the membership’s wishes, not necessarily those of the staff. But this is not where Weber or Downs directs our attention. We should examine those people brought in to lead the organization at its inception, and who are charged with carrying out its mandate: the first directors and their staff. This type of question and analytical vantage point applies as much to traditional international organizations (such as the two discussed below) as it does to new hybrid entities such as global public–private partnerships. If Downs and Weber are correct, there is much to learn from such an examination. It is important, therefore, to set the parameters for the conclusions that can be drawn when the examination is complete, and perhaps even more importantly, which questions remain. In the cases that follow, selection criteria establish the basis for comparison and frame the limits of the lessons drawn. In this way, future scholars may focus on the questions left unanswered by the cases here, with a clearer path forward delineated by what has already been done.
24.3. The Early Years of International Organization: Two Cases This chapter addresses two transnational organizations with somewhat similar mechanisms for achieving their mandates, but at different points in their organizational
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 425 life cycles, to see how well these constructs test in the field. Choosing comparable organizations for these purposes is challenging, since organizations at different stages of life are, by definition, not established at the same time. Additionally, since transnational organizations often have broad, far-reaching objectives but different mechanisms for achieving them, selection can be further confused by choosing organizations with similar missions but completely different methods for achieving those objectives. Additionally, the governing structure of the organizations should be similar, since organizations dealing with transnational problems often contain two somewhat distinct governing bodies (Bennett, 1991). Generally, there is both a representative body that speaks for member states and sets policy objectives for the organization, and there is also a functional technocratic body that carries out those objectives. The relationship between these two parts can take on a myriad of authority configurations, from cooperative to competitive, and with power imbalances between the two. Thus finding organizations with somewhat comparable missions and mechanisms for implementation of policy objectives from separate time periods requires careful consideration of all these criteria. Given this starting point, finding two organizations that are matched on these criteria is challenging, but serves to illustrate the importance of engaging the questions raised in the preceding section. Two different organizations from different times yet with surprisingly similar mechanisms for governing and for carrying out policy objectives are the International Finance Corporation (IFC), established under the urging of its first director, Robert L. Garner, in 1956 as part of what would later become the World Bank Group (Mason and Asher, 1973). The second, a much more recent creation, is the Green Climate Fund (GCF), created through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in March 2012, and which began operations in June 2013 with the appointment of its first executive director, Hela Cheikhrouhou (UNFCCC, 2011; UNFCCC, 2012; GCF, 2016). By examining the early stages of development for each organization, using the theoretical lens provided by Downs and Weber, we may be able to determine how early practices shaped later approaches to organizational behaviour. Additionally, since the IFC is now well into middle age, its current status may offer some insight into what we can expect from the future GCF.
24.3.1. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) The IFC was, by most accounts, the brainchild of its first director, Robert L. Garner. Serving as the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of General Foods Corporation, Garner was brought to the World Bank as its Vice President in 1947, after the abrupt resignation of the first US World Bank President, Eugene Meyer, and his replacement by John J. McCloy. Insisting that he be able to choose his own team as a condition of his acceptance of the position, McCloy also helped replace the World Bank’s Executive Director, Emilio Collado, with Eugene R. Black, the Vice President of Chase National Bank in New York (Mason and Asher, 1973, p. 45–50; IFC, 2016). The tenuous nature of
426 Jill L. Tao establishing a new entity like the World Bank, and how close it came to collapse before it had even started is outlined in the difficulties faced by its early president and the reasons behind the abrupt resignation. According to Walter Lippmann, writing a syndicated column picked up by the New York Herald Tribune, the problem lay in the distinction between formal authority and actual power: Unless the president of the bank can count upon the support of the American government and is assured that his advice will be taken very seriously by the Administration and by Congress, he cannot hope to do what is expected of him. If his real authority is only that which he has legally, he is only an administrative officer and a figurehead. Yet the world will hold him responsible for the success of the bank (Lippmann 1947, p. 3).
Indeed, it was partly because of the strictures placed on the World Bank by its creators that the IFC was formed. Garner, who as World Bank Vice President, understood its limitations, pressed for an alternative organization that would focus on efforts that went beyond public projects and infrastructure in less developed nations. He wrote, ‘It was my firm conviction that the most promising future for the less developed countries was the establishing of good private industry’ (IFC, 2016). His idea was shared by the Bank’s executive director, Eugene Black, who concurred that the World Bank’s mission was sufficiently distinct and that the creation of a new entity dedicated to private sector development would be worthwhile. Together they approached Nelson Rockefeller, who had also worked for Chase National Bank, and who had been appointed the Chair of the International Development Advisory Board under President Harry Truman. In 1951, the Board submitted an evaluation of the proposals of the Gordon Gray Report, ‘Partners in Progress’, which outlined Truman’s policies towards ‘underdeveloped areas’ (Truman, 1951). The evaluation, known as the Board’s Report on Foreign Economic Policy, was 120 pages, and focused on how to use private sector tools to help promote economic growth, especially in regions of the world where the Soviet Union was making headway. One of its recommendations was the creation of the IFC. The model Garner had in mind was the British approach to its colonial holdings through the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), and to bring in relevant expertise, he hired John Beevor, its former managing director, as the IFC’s first Vice President (IFC, 2016) after the IFC’s creation in 1956. Garner was originally from Mississippi, born in 1894, and he had also been a banker prior to his stint at General Foods. He was familiar with the investment community in New York, and was known as a somewhat abrasive, no-sugar-coating ‘straight talking’ personality. Given these characteristics, he also reportedly had the ability to improve the performance of his staff by increasing their confidence in their ability to accomplish the tasks at hand, and as such, he had a loyal following (Mason and Asher, 1973, p. 51). When the IFC was created in 1956, its purpose was to invest in private sector projects with four specific guidelines: first, private investors, not governments, would provide most (if not all) of the start-up capital for projects; second, the IFC would invest
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 427 in primarily private ventures, not public projects such as hospitals, infrastructure, or power plants; third, the IFC would not invest in projects for which conventional financing was available; and, fourth, it would not manage the projects in which it invested. These guidelines kept the role of the IFC clearly within the realm of finance, and within the realm of the private sector. Garner’s initial vision, however, was only partly realized. He pushed for an initial capitalization of $400 million, but got only one-quarter of that amount. He also pushed for equity investments to be made available, but the initial Board of Directors vetoed this idea, only allowing loans to be made for promising projects.
24.3.2. Charismatic Leadership? Garner came from an investment banking and finance background. He was part of the network that rebuilt the New York investment community in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and was therefore keenly aware of the importance of solid banking principles as the foundation of good investment strategies. However, far more important was the investment network within New York, and the way in which investment capital could be won. He saw the World Bank as having the potential, but not the capacity given its focus, to match investors and new projects in parts of the world that needed such investment. The question of his leadership and the character shaping the organization seems clear. He eventually won his request for equity investments for shareholders, which made it much easier to attract new capital. Structurally, however, the organization remains as conceived by the Board of Governors, its oversight body, and the Board of Directors, the membership body that makes policy decisions and works with the Executive Vice President to determine administrative details. This should not be surprising, given the collective nature of the organization’s oversight. The discretion given to the Executive Vice President, however, is a long-standing holdover from the initial negotiations that almost stopped the World Bank’s first steps towards its objectives before it began, and Garner’s insistence with the IFC that the managers should be given enough discretion to ‘do their jobs well’ (Mason and Asher, 1973, p. 46). How might we measure the impact of Garner’s legacy on the IFC? Was he simply the first of a number of likeminded directors to steer the organization? Or was his ‘mission’, as Weber would call it, sufficiently unique in setting norms and expectations of staff that it shaped the ways in which the IFC made later decisions? A proxy is suggested to establish what might be considered evidence of decision-making behaviours by staff: the nature of projects approved for loans and investment by the IFC during Garner’s tenure and after. Ideally, examining the staff records of the initial twelve people hired by Garner to carry out IFC’s mission would provide the best insight. However, access to such records can only be obtained from the World Bank repository in person as online records extend back only to 1989. Accordingly, this
428 Jill L. Tao type of research project awaits more considered attention from political historians of World Bank policy processes.
24.3.3. Middle Age at the IFC As organizations age, Downs argues, their characteristics shift. A young organization, led by a charismatic director, is likely to have a high percentage of advocates and zealots in its ranks, since both will find it more likely that their particular utilities can be maximized under such conditions. If the organization survives its infancy, and begins to grow, it will attract climbers, some of whom may vie for the top post after the initial charismatic leader moves on. But by middle age, the bulk of personnel (or the ‘age lump’, as Downs calls it) will be conservers, those happy with the way things are and not looking for any drastic changes in structure or programming (Downs, 1967). Is there any evidence that this is where the IFC now stands? Where might we look? And more importantly, what might confirmation of Downs’ thesis mean? If indeed, the IFC has continued down the path set by Garner and his team of twelve in 1956, then public organization theory leads us to some potentially interesting theoretical questions. First is the nature of change. The tomes that have been written on the difficulty public organizations face when adapting to new environmental challenges, especially those from the political realm, occupy a large proportion of the theoretical space in public administration. As outlined above, transnational organizations such as the IFC challenge even Bozeman’s fundamental assumption that ‘all organizations are public’ (Bozeman, 1988). The definition of which public looms large: Is it those represented by the sovereign states sitting on the IFC’s board? Or is it the private sector actors who receive IFC financing? It has been suggested that the loyalties of personnel in such organizations are not to clients, or to political masters, but to the organization itself (Moloney, 2016). What consequences does such a loyalty proxy have for theories of public organizations? Examining the beginnings of another transnational organization may offer further insight into what such consequences may be.
24.3.4. The Green Climate Fund While the IFC has certainly entered middle age, the GCF is still in its infancy, and as such, some might argue, still vulnerable. The next few years will be telling ones for the organization, as it establishes itself and its mission as essential to the international community. This is no small feat. The GCF has a very specific mission: to use its financing tools to keep the global temperature from rising to its 2 degree centigrade threshold, or the point at which global warming will accelerate and the world will become hotter than any time recorded in history (Carbon Brief, 2014). The UNFCCC recommended the
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 429 creation of the GCF in 2010 at its meeting in Cancun, and outlined specifically the way in which the organization would be structured and how its oversight mechanisms would function. As with most UN-worded agreements, the concerned parties are nation states, developed and less-developed, and each has a particular role to play in achieving global carbon emissions reductions. The GCF’s role is to focus on ‘adaptation’, which according to the Cancun Congress of the Parties, accomplishes this by helping developing nations do the following: Planning, prioritizing and implementing adaptation actions, including projects and programmes, and actions identified in national and subnational adaptation plans and strategies, national adaptation programmes of action of the least developed countries, national communications, technology needs assessments and other relevant national planning documents. (UNFCCC 2010: 4)
Since this requires considerable levels of governing capacity for the ‘least developed’ countries, one portion of the GCF’s mandate would seem to be focused on helping nations develop such capacity, but this does not appear to be the GCF’s primary concern. At the Conference of the Parties in 2011 in Durban, there was a shift in how ‘adaptation and mitigation’ might be achieved. A new section was added to the agreements between the parties, which focused on ‘using markets’ to achieve these goals in a more ‘cost- effective’ manner (UNFCCC, 2011, p. 16) The GCF, like the IFC, seems to be primarily a funding institution, and although it still is tasked with technology and capacity-building efforts, unlike the IFC and much of the activity surrounding its creation, the placement of the GCF headquarters’ in the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) in Songdo, South Korea, and the choice of its first executive director, Hela Cheikhrouhou, all underscore this finance role. The GCF was created to provide ‘climate finance’ to developing nations, which helps those countries deemed most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change develop mitigation and adaptation projects and programmes: They include climate specific support mechanisms and financial aid for mitigation and adaption activities to spur and enable the transition towards low-carbon, climate-resilient growth and development through capacity building, R&D and economic development. (Chung 2015, p. 17)
Hela Cheikhrouhou, the first executive director, is a Tunisian national, thus representing the ‘developing’ end of the spectrum, and the UNFCCC’s desire to focus especially on the African continent and the barriers to low-emissions development that it faces. Her education and background, however, place her squarely within the developed world’s milieu, as someone educated in Canada, and who spent the first seven years of her professional life working as an investment banker for Citibank in Canada. Subsequently, she worked for subsidiaries of the regional development banks in Latin America and the Caribbean, until moving to the African Development Bank, where she rose through
430 Jill L. Tao the ranks to become the Director of the Energy, Environment and Climate Change Department, and made a name for herself creating lucrative investments in developing countries in Africa. She was particularly credited with ‘scaling up the Bank’s green growth and climate resilient investments through an innovative blend of public and private finance’ (African Press Organization, 2013). Like Garner, she was an insider who had particular skills that fitted the organization. Unlike Garner, there is little evidence to indicate that the organization was created at her behest. She was one of three finalists for the position of Executive Director.
24.3.5. Charismatic Leader? However, there is quite a bit of evidence to indicate that she has played a key role in pulling together the Executive Board members. Of the four directors who serve under Cheikrhouhou, all have previous experience with the World Bank, two with the African Development Bank (AfDB), one with the Central American Bank for Economic Development, and all have worked for the private banking and investment sector as well (Citigroup, Santander, Accenture, and BNP Paribas (GCF, 2016)). All have crossed paths before, and are part of the network of donor organizations like the World Bank and the international finance community. This is to be expected, given the mandate of the Fund, but as an organization with public roots, and an oversight board made up of representation from sovereign nations, the structure is uniquely non-public in nature. The issue of the GFC’s transparency has been raised repeatedly by civic groups and by watchdog associations with regard to the procedures the GCF will use to do a number of things (Kumar, 2016), prompting promises by the Executive Director to improve the quality and frequency of information it provides. This has not appeased the GCF’s strongest critics; these are watchdog INGOs with a focus on reducing poverty and environmental damage in the global South, such as ActionAid in South Africa, the Asociacion Interamericana para la Defensa de Ambiente (AIDA) in Mexico, and the Heinrich-B oll Foundation in Germany. Through the initial whirlwind of activity that followed the GCF’s founding and startup, Cheikhrouhou was the face of the agency both inside South Korea and beyond. She managed the image of the agency in an interesting way, providing a highly professional and user-friendly website, supplemented by access to the office headquarters in Songdo by numerous outside groups, while still maintaining control of organizational message. She was low-key in her approach to the media, therefore appearing accessible and genuine. She supported her discussions of what the GCF’s mission and plans for the future with information that was accurate and detailed, but not highly revelatory. Her demeanour was that of a technocrat rather than a politically charged leader, and her emphasis hovered around three core messages: concern for the long-term stability of funding (e.g. invest with us, the GCF is a safe bet); climate change as a pressing issue (e.g. investing now rather than later is prudent); and technical investment prowess
Transnational Administration from the Beginning 431 (e.g. the GCF has the necessary expertise to secure return on your investment)(Climate Tracker, 2015). The Executive Director announced in March 2016 that she would be stepping down in September, which she did indeed do (she has since become the Energy Minister of Tunisia). Her replacement is Howard Bamsey, an Australian with a long track record inside South Korea as the former executive director of the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul. As a career diplomat for Australia’s Foreign Service, and several stints as a UN official representing Australia’s views on climate change, there is some expectation that different parts of the organization will now receive attention. So, which public does the GCF serve? Has Cheikrouhou’s brief tenure as the founding head of the agency produced the ripple effects one would expect from routinization of charisma? There seems to be some indication that her tenure will continue to set norms for the organization. One of her signature mandates was gender equity and better representation of the developing world among staff, including contractors hired to do projects for the GCF. Those preferences seem to have remained intact: the organization boasts a ‘50/50 balance between men and women, 30+ nationalities, and many more languages spoken’ at its headquarters in Songdo (GCF 2017). Under Bamsey, the Secretariat’s Senior Management team still has at least three members who served under Cheikrouhou and represent the regional development banks in terms of experience and finance in terms of training. Although the shift toward inclusion of more diplomatic approaches is evident, the holdovers from the previous board still outnumber the new additions who have more climate change and international organization experience. This will be a challenge for the GCF going forward: with its origins firmly rooted in fiscal stability, its arguably more important mandate to prevent global warming by investing in ‘transformational’ energy projects in the developing world, has not been realized (Herz, 2016). The organizational identity is split between investment in development on the one hand, and mitigating global climate change on the other. This would seem to suggest that the ‘public’ served has a split personality. Minutes from meetings of the Board after the change in leadership indicate that having a seat at the table is something that many developing countries take very seriously, and not for investment reasons (GCF, 2017a). But much of the workload for the Board is to determine how funding mechanisms will work and approve procedures for implementation of projects. This lends itself to Moloney’s argument (2006) that the organization itself becomes its own project, where the agenda for decision making is literally written by those interested in how the organization continues to perpetuate itself.
24.3.6. The Hazards of Early Stages of the Organizational Life Cycle Downs is quite clear about the dangers posed to the young public bureau. As it searches for a patron, if its leadership is not sufficiently vested in its survival, it may find itself
432 Jill L. Tao facing a sudden demise or (far more likely for public organizations) a sharp change of mandate and a reconfiguration into existing organizations. There is a large body of literature that supports this premise (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984; Seidman, 1998): a fledgling organization with few or no protectors faces a daunting array of powers, all of whom will look at its budget and personnel with hungry eyes. The conventional wisdom is that an existing organization can put such resources to better use. The very forces that converge to create a new organization underscore its vulnerabilities during its infancy. Moreover, a transnational organization faces an additional challenge. Much of what drives the circling of political vultures around a new organization lies in the nature of the public budget. With a constrained set of resources, the opportunity costs surrounding the creation of a new entity are clear. An organization created through the pooled commitments from donor nations lacks such clarity. Can donor nations give more? Can pressures be brought to bear on others? What are the limits on funds? Where else might such funds be spent? The space in which opportunity cost can be calculated constantly shifts, making assessment difficult, and identification of threats less predictable. Some of the recent moves of the GCF highlight the urgency of finding allies. In the first five months of 2016, the GCF has signed no less than seven agreements with other international organizations: the United Nations World Meteorological Association; the Agency for Agricultural Development of Morocco; AfDB; the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center; Centre de Suivi Ecologique of Senegal; the Environmental Investment Fund of Namibia; and the Acumen Fund (Ben-Ari 2013). As it outlines in the press releases surrounding such partnerships, these agreements are meant to ‘enhance the GCF’s ability to identify viable projects in developing nations and to match financing for such projects’ (GCF, 2016a). By linking itself to existing organizations and their networks, the GCF seeks to establish its own legitimacy. This serves two purposes according to the implementation literature: first, strengthened legitimacy makes carrying out its mandate, whatever it may be, easier; and, second, such strengthening protects a new agency from would-be poachers. Within a national domestic context, such poachers would be other organizations who covet the new agency’s budget. In the GCF context, poachers might be external actors who seek investment in similar areas, and view the GCF as a competitor. Interestingly, the second Executive Director, Bamsey, was the former head of just such an agency: the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul. Since the Paris Accords in 2015, its sense of urgency has increased, and recent political shifts within the US and parts of Europe have also accelerated decision-making within the projects division of the organization (Samper, 2016). Proving its worth to its supporters will mean demonstrating tangibles in its market models that do not add to the problems that it has been tasked with fixing. The temptation to finance energy production that may provide the quickest return on investment (construction of coal-fired power plants, for example) is very real (Goldberg, 2015).
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24.4. Initial Assessments and Lingering Issues This chapter has sought to address what we know about how charismatic leadership of transnational organizations fits into public administration theory. Despite substantial literature on the World Bank presidents and General Secretaries of the UN, the initial assessment is that we know very little. The examination here raises some striking questions about what we still have left to learn. As discussed above, transnational organizations do cleave closer to the public organization model than to other models we might borrow from organization theory, and this is the contribution Downs makes to our definitions of ‘public’. A clear assumption of the theories of public organizations is the identification of a particular public that is to be served. The choice of which organization will serve that public is highly political, as one might expect within a democratic forum. But the links between ‘public(s)’ and ‘organization’ for transnational organizations are distinctly different in nature: in terms of how such organizations are funded; how they finance their organizational mandate; who benefits; and, indeed, what difference it makes. If the characteristics of the formative years for transnational organizations can be assumed to be similar to those outlined by Downs, then the question of who oversees, as Wilson, (1887) put it, ‘the day-to-day business’, matters. Moving forward, there is much that public administration scholars can learn from such contexts: both about the nature of the tie between the definition of a ‘public’ and whether it can transcend the realm of the sovereign (and if so, how it continues to be ‘public’), and whether there is a new definition of accountability when the question of ‘who benefits’ becomes confounded by capital investments and broader societal development goals. The cases presented here are meant only as a ‘proof of concept’, to highlight where we might focus attention empirically if we wish to answer the questions raised, and as an agenda for future research on international organizations, whether they be inter- governmental or informal. Examining the foundations of organizations and perhaps employing more rigorous historical contextual analysis, drawing on the vast International Relations literature to frame investigations, would be a start. Yet, as briefly demonstrated here, identifying the characteristics of first leaders does offer some insight into how transnational organizations establish norms, identify stakeholders and potential protectors, and establish the foundation for future behaviour. The routinization of charisma has a role to play in the life cycles of organizations, especially in shaping the choice of implementation tools used to accomplish objectives. There is much we have yet to learn. However, expanding our analysis to include multiple organizations, each with similar governance structures, yet who are at different places in their life cycles, has merit. Such investigations may provide us with a better understanding of where problems arise in the sustainability and performance of international organizations,
434 Jill L. Tao and therefore, how such problems might be addressed. It may also offer a timeline for focusing on particular problems of agency, and identifying when an organization may be vulnerable to mission drift. For public administration scholars, ‘there is nothing as practical as a good theory’ (Lewin, 1952, p. 169), and in the uncharted territory of transnational organizations, a good theory can be a welcome guide.
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Chapter 25
De signing Gl oba l P u bl i c P ol icies in th e T w e nt y- First Cent u ry Meng-H suan Chou and Pauline Ravinet
25.1. Introduction This chapter introduces readers to the value-added of the policy design approach for studying the emergence, selection, and evolution of global initiatives. To do so, it describes the state of the acquis académique on policy design and outlines the analytical steps required to apply policy design insights to studies of global public and transnational administration. Its starting point, like other chapters in this handbook, is that the relevance of the global is assumed for a contemporary understanding and study of politics and policy making. By demonstrating how the policy design approach can be used to account for developments of global initiatives and transnational cooperation, the chapter invites political and policy scientists interested in design to reflect on the technical, learning, and sequential aspects of policy making across different policy arenas, especially the interaction between actors and settings inside and beyond the nation state, in the globalized context of today. In this chapter, policy design is ultimately defined as a dynamic and deliberative process between policy actors, during which they exchange policy ideas (problems are coupled with solutions), provide and articulate justifications for their positions, and agree on and experiment with steps forward, based on existing knowledge. Here, knowledge is taken to refer to insights into both the procedural and substantive aspects of policy making and implementation. Policy actors are expected to have different and overlapping beliefs about the potential policy opportunities for addressing these challenges, rooted in their respective experiences from national and other transnational cooperation (perceived failures and successes). By engaging in policy design, policy actors craft the instruments and mixes that are supposed to generate their desired policy
438 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet outcomes. In this chapter, policy design is thus conceived as a continual and repeated process occurring throughout the policy cycle that motivates actors to ‘venue-shop’ for the best institutional framework to facilitate their objectives. A variety of examples from around the world are used in this chapter to illustrate these points. The intention is to highlight the shifting trends of contemporary governance and the areas which scholars are invited to examine. The chapter begins with a review of the policy design literature, where a new design orientation is emerging, before elaborating its value-added in studying transnational developments. In the section that follows, the chapter continues with a working definition of policy design and discussions of three adjustments that should be made to the policy design approach before applying the design approach to studying transnational policy developments and administration. This chapter concludes by proposing a new metaphor of sketching for the policy design approach to studying global public policy and transnational administration.
25.2. Policy Design: The State of the Art The literature on policy design is a rich and mature field of research. Several reviews (cf. Howlett and Lejano, 2012; Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo, 2015) describe the theoretical and substantive contributions that design orientation has made to enriching our understanding of contemporary public policy making and implementation effects. In these surveys of the field, the narrative concerning the emergence and development of the policy design literature is generally divided into either three acts (when authors want to highlight the premises of the design approach) or two acts (when authors seek to emphasize the similarities and differences between the old and new design orientations). The review below combines these two objectives, synthesises the core principles of the policy design approach, and describes how they have evolved from the 1950s to the current day. For the purpose of this Handbook and its goal of assessing the relevance of policy and administrative sciences for understanding transnational and global policies, this review will focus on two aspects throughout this period: the positioning of policy design within the overall policy sciences and the attention it dedicates to beyond- the-state issues.
25.2.1. Early Years (Before the 1980s) When tracing its genealogy, policy design scholars date the premises of the design orientation to the 1950s and 1960s when policy sciences first began to take shape as a unique academic discipline (see DeLeon, 2008 for a historical overview). Behind the emergence of policy sciences was a growing scholarly interest in the role of self-conscious
Designing Global Public Polices 439 choices in policy making to mitigate implementation effects. While this focus can be seen in what would become the key readings of policy sciences (for example, ‘planning’ in Dahl and Lindblom, 1953), the pioneering works of Harold Lasswell (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951; Lasswell, 1954), in particular, have been singled out as inspirational for the design orientation. The Lasswellian concern for ‘concerted efforts of governments to act instrumentally . . . and to achieve a particular policy goal . . . through the use of a relatively well-known set of policy means developed over many years of state building and experience’ continues to resonate with today’s design orientation (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo, 2015, p. 293). During this very early period, however, the label of ‘design’ was only occasionally used (see Tinbergen, 1958; 1967) and there was no identifiable strand of the policy design literature with a set of common shared questions and shared definitions. The analytical origin of the policy design approach is thus embedded in the broader movement of the emerging policy sciences at the time and, as it will become clearer below, its evolution is twinned with the general shifts towards other aspects of policy making. Beyond these pioneering works, research within policy sciences during this early phase revolved around understanding the contextual aspects of policy making and in making sense of implementation (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2014, p. 60). This is in strong contrast to the emphasis on policy formulation and instruments, which are the hallmarks of current studies with a design orientation. Policy design scholars point out how scholarly interests in contexts and implementation in the 1970s gave contingency and uncertainty in policy developments an overwhelming role in the emerging policy sciences. The classic studies of John S. Dryzek (1983) and John W. Kingdon (1984) are two excellent examples of this combination of a general emphasis on contingency and uncertainty, on the one hand, and explicit attention dedicated to the opportunistic behaviour of policy actors, on the other. In this academic milieu, where policy uncertainty was given research primacy, approaches centred on the ‘opportunistic behaviour of policy makers’ were far more valued; and approaches interested in the ‘careful deliberation and “design” thinking’ of specific policy arrangements were simply outside the mainstream (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2014, p. 60)—but this would soon change. During this early period, the beyond-the-state dimension was absent in academic policy analyses. It would be anachronistic to conclude that policy scientists merely neglected international developments and failed to account for their relevance entirely or in domestic political and policy developments. It would be far more accurate to say that international issues were simply outside the mental maps of many early policy scientists delineating a design research agenda. They reflect this bias when placing the locus of political power and policy making at the national level or, subsequently, the infra- national level, even though many scholars working on, for example, the developing world have already emphasized the significance of the global (for example, institutional actors such as the World Bank) in shaping domestic political and policy developments. Indeed, International Relations scholars have incorporated the linkages between the transnational and the domestic in theories such as, among others, system theory and dependency theory. This analytical and empirical delineation would have profound effects on
440 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet the division of academic labour within the social sciences: studying the design of public policy means unpacking state domestic interventions, and examining international and inter-state issues is for those in another sub-field of political science—International Relations. This divide continues and would become consolidated in the next phase of the policy design approach when the latter acquired a clear conceptual pathway.
25.2.2. Path-Breaking Years (1980s–1990s) The 1980s marked the start of the path-breaking period for the policy design approach (see the seminal pieces from this period by Linder and Peters, 1984, 1988, 1991), which successfully extended the debate within policy sciences at the time concerning the roles of the stages in the policy cycle, on the one hand, and instruments, on the other, in public policy. The work of Lester Salamon (1981) characterizes this contention: he argues for a science of policy instruments as the way forward in policy sciences, previously occupied with contexts and uncertainty. Extant literature reviews of the policy design approach consistently cite Salamon’s (1981, p. 256) statement that policy studies had gone ‘wrong’ from the start ‘by defining policy in terms of problems, issues or fields rather than instruments’. From then on, it became increasingly acknowledged among policy scientists that instruments and instrumentation deserve more scholarly attention than they had thus far received. This led to a growth of literature in the 1980s that focused on, inter alia, categorizing instrument types and identifying the rationale underlying their selection and usage (Salamon, 1981; Hood, 1983; Bressers and Klok, 1988). For design scholars, Salamon’s (1981, p. 256) call to concentrate on the ‘generic tools of government action, on the “technique” of social intervention’ was a clear battle cry for pushing forward and broadening their research agenda on policy design. Within this intellectual universe, in which the systematic study of instruments is advocated and the significance of contingency and uncertainty in studies of public policy questioned, design scholars advanced their analytical distinction between policy ‘design- as-verb’ and policy ‘design-as-noun’ as the core of the (‘old’) design orientation (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo, 2015, p. 292). Inspired by Donald Schön’s (1988, 1992) work on the design processes of professional practices in urban planning and architecture, ‘design- as-verb’ refers to a set of policy formulation activities necessary in the undertaking. Here, the focus is on the process of finding the best output and instrument as well as their implementation. By contrast, ‘design-as-noun’ means the policy tools and instruments themselves. This implies looking at the substance of policy instruments, and how they are able to address a policy problem and intend to affect the policy choices and content. This very extension that design is more than the act (but includes both meanings as verb and noun) gave way to a set of key features associated with the policy design approach: focus on the rationality of designers who want to improve policy making rather than on contingency and uncertainty; emphasis on the role of knowledge, which guides designers’ rational choices, rather than political strategic bargaining as the main mechanism of policy making; and a clear concern for instruments, both substantive and procedural
Designing Global Public Polices 441 (see Howlett, 2000). Another distinctive feature of the policy design approach is its ontology: a design orientation is infused with a concern for ‘good’ design. This preoccupation creates a rather subtle overlap between ‘policy design’ as an analytical framework for explaining public policy making and effects, and ‘(good) policy design’ as a desirable outcome of policy making to which policy sciences could ultimately contribute. During this period, the policy design approach continued to be strongly anchored to the state, with the whole theoretical edifice of policy design structured by a frame of reference to the nation state. The global and transnational dimensions were thus still missing in scholarly works with the design orientation. Interestingly, it was this very focus on national developments that had contributed to a ‘precipitous decline’ of the policy design approach in the late 1990s (Howlett and Lejano, 2012, p. 8). According to Michael Howlett and Raul Lejano (2012, p. 9), the weakened interest in policy design was a manifestation of the ‘decentering of policy studies away from the centrality of authority and state centeredness’. This decentring is related to the rise of New Public Management, network governance, and collaborative governance, as well as the strong preference of international organizations for a small state, reflecting the dominant concerns of neoclassical economics for austerity. Whereas in the works of Lasswell and others during this period, the central actor in policy design was the state, the rise of governance and globalization perspectives in policy studies, with their attendant policy actors who wear multiple institutional hats or do not represent the state, presented another worldview. Acknowledging this shift and clearly identifying the utility of the design orientation for developments in the twenty-first century constituted the first step towards the ‘new’ design orientation—as can be seen next.
25.2.3. The New Design Orientation (2010s–) In response to the decline of the policy design approach since the late 1990s, the new design orientation embodies policy scholars’ strong desire to demonstrate the relevance of the design orientation in studying contemporary public policy making. In this period of ‘re-birth’ (Howlett and Lejano, 2012) and ‘re-invigoration’ (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo, 2015, p. 296), three new features have been introduced to the policy design approach (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015, p. 296–300). First, under the new design orientation, the design space is conceptualized as more open and complex (policy design can be done by a variety of actors in diverse governance sites and arenas). This is in contrast to the old design approach, which views this space as bounded (and policy design taking place in pre-existing specialized governance structures and following a pre-determined logic). Second, the new design orientation promotes the importance of examining policy mixes (instruments should be studied in combinations of multiple objectives and multiple tools) and patching (the addition and layering of instruments to a mix that may or may not subsequently change the nature of this policy) (Howlett and Rayner, 2013). Third, the new design approach highlights the importance of history in accounting for design choices, outcomes, and effects. In this view, design is no longer an
442 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet a-historical operation and contained; it is situated within the wider context of external and internal developments that may or may not affect the design choices of instrument mixes, and effects of instrumentation. These three new features reflect the broader debates unfolding in political science concerning new policy actors, governance (for example Kooiman, 1993), and the modes of gradual institutional change (see for instance Thelen, 2004; Mahoney and Thelen, 2010)—all indications of where public policy and political science could synergize and offer new insights into current political and policy developments across all governance levels. For instance, the features of openness and complexity signal the general lack of a single dominant sovereign authority and the many actors involved in designing, making, and implementing transnational initiatives. The existence of policy mixes points to experimentation by multiple actors who seek to delineate the relationship between instrument design and effects at the transnational level. Finally, acknowledging path dependency reveals the effects of (failed) policy experimentation, and the associated challenges in correcting these effects over time. Put simply, these new insights pave the way not yet taken for connecting the design orientation to studying the transnational domain. Unlike previous generations of policy design scholarship, proponents of the new design orientation are actually engaged with the beyond-the-state dimension through its positioning vis-à-vis the globalization ‘turn’ in public policy. But this engagement is an indirect one. Indeed, rather than elaborate concepts within the policy design repertoire to address beyond-the-state issues and developments, new design scholars argue that most claims associated with the globalization ‘turn’ in public policy are largely exaggerated. For them, this new generation of design scholarship is about ‘re-assert(ing) the centrality of the role of government in policy formulation and implementation . . . and the continuing importance, and need for, better policy designs and understandings of design processes’ (Howlett, Mukherjee, and Woo 2015, p. 293). Put simply, the new design orientation assumes that even in the context of globalization the ‘government continues to do its job’ (Capano, 2011) even though it is doing ‘its’ job via international organizations, transnational networks, and private cooperation. In this conceptualization, the unpacking of globalization as a distinct environment for national policies or as another level where policy developments emerge and unfold is largely irrelevant; state-level-based policy design approach, it is implied, is adequate for considerations of design and impact. Another issue is the tendency of the policy design approach to refer to ‘the state’ and ‘the government’ in the singular. When trying to characterize the evolving role of ‘the government’ in the context of globalization, this use of the singular might overlook the fact that not all states and governments are experiencing globalization in the same way. Indeed, a cursory reading of studies on economic globalization would point out the variation in globalization effects within and between countries around the world. This is why, while not denying the ‘continued vitality of the state in a globalized environment’ (Howlett and Lejano, 2012, p. 13), it seems more significant to examine the transformations of the states in a globalized environment and to acknowledge the implications for governments seeking to design policies.
Designing Global Public Polices 443 There is a need to shift the discussion beyond whether governments are still the central author of policy design, as design scholars claim, and focus on how they have been penetrated and reconfigured by global policy issues and transnational administration in its efforts to design policies and anticipate implementation effects and outcomes. The ways in which the government officials responsible for instrument choices and mixes are socialized in beyond-the-state networks and arenas are now well documented (see for example, Legrand this volume). At the same time, there is a general absence in the policy design scholarship of international organizations as key designers of policy initiatives, especially for developing and failed states. While this gap is not unique to the design scholarship (cf. Moloney and Rosenbloom, 2018 on the same gap in the public administration literature), it does challenge the design orientation’s core assumption concerning a sovereign authority designing and implementing policies. As Fabrizio Caffaggi (this volume) makes abundantly clear in his discussion of transnational private regulation within global supply chains, questions of policy design and instrument choice are equally pertinent to multinational corporations and NGO monitoring bodies. The frontier between domestic policy issues and transnational ones has been increasingly blurred and it is essential for the design orientation, if it is to be taken seriously as an approach to studying the transnational, to account for how this blurring affects the designers, their design choices, and the design space. We can take higher education policy as one example to illustrate this blurring. This is a typical sector in which policy design is still very much in the hands of (federal and state) governments and in which global developments have had transformative effects. In the last fifteen years, for instance, the emergence of university rankings has changed the way (federal and state) policy makers design higher education policy: when making choices between instruments, they do not ignore the global environment and competition, and, in effect, anticipate their national universities rising in the rankings as indications of the relative effectiveness of their policy design. To summarize, given the promising orientations of the ‘new policy design’, it is quite surprising that the approach did not experience its own ‘global turn’ when its contemporaries in public administration and public policy did. Scholars of policy design rather adopted a sceptical perspective on the importance of globalization, and developed arguments ‘in defence of the state’. Yet, it would be incorrect to conclude that the new design orientation has not ventured beyond the national level. It is far more accurate to view the latest generation of the policy design approach as engaging the international dimension in another way: by developing a conceptual toolkit sufficiently generic and universal to study design and instruments in different national or local policy contexts all around the world. One avenue of research for design scholars interested in the global is to examine the spread of certain instruments internationally, addressing questions concerning the overall similarity of the instruments and the possible mechanisms for transfer (see also Evans in Chapter 6). Another avenue of research, which this chapter follows, is to elevate the design orientation for analysing global public policy and transnational administration. But this cannot be a simple copy-and-paste approach as it requires some
444 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet adjustments and a revised definition of policy design suitable for this undertaking— both are developed below.
25.3. Beyond the State: How to Apply the Policy Design Approach to Global Initiatives The policy design approach has been very successful in opening up the ‘black box’ between the intentional crafting and selecting of policy instruments and their implementation effects on a range of political, policy, societal, and economic issues. These insights, however, were derived primarily from empirical observations and studies of domestic political and policy developments. As discussed above, one of the notable features of both the old and new design orientations is thus their overall lack of theoretical and empirical engagement with beyond-the-nation-state policy making and transnational public administration. Their general lack of interest has paved the way for other political and policy scientists to address this lacuna through their respective research agendas (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Coen and Pegram, 2015). Following the spirit of this Handbook, this chapter assumes that the theoretical frameworks of policy studies—of which the policy design approach is one—have much to offer in examining global and transnational policy developments. This section lends support to this claim by proposing three adjustments to the policy design approach that are required to better steer the design orientation towards analysing global developments and transnational administration. In so doing, it offers a working definition for those interested in studying the beyond-the-state dimension.
25.3.1. Acknowledging and Conceptualizing Multiple Actors Applying the policy design approach to studies of global public policy and transnational administration requires a renewed understanding of the types of actors who may be involved in policy making. In the current policy design literature, and even with the theoretical efforts of the new design orientation to develop a more open perspective on the design space, ‘the state’ is often seen as the key policy actor and is operationalized as the government (central or regional) responsible for decision-making across all stages of the policy cycle. Taking this research design to the transnational level would imply that attention is focused primarily on analysing the behaviour of governments. This is far too narrow. For instance, there are multiple design actors at the transnational level including, but not limited to, (1) formal or official actors (they include governments and international governmental organizations), and (2) non-state actors and networks. International and regional organizations are involved in a variety of design activities,
Designing Global Public Polices 445 including, for instance, developing new programmes for internal and external coordination (example: standards and benchmarks such as quality assurance frameworks and Millennium Development Goals), for (client) countries (examples: pension systems, reforms of higher education systems), and for global or regional public–private partnerships and networks (example: Programme on Global Partnerships to Strengthen Capacities of Supreme Audit Institutions). Adding to this grouping are the international consultancy firms (often contracted by governments and international/regional organisations to deliver design on procedural processes and evaluate implementation), think tanks, global commissions and task forces, large international non-governmental organizations (designers of indexes or rankings), business associations, and accreditation bodies. Although this list is not exhaustive, it does point to the many design actors at the transnational level who work with governments or work on their behalf. In order to satisfactorily capture actor interactions that may be significant for explaining the relationship between instrument selection and policy outcomes at the transnational level, the policy design approach principle can be followed to focus on intentionality and to view policy design as an act of purposive actors. But in the case of global and transnational policy making, it is essential to have in mind that the purposive actors involved in policy design are not pre-determined, may wear multiple hats, and may follow a sectoral organizational logic that is extremely relevant and significant. Although it minimally involves a form of public authority and can take the shape of an international organization, an epistemic network, an ad hoc platform or taskforce, as described above, transnational policy design may involve actors whose relationship with the state may be rather unclear (Stone, 2013). Indeed, as Stone and Ladi (2015, p. 844) put it, ‘The constitutive actors of global processes and transnational administration may be different from the domestic level, or they may have demonstrated increased power beyond the state.’ Specifying design actors at the transnational level, and their relationship with the state, can be elaborated through empirical research, which can only occur when the analytical perspective does not preclude this exploration. A first step for scholars promoting the design orientation is therefore to embrace the presence of multiple design actors at the transnational level who are not classically considered as ‘state’ actors. The next step could include in-depth analysis of their profile (gender, country, background, career, etc.), experience and practices, membership within networks and communities, and their relationship with state actors. Concerning the latter, it would be important to consider whether this relationship is consultative, partnering, competitive, coordinative, delegated or another, and how this relationship affects design.
25.3.2. Problematizing Instrument Selection: Power and Experimentation A design orientation to studying transnational developments should also adjust the potential range and types of policy instruments that actors may have at their disposal and
446 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet what actors do in the absence of available or acceptable policy instruments. The extant policy design literature depicts instrument selection as one of the core activities of the design process. Broadly, the idea is that smart design occurs when governments select the right implementation tools, consisting of substantive and procedural tools, for the identified policy problem. Within this formulation, largely based on a rational choice perspective of actor behaviour, any outcomes suggesting failure would simply mean that the wrong implementation tools were chosen or the ‘pre-conditions’ for design were absent or unfavourable (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2014). Once the right tools are picked when the favourable conditions are present, the assumption goes, the anticipated policy results should be observed. This is a particularly problematic formulation for transnational developments in at least two ways. First, it assumes that instrument selection is a neutral act and reveals nothing about the relationship between the governing and the governed (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). It is, for instance, common knowledge in studies of interstate relations that governments use transnational policy arenas for domestic purposes, including tying their hands to supranational reforms they wish to introduce domestically but which are opposed by veto players, or conflict with existing constitutional law, or are simply unacceptable to majority of voters (Guiraudon, 2000). These supranational processes are not purely bargaining as they also involve deliberation of policy problems and matching potential solutions with outcomes—i.e. design. Any perception of instrument failure following these processes is thus less straightforward and lessons to be learned more challenging to extract. Design scholars acknowledge this possibility, but they often relegate such developments with references to ‘complexity’, without adequately engaging in the unpacking of what complexity means for the design orientation. It is therefore essential to integrate into studies of transnational developments from a design orientation that instrument selection is far from being neutral. The ways in which instrument selection is made at the transnational level may configure or reconfigure domestic options. By explicitly examining whether these instrument choices were part of the deliberate design for ushering in domestic reforms, and the ways in which these instruments were accepted, rejected, and translated at the domestic and local levels, it is then possible to begin unravelling what complexity means for design. For example, complexity may be very much tied to shifts and changes in power dynamics at multiple governance levels—all themes of great interests to social scientists. Second, an instrument toolbox from which to ‘pick and choose’ may simply be unavailable at the transnational level. This further challenges the basic assumption of the design orientation that once the ‘right’ tools are selected the ‘right’ outcomes should be observed when the ‘right’ conditions are present. This assertion can be elaborated by examining the nature of transnational cooperation between states, including various configurations (for example, public–public and public–private and so on). Scholars of public administration have pointed out that the assumptions about accountability, legitimacy, and representation common to sovereign states may not always be directly applicable to transnational cooperation (Moloney and Rosenbloom, 2018). While the reasons for this are many, what is important for us to acknowledge is that this may lead to policy actors
Designing Global Public Polices 447 tasked to design transnational measures lacking the authority to carry out their work because they are unable to access instruments available at the national level; these instruments may be considered inappropriate for use at the transnational level. The lack of one central sovereign authority at the transnational level to uphold the accountability of all participants is significant, as this polyarchic nature of transnational cooperation does not guarantee that violators of agreements and adopted measures are revealed or held responsible. Recognizing this feature, Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (2012, p. 170) explained that many jurisdictions, such as the European Union, have embraced ‘experimentalist governance’ whereby transnational cooperation is structured as a ‘recursive process of provisional goal-setting and revision based on learning from the comparison of alternative approaches to advancing them in different contexts’. Put differently, transnational policy instrumentation is a process more about invention and innovation than selecting among available tools. While more empirical observations are certainly needed to refine the analytical construct of the design orientation, existing findings already point to the general inaccuracy of categorizing these instances as pre-conditions for or against design. Design, in these instances, is more about negotiation, deliberation, learning, as well as experimentation, than merely identifying the ‘right’ tools in a single iteration. Indeed, ‘failure’ as a result of deliberate and intentional design may very much be part of the learning cycle.
25.3.3. Addressing Effectiveness at the Global Level The third adjustment to the policy design approach concerns elaborating what effectiveness means for global public policy and transnational administration. As one of several analytical frameworks within policy science, the design orientation shares its foundational assumption that governments wish to have their goals effectively achieved in an efficient way. This spirit of good governance remains strong and can also be seen in the way that design scholars refer to their sharing the same perspective with practitioners of the design orientation. As Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee (2014, p. 62) put it, ‘The fervent wish of proponents of design orientation is generally to reduce instances of poor and non-design to as few as possible . . . This is expected to result in policies more likely to resolve pressing problems, correct social ills and better serve the public good . . .’ Yet defining notions such as effectiveness, efficiency, and public goods is extremely challenging in a transnational context (cf. Moloney and Rosenbloom, 2018). Unlike the domestic arena, one cannot assume that there is an overall collective sense of what constitutes an effective and efficient global public policy (this discussion is elaborated in section 4 of Peters et al., 2018). ‘Effective design’ generally means one is successful at producing some intended results. Yet, an important feature of international and supranational cooperation, as mentioned earlier, is that they offer opportunities for the exchange of ideas and information, as well as collective puzzling and mutual persuasion. How ‘success’ from such processes can be appreciated in terms of effectiveness remains quite subjective
448 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet for the individual participants. Another point is the distinct organizational structure for most transnational cooperation: the line of authority tends to be horizontal (states as equal decisional actors) rather than vertical and hierarchical; and the boundary between state and non-(or semi-) state actors involved in the policy making process tends to be more porous than that at the national level. This means that the designers of beyond-the-state public policies often have similar leverage vis-à-vis one another. In the policy design literature, debates about effectiveness often revolve around the selection of appropriate procedural tools rather than substantive tools. Michael Howlett (2000, p. 422) defines procedural instruments as tools that construct or assist in regaining legitimacy for the state through manipulation of network configurations. For design scholars, effectiveness can be achieved when specific procedural tools are introduced to offset the levels of systemic and sectoral de-legitimation. In the transnational and global contexts, patterns commonly associated with domestic policy environments have yet to be fully delineated to allow the straightforward application of such a template. Indeed, this incomplete empirical mapping extends an invitation to policy design scholars to consider applying a more inductive or abductive reasoning to studies of the transnational and global. A working definition of policy design suitable for examining the beyond-the-state dimension must incorporate core insights of old and new design orientations, as well as address the three adjustments discussed above. To this end, this chapter proposes the following working definition of policy design: policy design is a dynamic and deliberative process between policy actors (who may be state, ‘semi-state’, or non-state actors). A design process involves the exchange of policy ideas (problems are coupled with solutions), the articulation of justifications for policy positions (deliberation), and visible agreement on instrument selection or experimentation based on existing knowledge. To provide a broader context for using this working definition of policy design, the next section offers a new metaphor of policy design for approaching and studying the transnational dimension.
25.4. A Transnational Policy Design Research Agenda: Time for a New Metaphor? ‘Policy design merits attention’, Davis Bobrow (2006, p. 75) writes, ‘because it is ubiquitous, necessary, and difficult’. This claim still resonates after the ebb and flow of scholarly interest in the design orientation throughout the last few decades. Indeed, public policy making in the twenty-first century takes place amidst heightened and widespread awareness of the challenges the world collectively faces. At the same time, the resurgence of scholarly attention to the policy design approach, as embodied in the
Designing Global Public Polices 449 new design orientation, has not engaged the transnational dimension in a meaningful way, either analytically or empirically. This remains the case even though the turn towards the global has been well underway in the social and political sciences. Taking this missed opportunity as the starting point, this chapter has outlined several analytical steps the policy design approach is required to address before it can be further applied to studying developments beyond the nation state. These steps are essential because what may be taken-for-granted assumptions about public policy making at the national level may not be valid or even relevant at the transnational level. This chapter constitutes the first step towards a transnational policy design research agenda by showing what the debates on global public policy and transnational administration, on the one hand, and the new generation of policy design studies, on the other hand, have to offer one another. In this final section, the chapter proposes a new metaphor for policy design in the twenty- first century to point out how the shift towards a transnational design research agenda may be accomplished. ‘Policy designs are’, Bobrow (2006, p. 76) continues, ‘representations of what might be turned into realities’. In one of the earlier works on policy design that explicitly sought to connect the notion of design with public policy, Ernest Alexander (1982, p. 280) describes design as ‘commonly associated with giving form to some concrete response to a need or problem: a building (architectural design), a tool or product (product design), a machine or structure (engineering design), or a built environment of avenues of plazas (urban design)’. This reference to design as an exercise in giving form through specific blueprints has shaped how the design orientation views public policy. The preferred metaphor has generally vacillated between design as ‘engineering’ and design as ‘architecture’, with the latter being the mainstream metaphor for the new design orientation. This move towards design as architecture hinges on design scholars’ overall rejection of social engineering as feasible or even desirable in contemporary public policy making, but their attraction to the neatness and elegance of design is undiminished. Policy design as architecture, however, is a poor metaphor to retain for investigating global public policy developments and transnational administration. Practitioners who are active in beyond-the-nation-state policy cooperation or administration, and researchers who interview them, often use terms such as ‘messy’ or ‘complex’ to describe these developments. These adjectives point to the bounded rationality the policy actors possess and exhibit concerning policy substance (what to do) and procedure (how to do it). This is hardly the image conjured when considering design as architecture. A new metaphor for the design orientation is thus needed if the policy design approach intends to break out of this mismatch trap and apply its insights to examining beyond-the-nation-state developments. The new metaphor for policy design in the twenty-first century should be design as visual arts. While acknowledging the beauty of purposive actions, visual arts approach reality differently than the art form of architecture. Indeed, rather than being representations of what might be turned into reality, visual arts seek to capture and translate reality through the eyes of artists (policy designers). Here, like both
450 Meng-Hsuan Chou and Pauline Ravinet the old and new design orientation, the knowledge that the artists possess is crucial for determining whether the executed artwork is ground-breaking (solves the problem) or replicating (contributes little to the policy problem). In the visual arts universe, there is a ready vocabulary to articulate representations of reality in conceptual terms (e.g. expressionism, folk art, abstraction, and so on) and empirically (through different media: oil, acrylic, water colour, or pastel; and through different surfaces: wood, canvas, metal or paper). Design as visual arts offers a richer vocabulary to describe the complexity (and variety) of global public policy and transnational administration. It is a more appropriate metaphor for policy design in the twenty-first century: designing is as much about calculated rational planning as it is about sketching, which bears an exploratory representation (interpretation) of reality and integrates the subjectivity of the designer. In the design-as-visual-arts perspective, the good design (good sketch) may be one that the artist ultimately commits to final execution because it makes sense, but design does not stop at execution: the artist continues to exercise judgement concerning selection of medium and surface. These subsequent decisions, which are design choices, are equally as important as the initial good sketch. The proposed new metaphor of design as visual arts has roots in the policy design literature that is seemingly overlooked by the new design orientation. When attempting to link the notion of design with decision-making, Alexander (1982, p. 281) pointed out the difficulties: There are two basic reasons why the design of alternatives has hardly been addressed in connection with decision-making, and they relate to different views, sometimes implicit rather than explicit, of the design process. If we regard decision-making as a process of choosing between alternative problem solutions which are already there, the question of their origin becomes secondary . . . On the other hand, if alternative solutions have to be generated ex nihilo, many would rather ignore this inconvenient problem. This is true of those who would like to believe that the decision process can be expressed in an algorithm, however complex. Naturally, they prefer to disregard a stage involving creativity, with its associations of unpredictability and its basically irrational nature.
Design scholars have made tremendous analytical and empirical advances through creativity since the emergence of the design orientation. For instance, there is an improved understanding of the relationship between instrument mixes and (intended and observed) outcomes, as well as the mechanisms that may have generated this relationship. As the social sciences turn ‘global’, the response to the question ‘Design: Search or Creativity?’ (Alexander 1982, p. 281) should be the latter. The perceived or imagined ex nihilo quality of global public policy making and transnational administration demands that design scholars take seriously the challenges and collective puzzling associated with developments at this governance level. The time is ripe for shifting the policy design approach to studying the global with the metaphor of design as visual arts.
Designing Global Public Polices 451
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Chapter 26
T he Agenda -Set t i ng Capacit y of G l oba l Net work s Laura Chaqués-B onafont
26.1. Introduction Agenda setting is today an established and well-defined approach within public policy studies (see Zahariadis, 2016 for a review). In the main, such studies have focused upon agenda setting at the national and subnational levels of governance (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009; Sabatier and Weible, 2014). However, the approach is also employed in international relations (e.g. Risse-Kappen, 1995, 2002) and in development and social movement studies (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Tarrow, 2005; Carpenter, 2007). This overlap between different sub-fields provides potential intersections for enhancing our understanding of global policy and transnational administration. In particular, the analytical ‘added value’ of the concept is that it allows us to consider the agenda- setting capacities and powers of actors such as global commissions, international task forces, and transnational advocacy networks, as well as more traditional International Organizations (IOs) and the actors within them. This chapter uses the generic term ‘global policy networks’ to refer to the institutional arrangements—variously labelled as global commissions, international task forces, or transnational advocacy networks—typically launched by governments and international organizations, but also involving non-state actors, focused on ‘global public goods’ (see Kaul, this volume). In general, they include a broad variety of actors and negotiated arrangements designed to have an influence in the way global issues are governed. Some are composed primarily of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), while in others experts and epistemic communities, multinational enterprises, and/or foundations dominate (Kehoane and Nye, 1977; Börzel and Risse, 2007; Risse-Kappen, 2002). Some are time-bound projects aimed at fulfilling a given task, such as raising
454 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont money for a specific purpose, while others are more permanent structures aimed at developing and maintaining new rules and standards about specific issues. Some comprise a small set of actors, while others are structured around hundreds of participants. Many studies have already analysed how and under what circumstances these global policy networks emerge: how they are institutionalized in terms of their composition and functions; why some issues are the subject of their attention, while others seem invisible; and, which strategies they adopt to foster policy change at the global scale. These studies adhere to diverse theoretical traditions found mainly in the fields of agendasetting (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), social movements (Tarrow, 2005), and International Relations (Carpenter 2005; Petrova, 2018), while, empirically, they are based on the case study method. As a result, there is no unique, coherent theoretical framework to the study of this new form of global governance. Most of these studies emphasize that global networks are not new—some of them, like the networks that formed behind the movement for the abolition of slavery, having been in existence since the nineteenth century. Yet, over the last few decades, they have increased exponentially in number, becoming more complex and professionalized in the process (see the chapters by Gaus and Legrand in this Handbook). Broadwater and Kaul (2005) estimated that, around 2005, there were more than 400 global venues, compared to about just 50 in the 1980s. Caines et al. (2004) identified more than 100 of these global venues dealing with health issues alone, although Buse and Harmer (2007) identified fewer than 30 in the same period. These discrepancies point to the fact that currently there is no consensus as to what we we might understand as constituting global governance structures, and this problem is one of the main limitations to the study of the role global networks play in agenda setting (Risse-Kappen, 2002; Schäferhoff et al., 2009). Existing research also emphasizes that global networks are not simply instruments with which powerful states promote their interests in relation to a small set of issues (primarily, security), but institutional arrangements via which non-state actors, including NGOs, multinational companies, foundations, and epistemic communities, interact with governmental actors and international governmental organizations to impact the agenda-setting process at global and national levels. Their consolidation as global policy actors has generated a radical transformation in international politics, which has become increasingly more contested, externalised beyond national governments, and open to the input and disruption of a wider variety of political actors. In this new context, global networks play a key role in promoting the introduction of new issues and ways of thinking within formal political debate at the national and international levels. Yet, existing research suggests that global policy networks are also an important source of policy stability (Buse and Harmer, 2007; Börzel and Risse, 2007; Stone, 2008). Once they are formally institutionalized, global networks act as gate-keepers imposing strict limits on the introduction of new issues and policy proposals that do not match the principles, values, and preferences of international organizations, donors, and other veto players in the global arena. They institutionalize a set of common ideas and understandings of policy issues, and perform their tasks as a means to convince others of the
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 455 benefits to be derived from such ways of thinking, while limiting the introduction of alternative ideas. In so doing, they contribute to policy stability. This chapter is structured as follows. The first section explains global policy networks as agents of policy change. Following the agenda-setting literature, it argues that the agenda-setting capacity of global networks depends to a large extent on their ability to generate indicators and information; their capacity to frame issues in a way that best fits the principles and values of political institutions; and their ability to take advantage of the opportunities generated by political transformations and shifts in preferences at the national and global scales. The second section argues that global networks have also become an important source of stability, imposing significant limits on the introduction of new issues and on ways of thinking about these issues. The final section stresses some of the limitations of the existing analysis of the agenda-setting capacity of global policy networks and identifies a number of elements for the future research agenda. In particular, questions of representation and accountability prevail in agenda setting in global settings that the existing cache of case study approaches have not tackled as a system-wide concern. By contrast, the rich historical tradition of agenda-setting studies in national settings—exemplified by Schattchneider (1960) Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Dahl (1982)—linked agenda dynamics to democratic praxis.
26.2. Issues, Flows of Information and Policy Entrepreneurs Agenda setting is the process by which certain issues capture the attention of political institutions. In their seminal work, Cobb and Elder (1972) distinguish between the systemic agenda, defined as the group of issues under discussion in society at a particular point in time, and the institutional agenda, the set of issues the government prioritizes and debates. In a different vein, Kingdon (1984) classifies agendas into governmental agendas, that is, the list of issues a government is paying attention to, and decision agendas, which includes the issues a government is ready to take a formal decision upon. More recent approaches to agenda setting adopt a broader definition of the political agenda, defining it as the list of issues political institutions pay attention to over time (see Zahariadis, 2016 for a review). Members of international organizations, national governments, and non-state actors have their own agenda and pay attention to issues in a different fashion, taking into account flows of information, policy preferences, and the limits and opportunities of the institutional setting in which they operate (Baumgartner, Jones, and Wilkerson, 2011). Not all issues can be on the political agenda at the same time. For this reason, one of the main goals of agenda-setting scholars is to explain how and under what circumstances an issue is likely to be introduced onto the agenda. Issue prioritization is a competitive process in which different issues vie for attention, but only a few are successful
456 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005; Kingdon, 1984). There appear to be two main reasons for this: individuals do not have the cognitive capacity to process and interpret information about numerous issues simultaneously, and even if they had, the rules governing the political system impose strict limits on the number of issues policy makers can handle at any one time (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009, 1993). In this context of agenda scarcity, policy actors, like global networks, compete and build alliances in order to influence the list of issues political institutions prioritize and debate. In so doing, they adopt a range of different strategies as explained below.
26.2.1. Information Agenda-setting scholars emphasize that issue attention depends to a large extent on the means—indicators, focusing events, and feedback concerning previous programmes— by which policy makers come to learn about a problem. In some contexts, policy learning occurs automatically as a consequence of a focusing event. Such events are sudden and relatively uncommon, like a tsunami, a terrorist attack, or an environmental disaster (Birkland, 1997; Kingdon, 1984) and normally constitute an opportunity for advocacy groups to shoehorn new issues and ideas onto the agenda (Zahariadis, 2016). This is especially so when the consequences of the event (measured in terms of actual and potential harm) are visible and tangible to policy makers and most citizens, and their impact is concentrated in a particular community or geographical area. However, in most cases, problems are rarely self-evident. In order for policy makers and citizens to recognize an issue as one that requires government attention, it is necessary to generate credible information and to provide facts and testimonies to assess its magnitude, and the way in which it changes over time. Thus, one of the key activities of global networks is to create new information, and to develop indicators about the scale and consequences of an issue. Numerous examples might be cited, but one will suffice here. The lack of indicators partly explains why an issue like corruption did not become a global policy concern until the late 1990s. Although public officials and members of international agencies were fully aware that the funding for many development projects was tainted by some type of corruption, no global initiative was taken to push corruption onto the political agendas of national governments and international organizations. Foreign aid continued to flow even when it was clear that ‘many companies regularly wrote off bribes as business expenses in their tax filings’, and ‘the graft of some long-standing heads of state was legendary’ (Transparency International, History Report, 2017). A gradual change in attitude was achieved when civil society organizations, like Transparency International, in collaboration with other governmental and non- governmental organizations, generated specific information about corruption as an issue. This was critical for raising public awareness, for comparing the problem across countries and over time, and for convincing national and international political elites of the importance of launching global public–private initiatives—including
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 457 the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), the Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI) (led by the World Economic Forum), the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI); the Water Integrity Network (WIN); the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative (StAR)—to fight corruption at the global level. Many of these bodies are issue-specific global networks but their senior staff often interact with others through informal networks in key global forums. The creation of indicators and information is one of the main goals of global advocacy networks. The problem is that not everything can be quantified, and even when data are available, it is not as if they cannot be challenged. Examples abound. For instance, one of the main barriers facing the proponents of the prohibition of conventional weapons concerned the presentation of evidence about the degree of inhumanity of the effects of certain weapons. For several years, a network of political institutions, made up of the International Commission of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a number of different states, engaged in an effort to come up with an effects-based definition of ‘inhumane weapons’. After years of debate, unnecessary suffering was eventually defined as anything surpassing a ‘level of lethality, and injury producing effects for which there is no well recognised or proven treatment, or specific disease’ (Petrova, 2018). From here, the challenge was how to identify objective criteria to measure this unnecessary suffering. Opponents of the ban persistently questioned any data presented by the proponents of policy change. They considered the use of indicators such as mortality rates or the gravity of wounds to be insufficient to measure the degree of inhumanity of certain weapons, and of little use in drawing conclusions about the extent to which their effects on civilians outweighed their military utility (Petrova, 2018). The lack of sound evidence for measuring the effects of these weapons buried any attempt to promote the prohibition of cluster munition weapons for decades. Making information available is a necessary, but insufficient condition for an issue to get onto the political agenda. Information must also move quickly in those arenas where it can have most impact, and it must be comprehensible and useful to a wide set of actors across countries and political realities (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Global policy networks play a key role in this process of policy diffusion across borders (Stone, 2001). They become what Kingdon (1984) and others identify as ‘policy entrepreneurs’, whose main task is to initiate and expand issue attention (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). These policy entrepreneurs might be in or out of governmental institutions, in elected or appointed positions, in interest or research organizations at the national, subnational or/and international levels (see also Mintrom and Leutjens, this volume). These policy entrepreneurs are highly motivated political actors willing to invest their resources, time, energy, reputation, and sometimes money in the hope of a future return. They might include individuals within a global network, such as Judge Baltasar Garzón in the case of human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship; national governments—like Canada or Sweden—in the campaign to prohibit conventional weapons; or international non- governmental organizations, ranging from Greenpeace to Reporters without Borders. Similarly, celebrities, such as the rock star Bono (Jubilee, 2000 campaign on debt relief)
458 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont and Princess Diana (anti-landmine campaign) among others, have championed an issue on the global stage and invited other individuals and organizations to join the campaign. However, the ability of policy entrepreneurs to place an issue on the agenda also depends on the attributes of that issue. Here, agenda-setting scholars emphasize issues that are broad in scope—not especially technical, of high social significance, of long temporal relevance, and vague in definition—whose impact is both intense and severe, and that have a direct impact on people’s lives. These are the issues that are most likely to attract the attention of a large audience (Cobb and Elder, 1972; Zahariadis, 2016). More specifically, in the case of global policy networks, Tomaskovic-Devey et al. (2011) consider an issue as being more likely to get onto the agenda if it concerns an obviously vulnerable victim and guilty perpetrator, and when it is possible to link an issue to other issues that are already on the international advocacy agenda or to existing international humanitarian or human rights laws. Equally, issues with a direct emotional appeal (related, for example, to love or fear) stand a better chance of being accepted onto the political agenda. In contrast, issues that are overly complex, represent a taboo for much of the population, do not lend themselves to scientific measurement, or which seem to have impossible or unachievable solutions are thought to be less likely to gain advocacy attention (Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2011; Carpenter, 2011).
26.2.2. Framing Strategies The capacity of global networks to draw attention to issues depends on their ability to persuade powerful actors and potential issue adopters—international organizations, national governments, foundations, the large international NGOs, etc.—that mobilization is needed (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). To achieve this, they typically need to engage in framing strategies, understood as ‘the process by which, people develop a particular conceptualisation of an issue, and reorient their thinking about an issue’ (Chong and Druckman, 2007, p. 104). Issues can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and can be interpreted as having implications for multiple values and concerns (Schneider and Ingram, 1993; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005). Advocacy groups seek to win the political battle by shifting the focus of the debate in the direction of those dimensions that best meet their interests, as they attempt to convince policy makers and other potential allies—including public opinion and the media—that their proposal is both convenient and feasible in technical and economic terms, and congruent with the values of community members (Chong and Druckman, 2007). Global policy networks engage in this process of constructing cognitive frames to persuade decision-makers at the global and national scale that the time is right for a particular idea (Kingdon, 1984, Stone, 2008). This includes a wide variety of issues ranging from HIV/AIDS to Indigenous rights (see Coleman, this volume), violence against women and reproductive rights. As Joachim (2003) emphasizes, the inclusion of violence against women on the United Nations (UN) agenda was the result of a strategic framing process led by a coalition of NGOs. For decades, a distinction had been
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 459 drawn between women’s rights violations—framed as a domestic issue perpetrated by individuals in which the state had no right to interfere and occurring in relatively lower numbers—and human rights (Joachim 2003, p. 258). The coalition set up to fight violence against women was able to overcome preexisting moral standards after an intense mobilization. Their success can be attributed to their ability to mobilize advocacy groups, which generated technical and testimonial knowledge about women’s rights violations, and provided scientifically grounded explanations as to why women’s rights should also be treated as human rights. The construction of a strong frame was critical for persuading the international community and capturing the attention of powerful allies across borders. Framing strategies have also played a key role in the case of the fight against malaria and other endemic diseases in less-developed countries. Although malaria is an endemic problem that directly affects the lives of millions of people in less-developed countries, international organizations did not identify it as a priority issue until the turn of the Millennium (Sachs, 2005). To capture the attention of powerful organizations and other allies, the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization (WHO), led by Jeffrey Sachs, developed two distinct strategies. First, they generated new information about the imbalance between the resources needed to fight these diseases and the resources international organizations actually dedicated to them. Second, they framed malaria and other endemic diseases not simply as a health issue, but as an economic issue. By talking about money, and the implications of these endemic diseases for economic development, they provided a clear and powerful message to the international community. This ‘economic’ frame appealed to the shared principles of the members of international institutions and of the political elites. Members of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health acted as policy entrepreneurs, whose main purpose was to advance the adoption of health problems, such as malaria, as a priority issue on the global agenda.
26.2.3. Preferences Finally, the agenda-setting capacity of global networks depends to a large extent on preference shifts. Political transformations at the macro-level—including, for example, the end of the Cold War, changes in the political elite formation, a new political party or party coalition taking over the executive, the creation of an intergovernmental organization (see Tao, this volume), a change in strategic alliances among states, or the transformation of the views of the citizens and political elites on certain issues (like the adoption of the ‘good governance’ paradigm)—generate new opportunities for the defendants of policy change to push for the entry of a new issue onto the agendas of national governments and international institutions. The end of the Cold War proved critical for the defendants of policy change in many policy areas, especially those related to humanitarian action. For example, the inclusion of the prohibition of conventional weapons on the agenda only occurred in the
460 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont 1990s, following the long, intense mobilization of a large set of what were primarily NGO actors. The first step taken by the coalition calling for the prohibition of conventional weapons was to create indicators and information about the consequences of using conventional weapons (Petrova, 2018). New data clearly showed that the number of casualties attributable to the use of conventional weapons was much greater than that attributable to nuclear and chemical weapons combined; however, policy change only occurred with the radical transformation in the functioning of the international political system, brought about by the end of the Cold War. By the same token, the adoption of the ‘good governance’ paradigm as the driving principle of supranational institutions, including the European Union and the World Bank, proved critical for the entry of various issues onto the political agenda. From the mid-nineties onwards, good governance came to be appraised not only in terms of economic performance, but also in terms of the quality of political institutions—including the processes by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of governments to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect shown by citizens and the state for the institutions that govern the economic and social interactions between them (Grindle, 2007). This transformation in the way that international and national institutions understand governance opens a window of opportunity for the proponents of political change to push new issues—from the fight against corruption, to health issues, human rights violations, and labour conditions—onto the agenda. On some occasions, political transformations open a window of opportunity for policy change, while on others they serve as a source of policy stability and inaction. Advocacy networks dealing with moral issues, such as abortion, currently face considerable opposition following Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but the opposite was the case when Barack Obama was elected to power in 2008. Such political transformations affect the goals and strategies of policy entrepreneurs that seek to promote policy change. Indeed, this is one of the ideas underpinning the boomerang model developed by Keck and Sikkink (1998). Transnational advocacy networks emerge to tackle those issues that are neglected, or which face repression, at the national level. Their role is to promote causes, generate information, and persuade others to adopt the scenario that best fits with their ideas and ways of thinking. In this way, preference shifts provide new opportunities to promote policy change. In short, global networks play a key role as agenda setters in relation to a wide range of issues. They act as policy entrepreneurs preparing and disseminating information and promoting ways of thinking about issues across different venues as a means to promote policy change. Their ultimate success depends on the specific attributes of these issues, their ability to create objective indicators and feedback mechanisms, the availability of policy proposals that are not only technically feasible but also in line with cultural and moral values, and the opportunities provided by the political system. In the next section, it is argued that once global networks have been institutionalized, they act as gatekeepers blocking the entry onto the agenda of those issues that do not match the priorities, values, and principles of the major actors involved in a particular
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 461 network. Issues such as ‘children born of war’ and urban violence rarely attract much attention on the global security agenda. Likewise, explosive weapons and depleted uranium capture much less attention than landmines and cluster munitions, while pain relief and diabetes receive much less attention than HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria on the global heath agenda (Carpenter, 2011). These examples show that issue prioritization cannot simply be explained as a response to repression or the inaction of national governments, or in terms of the resources and mobilization capacities of highly motivated policy actors, but rather as part of an argument that institutional factors influence network outputs and outcomes.
26.3. Global Policy Networks as Gate-Keepers Global policy networks are institutional arrangements made up by a diverse set of public and private organizations that exchange information and other resources on a more or less regular basis with the aim of impacting the policy making process at the national and supranational levels. Their capacity to achieve their goals varies depending on their material and information resources, their level of integration and professionalization, and the recognition they receive as legitimate actors in a particular policy area. Each network is characterized by different institutional features in terms of its composition, commitment, and function, and these differences may impact their agenda-setting capacity. However, there is no consensus in the academic community as to which dimensions need to be taken into account when seeking to explain the importance of institutional factors for the effectiveness of global policy networks. Most of the research relies on specific case studies of the emergence and consolidation of global policy networks in relation to a particular issue—such as the fight against malaria, HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis, violence against women, or security issues—but only a few studies take a comparative approach. Tarrow (2005) proposed a classification of ‘global coalitions’ based on the degree of cooperation among the organizations included in that network—from simply lending a group’s name to a manifesto or website to forming a permanent umbrella organization to perform multiple tasks—and the duration of these coalitions—from maintaining a formal affiliation for the support of a discrete event to making permanent arrangements for cooperation, which normally lead to the creation of a separate organization. The combination of these dimensions results in four ideal coalition types: instrumental coalitions, characterized by short-term cooperation and a low level of participation; event coalitions (e.g. the ‘Battle of Seattle’ during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting), characterized by a high level of involvement over a short period of time; federated coalitions, which combine a low degree of participation over a long period; and campaign coalitions, which combine high intensity involvement with long-term cooperation (see also Levi and Murphy, 2006).
462 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont By contrast, other authors define the institutional features of global networks by recourse to the tenets of the policy networks literature. The transnational advocacy networks defined by Keck and Sikkink (1998) or the global public–private partnerships defined by Reinicke et al. (2000) share many of the features associated with policy networks in terms of their composition, strategies, pattern of influence, and functions (see Rhodes, 2006, for a review). Some of these global networks resemble more closely what Rhodes and Marsh (1992) identified as closed policy communities, or what Baumgartner and Jones (1993) referred to as policy monopolies, comprising a small set of public authorities (members of government, bureaucrats, and/or members of Parliament) and interest organizations that share principles and have a common understanding of a particular issue. With the participation of select private interests, these networks are distinct from the entirely official transgovernmental networks analysed by Legrand (this volume). In other cases, transnational advocacy networks, are more closely associated with ‘issue networks’. Keck and Sikkink (1998) stress that transnational advocacy networks are forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange, organized to promote causes, principled ideas, and norms, which often involve individuals advocating policy changes that cannot be easily linked to a rationalist understanding of their interests. They include a large and heterogeneous set of actors, including national and international non-governmental organizations, local social movements, foundations, business, media outlets, churches, trade unions, consumer associations, intellectuals, and public actors like international intergovernmental organizations, parts of the executive and parliamentary branches of governments, and regional and local governments. Each works internationally on an issue, and is bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, p. 89). To date, most case studies highlight that the majority of global issues are governed by networks that bear little resemblance to this model of horizontal and reciprocal information exchange and common principled understandings. On the contrary, in many instances, global policy networks are formed by a small set of actors—groups of states, international institutions and privileged groups of activists, experts, and advocates— that frame issues according to a common set of shared ideas, and define tactics and strategies to fulfil common purposes. Their goal is also to prepare the foundations for continued collaboration, and in doing so networks become well-organized political structures, in which members trust each other, make credible commitments, resolve tensions, and ensure cooperation through a vast set of formal and informal rules (Tarrow 2005, p. 1173). Global policy networks like GAVI (the vaccine alliance), the Global Water Partnership and human security networks share many of the features of these closed policy communities, formed by a small set of public and private actors. Specifically, human rights, humanitarian affairs, arms control, conflict prevention, and development are all issues governed by UN agencies, national governments that fund human security projects, academic institutions, and a few large, well-connected NGOs, such
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 463 as the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRD) (Carpenter 2011, p. 73). This privileged group of actors imposes important restrictions on which issues might be prioritized at any given time, and, especially, on the way in which these issues are framed through the highly professional and well-resourced communications strategies and advocacy initiatives undertaken by these bodies. The advocacy network concerned with children and armed conflict (CaAC) is a good example, as it does not advocate for all war-affected children equally. As Carpenter (2007) stresses, the issues and corresponding categories of war-affected children vary greatly in terms of their prominence on the CaAC network’s official agenda. Thus, child soldiers are the most prominent category on the agenda, while issues like children born of war or wartime rape are absent entirely (Carpenter, 2007). Inaction is accounted for, first, by the fact that these issues and their consequences represent the trauma of war for the nation as a whole, and which few want to remember; and, second, by the overlapping nature of ‘children born of war’ with other issues important to the CaAC network and the network of organizations concerned with gender-based violence in conflict zones. As a result, neither the CaAC network nor the gender-based violence network accept any responsibility for responding to the children born of war problems, blaming each other for the failure to act in response to a highly controversial issue. The gate-keeping capacity of global policy networks is closely linked to the number and type of organizations that have access to these networks (Carpenter, 2011). In most cases, only a small set of privileged public and private organizations—ranging from national governments to international organizations, foundations, companies, and think tanks—are able to access global governance structures, and in doing so, potentially impose their views and ways of thinking about different issues. For example, to achieve consultative status at UN conferences, such as with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and to maintain permanent connections with international governmental organizations is only feasible for highly professionalized organizations with a vast store of economic, human, and informational resources, and whose mission and activities largely reflect the goals of the UN (Joachim, 2003). Access is more likely to be achieved by major donor organizations, public institutions like the UN institutions and the World Bank, or private institutions like the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation. The funding decisions of these organizations are a powerful instrument with which to veto the entry of an issue onto the agenda. As to whether major organizations choose to veto the entry of certain issues onto the agenda, this may depend on whether these issues match the goals and principles of the organization, whether there are sufficient material and human resources to initiate and maintain a campaign across time, whether the chances of successfully ratifying a treaty or international agreement are deemed to be high, and whether other funders and partners might be secured to the cause (Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2011). Gaining access to these global venues is also more likely for those organizations that already participate in a global network. Enjoying access to governance structures increases the ability of these organizations to mobilize economic resources, generate
464 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont alternative policy proposals and reframe issues, shifting the dimensions of the debate in a way that better fits with the ideas and ways of thinking of the major gatekeepers (Petrova 2018). For the same reason, having access to one venue increases the chances of becoming a partner at other venues in the long run, simply because other actors recognize the organization as a relevant actor in the agenda-setting process. Uncertainty, combined with the large amount of resources needed to gain access to the global arena, partly explains the elitist nature of global network structures. This bias contributes to the reproduction of the same ideas and ways of thinking across issues and time. In short, issues and ideas ‘do not float freely’, most of the time being hinged to the interests, principles, and values of existing political structures (Risse-Kappen, 1995b; Baumgartner and Jones, 1993, among others). As long as these structures remain constant, the issues that reach the agenda are unlikely to change greatly. Global networks play a key role in this process of issue prioritization, promoting their views and ways of thinking about a growing number of issues. In so doing, they do not respond to the citizens’ preferences or to a political mandate, rather they answer solely to their own political criteria. As the next section highlights, this is one of the main challenges facing the effective theoretical and empirical study of the agenda-setting capacity of global networks.
26.4. Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks: Concluding Remarks Global policy networks play a key role in the agenda-setting process by raising public awareness of problems and by framing issues in ways that best match the principles and values of actual and potential allies. As has been argued in this chapter, global networks often act as policy entrepreneurs, seeking to transform political agendas at the global and national levels. Their capacity to promote new ideas and understanding about issues at the global scale depends on their ability to produce information and indicators that can quantify the magnitude of issues and the consequences of inaction, and their capacity to take advantage of the opportunities generated by political transformations and preference shifts. Transformations like the end of the Cold War, changing political elites, and the transformation of citizens’ views and understanding about issues are key factors in explaining why global networks can sometimes have an impact on the political agendas of national and international political institutions. Yet, once they are formally institutionalized, global networks may become important gatekeepers, preventing the entry of certain issues and ideas onto the political agenda, primarily through a strategy of non-decision. Inaction regarding an issue may respond to a wide variety of factors, from short-term concerns of organizational survival to a lack of financial or human resources, the veto of potential donors, the mismatch between the principles and values of the organizations and dominant issue frames, and/or simply
The Agenda-Setting Capacity of Global Networks 465 the lack of opportunities of success. As a result, some issues are shifted off the political agenda of global networks. In general, existing research emphasizes that the increasing agenda-setting capacity of global networks is a necessary solution to aid both the legitimation and effective delivery of global public goods such as those specified in the Sustainable Development Goals. Network proliferation does reflect the need for collaborative, innovative, and alternative solutions to the political, economic, and social challenges of the new Millennium (Carpenter, 2007; Risse-Kappen, 2002; Stone, 2001, 2008). Nevertheless, their consolidation as important agenda setters raises major questions of legitimacy and political representation (Held, 2006). Are global networks giving priority to the issues that most citizens in developed and less developed countries consider to be most important or are they prioritizing the issues of greatest concern to well-organized interest organizations and/or political elites? What criteria do these global arrangements consider when deciding which issues to prioritize in the first place? How transparent are these institutions and just how open are they to the scrutiny of the media and the general public? Global networks are having an increasing influence on the political agenda at the national and supranational levels, but they are not bound by principles of political accountability. The logic of political responsiveness does not apply to the analysis of the agenda setting of the global networks, simply because their members are not elected and do not have to respect an electoral mandate, nor do they have to define their activities by taking into account citizens’ preferences. This constitutes one of the main differences in relation to traditional agenda-setting studies that focus on the workings of advanced democracies, mainly conducted in the US. From Schattchneider (1960) and Bachrach and Baratz (1962) to Dahl (1982), the main goal of agenda-setting scholars has been not only to describe the make-up of political agendas, but also to explain the extent to which the issues policy makers focus on correspond to the issues deemed most important by citizens and the implications of this for the functioning of democracy. These questions constitute the main challenges for the study of the agenda-setting capacity of global networks and is an area that awaits theoretical and empirical development. The study of the agenda-setting capacity of global networks is also beset by major methodological shortcomings. There is no single, coherent theoretical framework for their study; on the contrary, some studies draw on the agenda-setting literature, others that of social movements, while others build on the tradition established within international relations. Most research is based on case studies, and with very few exceptions, it employs relatively static approaches that cover short periods of time (Petrova, 2018). Moreover, there is no clear definition of just what constitutes global governance structures. Today, most authors are using different labels to refer to largely similar phenomena, which adds unnecessary complexity to their analyses. Some adapt existing labels from the policy (issue) networks literature to identify transnational advocacy policy networks; others are influenced by the social movement tradition, as exemplified by Tarrow (2005); while others talk about public–private partnerships to emphasize the collaboration between international organizations and national governments, on the one hand, and private actors, on the other, to tackle issues at the global level.
466 Laura Chaqués-Bonafont Agreement is also absent in the categorization of these global arrangements. To explain the similarities and differences in the characteristics of global networks, and the implications this might have for the agenda-setting process, a more systematic analysis needs to be developed, based on a common set of categories that describe the institutional features of global policy networks. If this can be achieved, it should be possible to provide a more complete explanation of how and under what circumstances certain issues and ideas gain entry onto the political agenda; of which factors ensure that global policy networks become agents of policy diffusion or/and policy stability over time; and, of whether global networks reproduce power relations at the global scale.
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Pa rt T h r e e ACTORS, INSTRUMENTS, AND IMPLEMENTATION IN TRANSNATIONAL ADMINISTRATION
Chapter 27
T r ansnationa l P ol i c y C omm u nit i e s a nd Re gul atory Net works as Gl obal Admin i st rat i on Alexander Gaus
27.1. Introduction The emergence of transnational policy communities (TPCs) and regulatory networks has profoundly changed patterns of policy design, global regulation and global governance. The growing influence of activists, think tanks, expert commissions, and organized interest groups on national and international policies is evidence of a shift in policy making away from the nation state towards organized transnational actors. This has partially turned control over policy design away from national public administrations to what may be called a diffuse global administration. Even though TPCs and regulatory networks had already started to play a role at the beginning of the twentieth century (Rodogno et al., 2015), they remain shadowy figures of global public policy. Receiving comparatively little (scholarly) attention, they are coordinating different stakeholders, setting the agenda on many global policy and regulatory issues, creating policies and standards themselves and supporting their global diffusion (Morgan, 2001; Stone, 2008; Tsingou, 2015). At times, they are monitoring compliance with their advocated standards. Altogether, they have become what some regard as powerful actors of transnational institution-building and institutional change at the national level (Dobusch and Quack, 2008, p. 5). Conceptually, network ideas are rooted in political science and policy studies of the 1970s to early 1990s. During that period, a vibrant Anglo-Saxon discourse explored state–society relations and interest group representation in national policy processes (Heclo and Wildavsky, 1974; Richardson and Jordan, 1979; Rhodes, 1990). Organized
472 Alexander Gaus actors outside of the political-bureaucratic realm that influenced policy-making by coupling expertise with group cohesion and bargaining power held particular interest (Jordan 2011). Without a consensus in the literature on their ultimate definitions and with a ‘luxuriant growth of labels’ (Jordan, 1990, p. 325) describing a similar pattern, these organized groups of actors were mostly defined as policy communities, issue networks, or policy networks, depending how tightly knit and stable the connections among the actors were. This discourse influenced the conceptual debate about policy communities and regulatory networks at the international level (Börzel, 2011). Broadly speaking, TPCs can be characterized as cohesive and bounded groups of professionals from different countries who diffuse shared ideas and practices globally (Stone, 2008, pp. 30–1). Regulatory networks active at the global level can be defined as stable and goal-directed organized interest groups of state and non-state actors such as businesses or NGOs that seek to influence regulatory policy at the national, regional, or global level (Raustiala, 2002; Slaughter, 2004a; Verdier, 2009). While these two types of organized actors are often conflated in the literature, I suggest viewing regulatory networks as a more institutionalized version of a particular policy community where either network members are policy makers themselves or close contacts with policy makers exist. Such regulatory networks are also characterized by greater stability, a small administrative core, and often a specific agenda. In a sense, a regulatory network is the organizational kernel within a policy community, while not all policy communities necessarily have such a kernel. Against this backdrop, the chapter charts the landscape of transnational policy communities and regulatory networks. It adopts an organizational lens to break down the administrative quality of these new players of global governance, discussing the challenges of transnational policy communities and regulatory networks before concluding with a discussion of the way these new fora contribute to the contours of an emergent but diffuse global administration.
27.2. Transnational Policy Communities TPCs are profoundly affecting global public policy by providing knowledge, shaping the understanding of an issue and creating and advocating policies. Being a result of today’s knowledge society, they are ubiquitous, span various policy fields and materialize in different forms, often blurring the lines between public and private actors. For instance, a transnational policy community among national internet technicians organized itself into ‘Computer Security Incident Response Teams’ to prevent cyber incidents by exchanging information and suggesting responses to policy makers nationally and internationally (Morgus et al., 2015). A transnational policy community can also be
Transnational Policy Communities 473 found among development experts from academia, consultancies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations, who seek to move the practice of development assistance from a planning approach towards one that experiments more. Academics and practitioners from Harvard University, Oxfam, and other NGOs have teamed up to issue a manifesto of ‘Doing Development Differently’. By 2016, it had been signed by over 400 signatories from more than sixty countries and had its own website. While these two examples illustrate the variety of TPCs, the concept itself struggles to shed its metaphoric character. Due to the lack of an agreed-upon terminology, little clarity exists in the literature about its scope. Conversely, the literature on TPCs varies regarding its antecedents and relationship with existing concepts. For instance, it remains ill-defined whether a transnational policy community is closer to the idea of an issue network (Heclo, 1978), an epistemic community (Haas, 1992), an advocacy coalition (Sabatier, 1988), or an advocacy network (Keck and Sikkink, 1999), all of which are based on the notion of interest groups, and individuals with expertise and shared perceptions and interests. Seeking clarity, it is useful to revisit the concept of the policy community as it was developed by public policy scholars in a national context. The idea of a policy community was first introduced when scholars looked at national decision-making processes and not only found that policies are developed by bureaucrats and politicians, but also that changing coalitions of actors sought to influence and determine policies through advice and lobbying (Atkinson and Coleman, 1992). Analyses of political processes demonstrated that interest groups and expert communities exert influence throughout the policy cycle, at times creating policy communities, which Rhodes (1990) as well as Rhodes and Marsh (1992) define narrowly as groups with a limited and highly restrictive number of participants who share an ideology, values, and broad policy preferences and whose members have close relationships and are highly integrated. Others apply a broader definition, where a policy community refers to actors who share an interest in a policy area and over time succeed in shaping policy but do not necessarily have close relationships (Wilks and Wright, 1987; Wright, 1988). An important aspect when reading the earlier works is the different conceptions regarding how closely the members of a policy community are believed to be connected. Rhodes argues for close connections and a high degree of vertical interdependence (1990, p. 304). Wright views policy communities as being loosely connected but cohesive communities or groupings of actors, in effect seeing them as quite similar to Heclo’s (1978) issue networks. Following the latter understanding is analytically beneficial since the notion of loosely connected but cohesive communities allows for differentiating TPCs from organized regulatory networks. Seeking to develop a concept of TPCs that follows the thinking of policy communities as loosely connected communities outlined above, Diane Stone defines TPCs as a combination of actors and actions. From her perspective, TPCs are cohesive (but not necessarily integrated) groups of professionals who have in-depth knowledge on an issue, share similar belief sets and policy interests, and have sufficient shared social capital to
474 Alexander Gaus sustain their collaboration. They diffuse ideas and practices through direct engagement with policy makers or more indirect advocacy work (Stone, 2008). In terms of actors, three ‘carriers of global policy processes’ are involved in the diffusion of ideas, standards, and policy practice (Stone, 2008, p. 30–1): internationalized public sector officials, international civil servants, and transnational policy professionals. Internationalized public sector officials represent national bureaucrats and employees of public sector organizations who engage with their counterparts from other countries around distinct policy issues. For instance, this can be tax officials who seek to coordinate anti-money laundering policies or food-safety specialists who regularly meet at international conferences and build lasting social networks. The more institutionalized these exchanges become, the greater the extent to which such a policy community turns into a transgovernmental network (see Legrand, this volume). International civil servants are another distinct group forming large policy communities, representing bureaucrats working in the secretariats of international organizations (IOs). They are formally independent of national interests and influences and are assumed to advance the interests of their organization as such, even though they also remain self-interested individuals (Weiss, 1982). Their influence lies particularly in the areas of policy formulation and policy implementation within the mandate and scope of their own organization, although they are also able to transcend their organizations by engaging in norm entrepreneurship (Oestreich, 2007, p. 3). The last group of actors representing TPCs are transnational policy professionals. They are a ‘diverse community of consultants, foundation officers, business leaders, scientific experts, think tank pundits, and NGO executives who are growing in number, policy reach, and professionalism’ (Stone, 2008, p. 30–1). These are professionals from very different fields and sectors who hold power ‘as a result of their (semi-)official position; their control of information, and other organizational resources; their technical expertise or epistemic authority; or their often lengthy international experience as career officials and consultants’ (Stone, 2008, p. 31). Moreover, they are also often perceived as moral authorities in their respective fields (Price, 2003, p. 589). While these are analytically useful categories for delineating the main actors in TPCs, it would be misleading to assume that communities do not bridge the different categories. A number of authors have shown that TPCs often combine a mix of different actor categories and nested sub-communities (Farquharson, 2003; Tsingou, 2015). For instance, in the case of a global community of child health experts, community members came from government agencies, private foundations, NGOs and universities, each with their own distinct circle of experts (Dalglish et al., 2015, pp. ii, 16). Beyond distinguishing different actors, it is useful to break down the actions of TPCs. Since their organizational quality is by definition absent or very low and given that they lack the power and authority to force others to adopt and implement their suggestions and standards, TPCs share the need for ‘intermediaries, some more powerful agent . . . to do the job for them’ (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000, p. 6). Indeed, policy communities interact and direct their own efforts at these intermediaries, such as IOs, regulatory networks, or political initiatives that are open to outside input.
Transnational Policy Communities 475 Beyond intermediaries as the recipients, is useful to distinguish between the analytical, coordinating, and communicative discourses in which TPCs engage as their concrete actions (Stone, 2015). TPCs provide analytic discourses to construct meaning and a shared understanding of an issue (Risse, 2012, pp. 434–5), by using their knowledge and expertise to reduce the uncertainties and complexities that surround many policy issues. This comes close to the activities of epistemic communities, which provide valued information that is ‘neither guesses nor “raw” data’ but rather information that is the ‘product of human interpretations of social and physical phenomena’ (Haas, 1992, p. 4). Similar to epistemic communities, policy communities often comprise academics, scientists, or technicians with recognized expertise and whose central reason for influence is their status as experts and providers of objective knowledge (Price, 2003). Newer conceptions of epistemic communities emphasize a broader set of actors (Cross, 2013), which closes the gap between epistemic communities and policy communities regarding their analytical, knowledge-ordering function. TPCs are also engaged in a coordinative discourse that refers to the creation, elaboration, and justification of policy and programmatic ideas. This is coordination not in the sense of organizing different actors, but rather consolidating ideas, opinions, and views to form a common position within decision-making institutions and processes. It reflects the attempt to extend the shared understanding of an issue beyond the policy community itself. This type of activity is linked to the question of which norms and issues to promote in the first place, which is influenced by many factors, as shown by a study of human security practitioners and their prioritizing of issues. In this particular case, what influenced agenda setting was a combination of the broader political context, the nature and salience of potential issues, the relative standing of influential actors within the network, and the more personal attributes of entrepreneurs and gatekeepers (Carpenter et al., 2014, pp. 460–7). Finally, TPCs may also be engaged in a communicative discourse to persuade policy makers and the public about their specific position (Stone, 2015, p. 795). If a communicative discourse takes precedence over the other two discourses, a transnational policy community comes close to interest groups, advocacy coalitions, or policy sub-systems that focus more on lobbying and advocacy work compared with epistemic communities, which focus more on knowledge production and ordering. The different discourses emphasized here represent stylized types and we should not assume that every transnational policy community engages equally in all three modes of discourse; rather, they exist in various configurations in terms of scale, depth, and duration. Moreover, the actual influence of these policy communities and their discourses strongly depends on context factors in which TPCs are embedded, such as internal dynamics, scope conditions, phase of policy process, policy field coherence, coalition building, and rivalry with other policy communities. These intervening variables were highlighted in relation to the influence of epistemic communities (Cross, 2013) but serve well as guidance for the study of TPCs, which is only in its infancy.
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27.3. Regulatory Networks In some instances, TPCs, or parts of them, solidify and turn from a cohesive (sub-) community of experts to an organized group engaged in a specific regulatory project. Reflecting upon Djelic and Sahlin-Anderson’s work on transnational communities of interest, for Dobusch and Quack (2008, p. 8), these ‘expansive’ transnational communities ‘are characterised by the common mission around a regulatory project, [and] combine features of epistemic, expert, and professional communities with attributes of formal organizations’. In an attempt to clearly distinguish this specific phenomenon from TPCs, these are referred to as regulatory networks. In the broadest sense, regulatory networks are a type of internationalized organization based on regular, purposive, and organized interactions between regulatory stakeholders to facilitate ‘cooperation on issues of mutual interest within the authority of the participants’ (Verdier, 2009). Seeking to set standards, regulatory networks have become part and parcel of global public policy (Hale and Held, 2011). Regulatory networks are influential in the areas of banking (e.g. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision), competition policy (e.g. International Competition Network), consumer protection (e.g. Consumers International), environmental policy (e.g. Marine Stewardship Council) and internet governance (e.g. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), among others. Each of these examples is credited with leading regulatory activities in their policy domain on a global scale. For instance, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has set global standards on capital adequacy requirements for banks, which have subsequently been implemented by national regulators (Goodhart, 2011). The International Competition Network issues voluntary standards that are consistently taken up by national anti-trust agencies either in their administrative practices or when reforming national competition laws (Rowley and Campbell, 2005). While regulatory networks cover very different policy domains and differ in terms of their size, scope, and the types of rules that they promote, Newman and Zaring suggest that regulatory networks nonetheless share similar characteristics (2013, p. 245). Their common core relates to similarities in membership and participation, their activities, as well as organizational attributes and institutionalization, as outlined below.
27.3.1. Membership and Participation Unlike policy communities, membership in regulatory networks is usually clearly defined and based on distinct membership rules established by the network members themselves. Importantly, regulatory networks often have other organizations as members, effectively making them ‘meta- organizations’ (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008).
Transnational Policy Communities 477 Such membership criteria create clear organizational boundaries through inclusion and exclusion and are effectively a tool of self-selection. If officials from national regulatory agencies or ministries and their foreign counterparts are the sole members, such ‘Type-1’ regulatory networks are also known as ‘transgovernmental relations’ (Keohane and Nye, 1974) or ‘transgovernmental networks’ (Raustiala, 2002; Slaughter, 2004a). If membership and participation are not limited to agency representatives and government officials but rather allow for the inclusion of non-governmental stakeholders, or regulatory networks stem from private sector initiatives entirely, such ‘Type-2’ regulatory networks are more appropriately defined as transnational regulatory networks or global public policy networks (Reinicke, 1998). ‘Type-1’ regulatory networks are rare and usually confined to policy fields that do not depend on or allow private participation for the setting and implementation of standards. One example of a government-only network is the Five Eyes alliance among the intelligence agencies of the Anglosphere (see Legrand, this volume). However, most regulatory networks have mechanisms to include non-governmental stakeholders, which effectively makes them ‘Type-2’ regulatory networks. For instance, the previously mentioned International Competition Network encourages the participation of non- governmental advisors, who are active in the formulation of policies but are not formal members and are not allowed to hold formal roles in the network.
27.3.2. Activities Regulatory networks may facilitate the sharing of information among the involved stakeholders by providing a platform for structured interactions. Regular meetings, conference calls or electronic communication are the basis of many of these networks, allowing members to share information and establish personal contacts. Nonetheless, regulatory networks are often more ambitious. The same communication lines and coordinating mechanisms are used to harmonize or regulate the development, the details, and the enforcement of policies across multiple jurisdictions (Slaughter, 2004a, pp. 51–61). Many networks want to ‘promulgate generally applicable, forward-looking regulations meant to guide the conduct of the membership when it returns home’ (Newman and Zaring, 2013, p. 246). They usually push standards rather than international law, because the former are easier to develop and they allow other actors to engage in regulation more easily (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2002, pp. 31–6). What compels actors to accept the standards of regulatory networks? One reason for the expected uptake is related to the membership of the network, given that those engaged in setting standards internationally through their membership in regulatory networks are often the same agencies responsible for national implementation and they can use the administrative prerogative to their advantage. In addition, many of the standards and regulatory activities are highly technical and at that level they are left to specialized agencies. Nonetheless, one should not expect that the implementation of standards is a given. After all, standards are voluntary. Accordingly, regulatory networks
478 Alexander Gaus also frequently engage in ‘self-reporting and peer review to police compliance with the network’s standards’ (Newman and Zaring, 2013, p. 246), even though such information is rarely disclosed to the outside world. Beyond agenda setting and policy deliberations, some regulatory networks also engage in advocacy work targeted at potential adopters of the suggested standards or law-makers who may turn the soft law standards into legally binding provisions.
27.3.3. Organizational Attributes and Institutionalization Regulatory networks often emerge out of frequent interactions between regulators rather than through formal negotiation. As such, they commonly lack a signed and ratified international treaty establishing the organization; instead, they are guided through by-laws, Memoranda of Understanding or operational frameworks that seek to formalize what were previously informal relations. This informality usually also influences the mode of operation. As Newman and Zaring (2013) explain, ‘the administrative process that the networks use whenever they promulgate their various types of rules is often extremely informal’ (p. 246). This sets them apart from treaty-based IOs such as the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which have developed extensive formal routines. One important organizational attribute is the secretariat. Some regulatory networks do not have a dedicated secretariat but rather have spread out secretariat functions among the different members. By contrast, others have dedicated secretariats and it seems a common pattern that regulatory networks professionalize and institutionalize their internal processes over time. With an expansion of members and policy tasks, the need for a dedicated secretariat to handle these tasks typically emerges. The Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units illustrates this pattern. It was founded in 1995 as an informal group of government agencies, and it created a secretariat in 2007 after a steady increase in members, tasks, and activities. One approach is to rely on experts seconded from network members that continue to be funded by their home organization. For instance, the entire ten-person secretariat of the Paris Club, a group of creditor countries that meet regularly to discuss the financial obligations of debtor countries at risk, is provided by the French Treasury (Paris Club, 2016). The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which formalized its activities at the end of the 1980s in the wake of its first regulatory milestone on capital requirements for banks (Basel I), has staffed its secretariat ‘mainly by professional supervisors on temporary secondment from member institutions’ (BIS, 2016). This avoids the need for establishing dedicated appropriations that may be difficult to guarantee among the different network members. The highlighted variations of formalization and institutionalization of regulatory networks bring two conceptual challenges to the study of regulatory networks. One of them is the label ‘network’, which suggests informal connections among actors and is often metaphorically used, hindering observers from assessing organizational qualities.
Transnational Policy Communities 479 The notion of informality that surrounds regulatory networks should not be misread as the absence of formality. Regulatory networks are usually characterized by a sort of light institutionalization that includes an internal organization around subject-matters or organization-related tasks, dedicated positions such as chairpersons or facilitators of sub-groups, distinct membership rules and entry barriers that distinguish regulatory networks from policy communities, or informal social networks among experts that demonstrate similarities with formal IOs. Second—and related to the last point—it blurs the lines between informal and formal IOs (Vabulas and Snidal, 2013) and makes it difficult to draw clear boundaries between what can be considered a regulatory network and an international organization. This ambiguity makes it challenging to situate regulatory networks as a distinct category within the landscape of global governance.
27.4. The Challenges of Managing TPCs and Regulatory Networks While there is a growing interest in managing networks in the field of public administration and organization studies (Agranoff, 2007; Sørensen and Torfing, 2007) as well as established literature on IO bureaucracies (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2013), the same depth of analysis about internal processes in TPCs and regulatory networks has not yet developed. Being unable to present a fully developed field of research, this section draws instead on more general insights from the wider policy community and network governance literature as well as case studies on TPCs and regulatory networks in order to highlight both emerging conjectures as well as research gaps in the analysis of TPCs and regulatory networks. It is structured around the themes of formation, governance structures, and instruments of managing policy communities and regulatory networks. These represent important areas of inquiry to better understand the emergence and maintenance of these transnational actors.
27.4.1. Formation TPCs and regulatory networks have in common that their members share views on a policy issue. However, the establishment of such a shared understanding is neither a linear nor a unidirectional process. TPCs ‘cannot be understood as simple bottom- up responses to globalization’; instead, ‘they have to be conceptualised in terms of the interplay between top-down projects of transnationalism, pursued by powerful actors, and bottom-up processes of mutual identification and collective awareness since it is through this interaction that transnational social space is created, distinctive from the national level’ (Morgan, 2001, p. 118). This ‘messy’ formation of TPCs and regulatory networks is little researched, although it emerges from the nascent literature that actors
480 Alexander Gaus must have the opportunity to recognize each other as part of a community and develop a minimum level of cohesion that characterizes both loosely coupled communities and more tightly connected networks. Physical spaces such as international conferences seem particularly important to recognize, form, and nurture shared ideas. Partially tied to the locus of formation, one can further distinguish between emergent communities and networks on the one hand and more mandated ones on the other (Kenis and Provan, 2009). For instance, the development experts that formed the group ‘Doing Development Differently’ represent an emergent transnational policy community. An example of a (now) mandated regulatory network is a group of think tanks and academic experts from G20 countries that contribute ideas to the G20 summits. Called the ‘Think 20’ or ‘T20’, this group began as a self-organized expert forum independent of the G20 process but subsequently became institutionalized under the guidance of the G20 with a distinct mandate. Starting with the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico in 2012, the host nation of the G20 summit now appoints a lead research institute or think tank from their country to facilitate input from other organizations and researchers on issues relevant to the G20 (Hajnal, 2014, p. 93). The distinct way of formation is believed to have knock-on effects on the way in which members engage, as well as the activities required to manage a network. As a conjecture drawn from work on governance networks, voluntarily-formed communities or networks are likely to see more self-sustaining collaboration than mandated ones because their members have recognized and internalized the need to collaborate. Developing this argument, Kenis and Provan hypothesise that ‘when network members are not actively involved in the network’s inception (as is the case in mandatory networks), the network will be less self-activating; thus, members will have difficulties balancing organizational and network interests’ (Kenis and Provan, 2009). While this is not yet validated for TPCs or regulatory networks, individual cases lend support to this assumed pattern. For instance, Dalglish et al. (2015) studied the formation of a transnational community of experts around the theme of childhood survival. One of their findings was that a broad community of experts evolved out of smaller sub-groups who were concerned about different specialized issues of child health. While the authors reported a number of points of discord among community members on substantive issues of certain policies, the notion of collaboration was not questioned by members of the community and a progressive expansion of collaboration set in once contentious issues were resolved.
27.4.2. Governance Mechanisms The patterns of formation of TPCs and regulatory networks have implications for individual governance mechanisms. A useful starting point to analyse the varieties of governance forms among TPCs and regulatory networks comes again from the broader network governance literature. Depending on how distributed tasks are, three basic governance structures for collaborative mechanisms can be distinguished. Accordingly,
Transnational Policy Communities 481 one can either find models of (a) ‘shared or participant governance’, (b) ‘lead organisation’ governance or (c) ‘network administrative organisation’ governance (Kenis and Provan, 2009, p. 446). In a shared governance model, tasks, functions, and roles are fully distributed among members and no dedicated entity is tasked with specific issues. By definition, a transnational policy community has only this governance mechanism. One assumption derived from this model is that shared governance is mostly ‘suited to small, geographically concentrated networks where full and active face-to-face participation by network participants is possible’ (Kenis and Provan, 2009, p. 446). The logic is that close interaction, strong ties, and high levels of trust combined with a sense of a distinct community replace the need for a more structured organizing of activities. This changes the more one moves to a lead organization or a model with a dedicated network administrative organization, usually called a secretariat. While governance through a lead organization unloads most tasks to one member, the model of a network administrative organization is based on a distinct entity additionally created by the members solely for the purpose of organizing the collaboration. A larger number of members, a greater distance among them, as well as expanding tasks, increases demand for a network administrative organization. While this remains to be validated for TPCs and regulatory networks, the general tendency of establishing secretariats as a reaction to growth in membership and rising functional demands points in this direction. Beyond formal structures that govern the distribution of tasks, TPCs and regulatory networks are also strongly built upon institutions in the sense of taken-for-granted, rule-like norms, beliefs, values, and routines (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). As Eleni Tsingou has shown in her analysis of a global community of financial regulators, the sense of community is built around a club model that encourages constructive public–private regulator interaction. Rather than seeing such interactions as potentially problematic regulatory capture, the members of this transnational policy community view themselves as speaking in a private capacity and emphasize self-regulation because membership in their club is prestigious and based upon invitation, additionally imposing self-restraint (Tsingou, 2015, pp. 236–7). Moreover, the community has institutionalized the possibility of members informally contacting each other and helping each other out, which seems strongly valued by the community members (Tsingou, 2015, p. 237). It is these and similar types of institutions that often govern TPCs and regulatory networks in the absence of elaborate formal rules and structures. While they are difficult to see, they are no less important than formal mechanisms.
27.4.3. Instruments of Collaboration The notion of instruments or management strategies to facilitate collaboration in the context of policy communities or regulatory networks seems inappropriate at first. After all, these are fora characterized by similarities in belief systems, high levels of trust, and similar interests that replace dedicated management strategies. As discussed above, taken-for-granted institutions also regulate behaviour. Nonetheless, studies on
482 Alexander Gaus governance networks have demonstrated that tangible outputs are dependent on concrete managerial strategies that organize and distribute tasks among community or network members (Klijn et al., 2015). The need for dedicated managerial strategies and instruments of collaboration can be tied to a lack of enforcement mechanisms and ambiguous lines of accountability inherent to loosely coupled communities and, even more, organized regulatory networks. The lack of enforcement prevents clear targets being set for others and controlling their implementation, thus making network management a challenging endeavour. Rather than using force and command, network management relies on other forms of authority such as persuasion and offering bargains (Vangen and Huxham, 2003). Drawing on core concepts of network management linked to the fields of network governance and inter-organizational relations, certain instruments of collaboration can also be expected to play an important role in TPCs and regulatory networks. As a general premise, network management rests upon the observation that line management, command and control, and performance management are rarely found in network organizations and that other management behaviours are more relevant (Agranoff, 2007). Koppenjan and Klijn (2004) have defined a set of activities for steering collaborative governance, such as ‘activating’, ‘mobilizing’, ‘framing’, and ‘synthesizing’. Activating and mobilizing focus on finding the right mix of people and encouraging their active participation, while framing and synthesizing refer to finding agreements on operating rules as well as creating an environment for productive interaction. Even though these are no panacea to ensure the stability and goal-achievement of a network, these management techniques play an important role in this regard (Agranoff, 2007; Klijn et al., 2015). In a collaborative setting that characterizes TPCs or regulatory networks, managers can ‘only “make things happen” . . . by attempting to influence structures, processes and participants’ (Müller-Seitz, 2012, p. 437).
27.5. Critical Issues: Power, Legitimacy and Accountability TPCs and regulatory networks are not without certain challenges. Policy communities may further special interests rather than providing neutral expertise. Regulatory networks may operate ‘on a technocratic, professional set of assumptions that do not take into account other perspectives, interests and politics’ (Slaughter, 2004b, p. 167). In particular, the distribution of power in these fora as well as questions of legitimacy and accountability are challenges that are hard-wired into these new forms of transnational administration. Some of the challenges can be addressed through adaptive organizational design, while others have to be accepted as a trade-off for the benefits that these actors bring to global governance and regulation.
Transnational Policy Communities 483 Distribution of power: Power is often unevenly distributed in TPCs and regulatory networks, which affects the structures, processes, and outcomes of these fora. Moira Faul (2015) has used social network analysis to determine power relations in a regulatory network. Her research has shown that networks do not necessarily moderate asymmetries of power, but rather replicate existing power differentials that exist between various members. Those with power outside a community or network are likely to exert them once in a community or network. Faul suggests that ‘actors who are considered most powerful prior to the establishment of a network may also occupy structurally advantageous positions within the network. The effect of this is to supplement (rather than off-set) the power they enjoy outside the network’ (Faul, 2015, p. 11). Material resources such as staff capacity, time, travel money, and domestic support services greatly influence the ability to engage, as do non-material resources such as level of expertise, cognitive capacities, or the ability to generate influential ideas. These resources confer power and authority on individuals or organizations over processes and outcomes. Unsurprisingly, material resources remain predominantly concentrated in OECD countries, among multinational companies, well-organized interest groups, and professional associations. Seemingly ordinary issues such as language barriers or time zone differences can further affect the ability of individuals or organizations to participate in meetings that often function as fora to build personal relationships, trust, and social capital. In turn, the level of participation is likely to affect the ability to influence structures, processes, and outcomes. While the distribution of power may be less problematic in TPCs due to the self-selecting nature of communities, it represents a real challenge for representative standard setting by regulatory networks. Experts or administrators from developing countries with low administrative capacity may not be able to engage meaningfully, despite being bound by future standards. Small NGOs or businesses may face the same problems. Such a pattern can easily lead to: (a) the creation of elite parallel structures within TPCs and regulatory networks among those that have the required resources and interest to influence activities and standard- setting processes; and (b) reduced overall legitimacy due to outputs being skewed towards the interests of the powerful. This makes them prone to favour special interests rather than broader societal goals, opens the door for regulatory capture and leads to questioning the legitimacy of TPCs and regulatory networks in general. Therefore, for some critics, they are not representing neutral experts and their knowledge but only the most powerful national interests and thus the structural inequalities that exist globally (Verdier, 2009). Legitimacy: Who do TPCs and regulatory networks represent and are they anchored in democratic principles? Do they challenge the privilege of the state to decide about policies? These questions are at the heart of the debate about the legitimacy of TPCs and regulatory networks. For instance, Sol Picciotto (2006, p. 11) criticizes regulatory networks in particular for destabilizing the regulatory hierarchy. He argues that regulatory networks disrupt ‘the channels of democratic accountability, which in the classical
484 Alexander Gaus liberal system are through national constitutional structures, ideally parliamentary representative democracy’. According to his view, members of regulatory networks lack the authorization to engage in international standard setting. Those countering Picciotto argue that network members are domestically legitimate actors if they are part of a transgovernmenal network, whereby the network as such also enjoys legitimacy through delegation (Slaughter, 2004a). Another challenge linked to the legitimacy of TPCs and regulatory networks extends beyond uprooting the regulatory hierarchy and is instead focused on the need to be perceived as a legitimate actor as such. Since TPCs and regulatory networks lack the legal authority to enforce rules or standards, adopters must view their outputs as legitimate (Brunsson et al., 2012, p. 619). They must not only develop rules and standards but also endow themselves and their outputs with legitimacy. Descriptions of TPCs and regulatory networks have shown that these fora react to this challenge by emphasizing broad representation and consensus-building (Scholte, 2011). Broad representation signals that the activities and standards of TPCs and regulatory networks are not the representation of just a few but rather the aggregate views of a representative body of experts, whether from different countries, professions, or sectors. Demonstrating adherence to the norm of consensus signals acceptance of the standard by all members of the community or network. Nonetheless, consensus may be difficult to achieve if diverging interests exist or if the issue itself is controversial. A way out, which seems to be quite a common responses in communities and networks, is to introduce ‘neutral’ expert knowledge in the form of outside or inside experts who are not perceived as having vested interests themselves. This gives academics and think tanks with expertise in the subject area a particular role in these organizations, even though it should be acknowledged that the selection of experts may also become political. Another way out is to resolve the potential for conflict within TPCs and regulatory networks simply by focusing on less-divisive topics at the expense of standard setting on difficult issues that may require more standards. Despite being likely strategies, both make internal deliberations and decision- making processes more complex. Theoretically, the need for inclusiveness may reduce the number or quality of outputs due to procedural attempts to counteract low levels of participation, while it may also simply take longer to achieve results. Both strategies also require active management to ensure the desired level of representation and consensus, which may not necessarily lie within the capabilities of many of those tasked with steering these communities and networks. Accountability: Closely connected to the challenge of legitimacy, TPCs and regulatory networks also have blurred lines of accountability. Accountability is hereby understood as a condition in which some actors ‘have the right to hold other actors to a set of standards, to judge whether they have fulfilled their responsibilities in light of these standards. And to impose sanctions if they determine that these responsibilities have not been met’ (Grant and Keohane, 2005, p. 29). This definition implies two aspects for TPCs and regulatory networks: one is a relationship between policy communities or
Transnational Policy Communities 485 networks and those holding them to account; and the other is that if certain standards are not met, those held accountable have obligations to change their actions. Following this logic, establishing accountable TPCs and regulatory networks is deeply problematic for two reasons: the indistinct constituency of TPCs and regulatory networks; as well as the undefined set of standards. To whom are experts, NGO representatives, and national regulators active in TPCs and regulatory networks accountable, and by what standards? Different conceptions exist in this regard. For some observers, TPCs and regulatory networks must answer to a general (global) public even though no formal mechanisms exist to channel feedback into expert groups and regulator meetings. This is particularly problematic for policy communities that often have indistinct boundaries and fluid membership patterns. Moreover, which voices of the public should be heard and included and how can favouring the powerful organized interest groups be prevented? While this remains unresolved for TPCs, observers of regulatory networks have argued that domestic legislators and organized interest groups should closely follow the actions of regulatory networks to avoid a distortion of national political processes. Nonetheless, such an extended scrutiny easily limits the de-politicized nature of regulatory networks, which is often considered essential for addressing highly complex and controversial governance problems. The second problematic issue regarding accountability concerns which standards should actually be met. Should TPCs and regulatory networks be above all ‘effective’ as a benchmark? What constitutes effectiveness then? Is it effectiveness in terms of outputs such as the influence of policy design on a certain issue, or is, rather, efficiency in terms of processes desirable? Whose perception of effectiveness and efficiency should define the standard? While these questions remain a messy and unresolved reality, some observers have instead proposed transparency and inclusiveness as important standards that TPCs and regulatory networks should meet (Slaughter, 2004a). Transparency requires TPCs and regulatory networks to make information about members, processes and decisions publicly available. In turn, inclusiveness is the structured engagement of different societal groups in expert committees and regulatory networks to avoid a technocratic set-up in which unelected regulators and stakeholders ‘do not respond to the social, economic, and political concerns of ordinary citizens’ (Slaughter, 2004b, 164).
27.6. Conclusion: Towards a Global Administration? Transnational policy communities and regulatory networks have become central elements of transnational relations by supplying critical knowledge, suggesting policy alternatives and, partially, by setting standards. While the legitimate authority of some TPCs and regulatory networks may be questionable, it seems undeniable that their
486 Alexander Gaus proliferation has shifted our view on global governance from an international model to a transnational one. Global regulation and standard setting is no longer a top-down legal process but rather one of multiple actor constellations, competing discourses and self-regulation through soft law by a myriad of actors from the public, private, and third sectors. TPCs and regulatory networks are similar in many respects, despite their differences in terms of organizational quality. While their membership is selective and often exclusive, they connect experts and regulators from both the public and private sectors. They seek to influence policy processes primarily through discourses and expert authority rather than necessarily by establishing formal rules and legal provisions. Above all, they are quite effective in influencing policies and setting standards, as evidenced by studies on policy communities and regulatory networks active in policy fields such as human rights (Keck and Sikkink, 1999) or the world of finance (Bach and Newman, 2010). By virtue of their activities, the actors engaged in TPCs and regulatory networks have become an important part of an emergent global administration. Nonetheless, the elements of an administration that they represent are different from the Weberian ideas of administration and bureaucracy. Lacking a clear hierarchy as well as public accountability, the contours of a global administration pushed forward by TPCs and regulatory networks feature diffuse centres of influence such as network secretariats and self- selecting administrators that derive their influence from expert authority and technical expertise rather than a position legitimated by state action. Such an emerging global administration is above all transnational because influence is shared between public and private actors. However, a number of issues surrounding TPCs and regulatory networks remain unspecified and represent avenues for future research. First, rather than engaging in more conceptual and definitional studies, it would be useful to more closely analyse the organizational quality of TPCs and regulatory networks, as well as how structures influence processes within them and their overall regulatory capacity. This should explicitly extend beyond formal structures and include taken-for-granted rules and norms, how these rules develop, how they are sustained, as well as how they change. A second avenue for future research beyond structures and institutions concerns the internal dynamics. Given that power plays an important role in TPCs and regulatory networks, one should not assume that they establish a level-playing field among the various actors engaged in these new fora; instead, it would be beneficial to better understand how and to what extent influence in and by TPCs and regulatory networks is dependent on the level of professionalization, organizational attributes and the instruments of collaboration under use. Finally, a (more) critical examination of TPCs and regulatory networks could help to generate new perspectives. The expansion of the influence of TPCs and regulatory networks should not obscure the fact that they do not exist equally across all policy fields, that they are not necessarily more effective than more traditional governance arrangements or that they necessarily advocate better policies. What then determines the rise, the effectiveness, and the specific
Transnational Policy Communities 487 policy outlook of TPCs and regulatory networks? In particular, studying the interplay between opposing policy communities and the discursive competition of ideas represents a promising field of research.
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Chapter 28
Standard Set t i ng and Internat i ona l Peer Revi ew The OECD as a Transnational Policy Actor Leslie A. Pal
28.1. Introduction The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), despite having no coercive powers over its members and partners, is heavily engaged in a wide range of global policy issues, from climate change to childcare. It has successfully insinuated itself into global public policy making, and thereby illustrates some of the tools and mechanisms indispensable to transnational administration. As an international governmental organization (IGO), it relies extensively on its intellectual and reputational capital, its convening power, its networks, and various capacities in exchange, lesson-drawing, and monitoring/surveillance. This chapter first situates the OECD in terms of the various current, overlapping systems of global governance. We distinguish four such systems in contrast to the traditional, state-centric model of international relations. The traditional, Westphalian, model is one of sovereign states contracting among themselves through various treaties and agreements that have binding force in international law (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992). States also form IGOs. These IGOs can be almost universal, as in the case of the United Nations (UN), or regional. In either case, they are dominated by their members, and reflect state interests. The implementation of agreements is usually by the state parties (their governments). The four other models are not mutually exclusive, and overlap and are often reinforcing, but they are distinct in their dynamics.
492 Leslie A. Pal 1. IGO partnership and cooperation: Whereas the traditional model sees IGOs as artefacts of their member states, an emerging trend has been cooperation and coordination among IGOs, combining efforts and resources on horizontal policy issues (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Koppell, 2010; Deacon et al., 1997; Carroll, 2010). The World Bank’s Global Environment Facility, for example, has eighteen partners, including development banks and various UN agencies (e.g. Food and Agricultural Organisation, United Nations Environment Programme). 2. Transgovernmental: These are networks of government agencies or other state organizations that operate in focused policy areas, marshalling expertise, exchanging information, managing policy issues, implementing state-level agreements, and often generating operational agreements (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009; Slaughter, 2004). Examples would be the Financial Stability Board (central bank governors and finance ministries) or INTERPOL (police agencies). 3. Transnational: Whereas the previous two systems are closely connected to states, there is also global policy coordination among non- state actors— non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector firms and associations, epistemic communities (scientists and researchers), foundations, and others (Stone, 2008; Cutler et al., 1999; Stone, 2004; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002; Haas, 1992). They are not merely observers or pressure groups; they are increasingly involved in policy development and administration, often engaged with states as partners or in distinct areas of non-state regulation (Büthe and Mattli, 2011; Christensen, 2006; Cashore et al., 2004). For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the scientific research for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Forest Stewardship Council is a multi-stakeholder international organization to promote responsible management of the world’s forests. 4. Regime complexes: In some respects, this system builds and incorporates the ones above. Regime complexes lie somewhere between ‘comprehensive international regulatory institutions’ with single, integrated legal instruments at one end, and highly fragmented and disjointed arrangements at the other. They embrace sets of nested, semi-hierarchical sub-regimes that are loosely coupled but not themselves arranged hierarchically (Keohane and Victor, 2011; Abbott and Snidal, 2009). The regime complex for climate change, for example, would include (at minimum) the UN legal regime (the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Accord), IPCC assessments, various ‘clubs’ of countries (G20, G8, APEC), multilateral development assistance, the Montreal Protocol (on ozone-depleting gases), and subnational initiatives. A regime complex includes both state and non-state actors in multiple configurations focused on different aspects of a wider policy issue. A particularly vivid example is the regime complex for global financial regulation (Eccleston, 2012; Germain, 2010). As an IGO, the OECD reflects the traditional model of a state-based organization, but is also deeply engaged in each of the other four systems (Mahon and McBride, 2008;
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 493 Ougaard, 2010; Carroll and Kellow, 2011; Woodward, 2009). It partners with other IGOs, it is a venue for government officials around the world to cooperatively manage key policy fields through agreements and standards, it is a site for discussion and coordination for NGOs and other non-state actors, and it is an indefatigable contributor to and builder of regime complexes. The scope of these activities is not unique—indeed, to the extent that global governance consists of these overlapping systems, we would expect at least a subset of key global actors (states, state agencies, non-state actors) to be equally ecumenical in their engagements. What distinguishes the OECD is its mastery of three key elements of effective transnational administration: (1) quality research and information as the foundation for, (2) agreed norms and standards that can be, (3) credibly monitored and benchmarked. These are key because transnational administration as it is understood in this book cannot rely exclusively or even primarily on the traditional system of state-led, legally binding agreements. If states and non-state actors are to be engaged in a wide variety of policy regimes, and are to manage them effectively, they need credible information (or have to agree on the sources of that information) that can be the trusted basis for agreements and understandings that are in turn implemented and institutionalized. The OECD’s ‘brand’ in transnational administration has been built on these elements: it is possibly the world’s single largest producer of policy relevant data and research across almost all (with the exception of defence and culture) policy fields, and it relies uniquely on a system of peer review to spread ‘good practices’ and often to monitor their implementation.
28.2. The OECD as an International Organization The OECD was established in 1961 as the successor to the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation, founded in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan and help re-build the European economies (Barbezat, 1997; Griffiths, 1997). At the time of its founding, the OECD’s original twenty members1 represented 80 per cent of world GDP. By 2011, that had dropped to slightly less than 50 per cent, and is still probably at that level in 2018, even with a roster of thirty-six2 (OECD, 2014a). Its original focus was narrowly economic: trade, balance of payments, scientific research, energy, labour, and a host of specific sectors such as oil, iron and steel, textiles, hides and skins, and cement. But this focus was a matter of definition at the time—almost anything can be connected to economic development—and has expanded dramatically to the point where the OECD is engaged in almost every conceivable policy area, from taxation to happiness. The OECD was originally a quintessential state-centric IGO, though its mandate was more nebulous than sister organizations like the World Bank. As a member-based IGO, it has all the trappings of a diplomatic entity. Its members are represented on the Council (one representative per member, plus a representative of the European Union),
494 Leslie A. Pal and most decisions throughout the organization, even at the working level, are taken by consensus, that is, without a formal vote. The Council meets monthly and is chaired by the Secretary-General, who is appointed for renewable five-year terms. The annual Ministerial Council Meeting (MCM) consists of high-level delegations from each member state, as well as observers, partners, policy experts, and others. The MCM sets the OECD’s broad priorities, while the Council oversees day-to-day operations. The Council sits atop the internal working machinery of the OECD, which consists of: (1) an intricate committee system, supported by, (2) a secretariat.3 The committee system is the key, distinguishing feature of the OECD in comparison with other IGOs. As of September 2018, there were twenty-nine substantive committees (listed in Table 28.1). Each committee consists of a subset of interested member-state representatives, but invited observers and non-members may also attend. The committees comprise officials from the respective states who have practical expertise in the policy field in question. Most committees meet only once or twice a year, and most have subsidiary bodies designated as working groups (more ongoing) or expert committees (usually focused on a single issue). While they are subsidiary, they are not necessarily subordinate, which means that they often pursue narrower, more technically focused issues as they see fit. For example, the Environmental Policy Committee has eleven subsidiary bodies: the Global Forum on the Environment, three ‘joint’ bodies that connect it to other OECD committees, and seven ‘working parties.’ One of the working parties, the Working Party on Chemicals, Pesticides and Biotechnology, has nine additional subsidiary bodies (designated as task forces and working groups). Finally, in addition to the committees, there are centres, programmes, boards, forums, ad hoc working groups, networks,
Table 28.1 OECD Main Committees (as of September 2018) Chemicals Committee Committee for Agriculture Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy Committee on Consumer Policy Committee on the Digital Economy Committee on Financial Markets Committee on Fiscal Affairs Committee on Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy Competition Committee Coordinating Committee on Remuneration Corporate Governance Committee Development Assistance Committee Economic and Development Review Committee Economic Policy Committee
Education Policy Committee Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee Environment Policy Committee Fisheries Committee Health Committee Insurance and Private Pensions Committee Investment Committee Public Governance Committee Regional Development Policy Committee Regulatory Policy Committee Steel Committee Steering Committee for Nuclear Energy Tourism Committee Trade Committee
Source: OECD, On-Line Guide to OECD Intergovernmental Activity. Available at: https://oecdgroups. oecd.org/.
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 495 steering committees, standing groups—in total, there are over 250 such specialized bodies within the OECD. This is the part of the OECD, in contrast to the Council, that is transgovernmental in the sense defined above. Each year, over 40,000 government officials from around the world—member states, non-members, observers—attend the meetings of these bodies. Supporting all this activity is the OECD Secretariat, which consists of about 2,500 permanent staff, most of whom are policy experts and analysts. Its core consists of departments or directorates (the nomenclature varies) that support the work of the committees and other entities. As of September 2018, there were twelve departments/directorates:
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Development Co-operation Directorate; Economics Department; Directorate for Education and Skills; Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs; Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs and Local Development; Environment Directorate; Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs; Directorate for Public Governance; Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation; Statistics and Data Directorate; Centre for Tax Policy and Administration; Trade and Agriculture Directorate.
The four most active directorates (in terms of the total number of bodies that they support) are the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs (30), the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (26), the Environment Directorate (25), and the Trade and Agriculture Directorate (24). Table 28.2 lists the bodies supported by the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs. The range of issues covered by the various entities illustrates the level of detail at which the OECD operates. This is multiplied and leveraged significantly across all of the other 250+ bodies. The OECD is a hybrid IGO. Its Council structure is a traditional state-centric diplomatic mechanism, but its committees consist of expert officials who are issue-and problem-focused. The Secretariat is like a giant think tank that is both engaged with but insulated from the political and international relations context of its work. That insulation is rooted in its understanding that the OECD’s key resource is the quality and credibility of its research. When the Secretariat ‘supports’ a committee’s work, it provides the foundation of research and data for eventual OECD norms and standards. A classic perspective on this internal machinery would assume that it is dominated by state members. The reality is more complex. First, ‘states’ are represented in the OECD system (as they are in most IGOs) in multiple ways and levels. Council and MCM representation is by the state’s diplomatic corps, by its ‘government’. However, in committees, states are represented by senior ministry officials. The delegations often have difficulty tracking and coordinating the small platoons of their own officials. Moving down the
496 Leslie A. Pal Table 28.2 Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs (bodies supported as of September 2018) Investment Committee Working Group on International Investment Statistics Meeting of the National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct Advisory Task Force on the OECD Codes of Liberalization Global Forum on Responsible Business Conduct Working Party on Responsible Business Conduct Insurance and Private Pensions Committee Working Party of Governmental Experts on Insurance Working Party on Private Pensions Task Force on Pension Statistics Task Force on Insurance Statistics Global Forum on Finance Joint Task Force on Institutional Investors and Long-Term Financing Committee on Financial Markets Working Party on Financial Statistics Working Party on Debt Management Global Forum on Finance Task Force on Financial Consumer Protection Joint Task Force on Institutional Investors and Long-Term Financing Competition Committee Global Forum on Competition Working Party No. 2 on Competition and Regulation Working Party No. 3 on Co-operation and Enforcement Corporate Governance Committee Working Party on State Ownership and Privatisation Practices Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions Source: OECD, On-Line Guide to OECD Intergovernmental Activity. Available at: https://oecdgroups. oecd.org/.
layers of committees, the coordination and coherence diminishes significantly. Each entity becomes a small world of policy making relevant primarily to their respective ministerial or agency constituencies. Transnational networks of officials develop around insulated nodes of activity—officials working on chemicals regulation will have little or no connection with officials working on education, financial markets, or anti-bribery. The issue definition and norm-setting that occurs within these networks aggregates
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 497 upwards into an organizational agenda for the OECD as a whole, but this is largely a fallacy of composition. The second complexity is the process of agenda setting through the committees and Secretariat. States rely on the OECD, as they often do with other IGOs, to help articulate issues, policy problems, norms, solutions, and agreements (Busch, 2014; Xu and Weller, 2008; De Francesco, 2013). Committee membership is variable and turnover frequent, and so the role of the Secretariat is pivotal. Its core of directorates and its machinery of research, data collection, and issue articulation, help it steer the OECD’s agenda at the working level as much as support it. This is consistent with research on the administrative machinery of other IGOs (Trondal et al., 2010; Reinalda and Verbeek, 2004; Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Mathiason, 2007). A third complexity is that the OECD’s internal and transnational machinery is complemented by the organization’s various partnerships with other IGOs and with global civil society constituencies. An example is the climate change agenda that peaked with the Paris Agreement signed on 12 December 2015. The Agreement was the product of COP21—the Conference of Parties that have been negotiating the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), first adopted at the Rio Conference in 1992. The UNFCCC came into force in 1994, and was followed by annual meetings of the COP, culminating in the Paris Agreement to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2o C above pre-industrial levels’ (United Nations, 2015). However, COP21 was preceded on 15–16 November by the G20 meeting in Antalya, Turkey. It also endorsed the Paris objective of a 2o C global temperature limit. The OECD supports each G20 meeting with a designated ‘Sherpa’ who helps frame its priorities (see Cooper in this volume). It claims to be involved in ‘virtually all of the Group’s strands of work and most G20 working groups with data, analytical reports, policy recommendations and standards’ (OECD, 2015a). The OECD’s contributions to the G20 climate efforts were to the Energy Efficiency Finance Task Force (part of the G20 Energy Efficiency Action Plan), the Energy Regulators’ policy dialogue, and the Energy and Sustainability Working Group’s review of fossil fuel subsidies. And at COP21 in Paris, just before the launch, the OECD released a joint statement with the International Energy Agency, the International Transport Forum, and the Nuclear Energy Agency (all special bodies affiliated with the OECD), noting the enormous amount of research conducted by the Environment Directorate (Busch, 2009). These multiple engagements with the UN and the G20 are not simply a game of international musical chairs, but an ‘orchestration’ (Abbott et al., 2015) of overlapping, coordinated transnational activities that contribute to building global policy agendas. This also entails engagement with global civil society organizations. This also departs significantly from the classical view of an IGO as consisting essentially of state members. When established, the OECD had a formal partnership with trade unions and business associations through the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) and the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC). Nonetheless, the OECD did in fact operate as a classical IGO until the setback with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in
498 Leslie A. Pal the late 1990s. The OECD’s draft met the first internet-coordinated international NGO opposition, which ultimately defeated it in 1998 (Clarke and Barlow, 1997). The OECD learned its lesson, and from that point began to engage more broadly with international civil society, principally through the OECD Forum, starting in 2000 and held annually in conjunction with the MCM. The 2018 version attracted over 4,000 participants. As well, most of the directorates and key committees have global forums of their own. The Environment Policy Committee (EPOC), for example, has a Global Forum on the Environment. The Public Governance Directorate has a Global Network of Schools of Government, consisting of national academies and schools of public administration from over seventy countries (see Jeong and Kim in this volume). There are numerous other networks of non-governmental partners that exist more virtually (e.g. the Development Assistance Committee’s Network on Governance or GovNet). These layers of complexity—(1) Council (member states), (2) Secretariat, committees and their working groups and special bodies, and (3) IGO partnerships, forums and networks—go well beyond the model of a classical IGO of sovereign member states. That model fails to capture the disaggregated and networked nature of the OECD, its practices of knowledge and norm generation, consultation and exchange. While the organization has sometimes been criticized as ineffectual (Mahbubani, 2013) or too Western-centric (Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes, 2014), the OECD has emerged as the type of IGO highly adapted to the current phase of globalization. Its apparent weaknesses can be considered to be strengths when global regulatory regime complexes are themselves disaggregated, networked, information driven, and even chaotic.
28.3. Knowledge Production, Standard Setting and Peer Review From the classical, realist perspective, the ‘power’ of the OECD is the power of its leading member states. But this is only one strand in the OECD’s DNA. In fact, unlike IGOs with the leverage of loan conditionality (the World Bank and other development banks) or the direct benefits of membership accession (European Union), the OECD is among those IGOs whose only tools are its conceptualizing and convening powers. From a realist perspective, this is no type of power at all. However, the relation of power and knowledge is more complex (Neumann and Sending, 2010; Williams, 2008). Power creates knowledge and knowledge reflects power. This power/knowledge matrix—what Foucault, for example, called ‘disciplinary power’—relies on several techniques (Foucault, 1979, 1980). One is coercion through comprehensive surveillance. It relies on ‘observatories,’ or ‘panopticons,’ that comprehend and monitor behaviour. Another is the ‘normalizing judgement,’ a technique that establishes a myriad of rules and norms, and a series of micro-penalties for even
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 499 small transgressions. A third is the ‘examination’, which combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and a normalizing judgement. Foucault’s exemplar was the modern prison, with the ‘examination’ as a technique involving a ‘network of writing’, using documents and procedures of registration and codes. These conceptual markers help capture the transnational governance techniques of the OECD. The OECD is ‘considered to be a mythical, neutral, scientific and objective soothsayer that one cannot afford to ignore’ (Marcussen, 2004, p. 20). It generates knowledge, but of a particular type that gives it a special currency in global governance (Dostal, 2004). The knowledge is practical, about what states actually do, gathered through canvassing states themselves, developing techniques of measurement and comparison, and generating knowledge frameworks that create new fields of action and intervention (Sahlin-Andersson, 2000). The knowledge then accumulates into ‘best practices’ (though that terminology has now been replaced with ‘good practices’ or ‘good fit’), standards, codes, frameworks, and guidelines. The OECD creates and participates in a constant cycle of examination and monitoring—reports, meetings, updates, compliance. It contributes to a transnational system of governance that is a system of disciplines, of administrative practices which in turn constantly re-create the epistemes of regime complexes.
28.3.1. Knowledge Production The OECD is one of the largest producers of policy relevant data and reports in the world, publishing over 250 new books, forty updated statistical databases and other materials each year. Once described as an ‘ideational artist’ (cited in Marcussen, 2004), it paints by numbers, through its datasets, statistics, and quantitative comparisons. Its impact is not due to simple quantity of materials, but their quality, a ‘quality’ marked by several key characteristics (Kay and Carroll, 2014; Hansen and Porter, 2012). First, the scope and breadth (over forty general datasets, complemented by numerous more specific series on almost every conceivable subject) make the OECD a default government data source. For example, it produces 238 indicators ranging from ‘access to computers from home’ to ‘mammography machines’. Second, much of the data are unique to the OECD in that they are gathered through questionnaires sent to member states. This gives the OECD the unique advantage of the ‘insider’, and it also gathers data from non-members. A good example of this is the ‘At a Glance’ series produced by several OECD Directorates. These are compilations around the key directorate focus (governance, health, etc.) that provide sharp, comparative portraits on various sub- themes. They are powerful overviews that map ‘mindspace’ around an issue. The OECD describes this collection of publications as its ‘most frequently-requested indicators on a variety of topics’ (OECD, 2015b). It lists ten ‘At a Glance’ titles: entrepreneurship; government; health; education; national accounts; Factbook; regions; science, technology and industry scoreboard; and society. They provide an artful sense of trends (as in ‘many OECD countries’, ‘the OECD average’, and ‘across OECD countries’), but also
500 Leslie A. Pal differences within groups of countries, both member and non-member states (a mix of the enhanced engagement states, as well as likely accession states). Third—and this moves from mere calculation to real artistry—the OECD is a master at staking new conceptual ground and then building credible data sources around it. One example is ‘happiness’. GDP as an indicator of national well-being has long been criticized, and the effort to find superior substitutes received a boost when the government of Bhutan decided to develop a measure of ‘Gross National Happiness’. The OECD quickly seized the opportunity and launched a ‘Better Life Index’ (OECD, 2015c), complete with cross-country comparisons, gender differences, various ways to explore the question of ‘How’s Life’ at a personal level, and even a publication How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820. Another example of this ideational entrepreneurship is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (von Bogdandy and Goldmann, 2012). Started in 2000, it is held every three years, and assesses the skills and knowledge of fifteen-year-old students. In 2000, forty-three countries participated, fourteen of which were non- members. In 2015 (the most recent PISA at time of writing), there were seventy- two participating countries, including all thirty-five OECD member states and thirty-seven non-member states as diverse as Qatar and Vietnam. Upon release, the PISA results typically engender anxious national debates about educational policy (Rautalin and Alasuutari, 2007). PISA has rapidly become one of the most visible OECD products, a global standard on education and a key indicator of quality (Martens, 2007).
28.3.2. Standard Setting, Norms, and Instruments Knowledge production is a key element in standard setting and the creation of global administrative norms, typically because standards and norms are meant to address ‘public goods’ and ‘public bads’, (see Kaul in this volume). The OECD is noted for its reliance on ‘soft law’—even those instruments that are legally binding are so only for members who have not abstained. But they still have a demonstrative force since they are visible deals among ‘leading’ nations. The OECD instruments are classified as follows. First, there are decisions, which are legally binding on all non-abstaining OECD members who adopt them. They are not international treaties, but carry the same obligations. Recommendations carry no obligations, but are said to have ‘great moral force’ for those countries who have accepted them. Together, decisions and recommendations are known as the ‘OECD Acts’. Declarations are ‘solemn texts’ that outline policy commitments, which are monitored by the responsible OECD body. Finally, there are declarations, arrangements, and understandings, negotiated and adopted by a subset of OECD members, and international agreements, binding on those concluding the agreement but not on the OECD as a whole. As of September 2018, the OECD’s portfolio consisted of 245 legal instruments in force, twenty-five decisions, 172 recommendations, and twenty-six declarations.
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 501 It is easy to dismiss the practical effect of these instruments. But this overlooks two important ways that standards and norms can affect global public policy (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Djelic and Quack, 2012; Rieneke et al., 2012). The first is the contribution to discourse, to a mental space around an issue. For example, the December 2015 Recommendation of the Council on Gender Equality in Public Life advises adherents to ‘mainstream gender equality in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of relevant public policies and budgets’. It suggests securing leadership at the ‘highest political level’ for a whole-of-government strategy that would include ‘setting a rationale, action plans, priorities, timelines, objectives, expected outcomes and/or targets’ as well as ‘information and awareness campaigns, media strategies and regular reviews.’ It further recommends the strengthening of monitoring capacities of independent institutions such as Supreme Audit Institutions or Ombuds Offices, as well as advisory councils. Parliaments should be engaged by integrating gender perspectives into practices, legislation, and budgets. There should be gender balance in decision- making institutions in public life, ‘encouraging greater participation of women in government at all levels,’ and improved gender equality in public employment (implying the removal of any ‘implicit barriers’). This is a considerable agenda: if actually implemented in a country that ranked low on gender equality measures, it would involve substantial institutional reforms, new processes, and broad public engagement. It is true that there is little likelihood of such a country adopting and implementing all of these measures at once, but that is not the point. The Recommendation establishes a set of benchmarks and norms of what should be done to achieve ‘gender equality in public life.’ Moreover, the Recommendation enjoins adherents to disseminate it ‘at all levels of government’, and encourages non-adherents to ‘take due account of and adhere’ to it. The very existence of this agenda, if taken up by even by only a few government bodies and non-governmental agents, potentially creates ‘compliance constituencies’ which will move that agenda—however incrementally and haltingly—forward (Talberg, 2015). The Public Governance Committee, in cooperation with the Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee, is to monitor the Recommendation, ‘including through the development and use of benchmark indicators and country reviews’ and report regularly to the Council. It is this definitional crafting of a conceptual space and then its institutional support through surveillance and monitoring that pushes the agenda forward. The second aspect of these instruments is that they evolve incrementally. The OECD Secretariat is well aware of their anaemic quality, but sees them dynamically, in the sense that they are beads in an ever-strengthening and lengthening rosary, and collectively in that each instrument is part of a larger portfolio of tools. A good example is the OECD’s public governance integrity agenda (Pal, 2012, pp. 137–8). The foundation was an international legal instrument, the 1997 OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (OECD, 1997). It still is the only international instrument addressing the ‘supply side’ of bribery transactions, and as of September 2018 had been signed by all thirty-six OECD members as well as eight non-members. Fresh discussions were held in 2007, which resulted in the Recommendation of the Council for Further Combating Bribery of Foreign Public
502 Leslie A. Pal Officials in International Business Transactions (OECD, 2009). This extended the Convention by encouraging further reviews of the regulation of banks and other financial institutions, and provided a ‘good practice’ guide on the Convention’s implementation. The integrity portfolio is further rounded out by four other instruments: 1. Recommendation of the Council on Improving Ethical Conduct in the Public Service Including Principles for Managing Ethics in the Public Service (1998); 2. Recommendation of the Council on OECD Guidelines for Managing Conflict of Interest in the Public Service (2003); 3. Recommendation of the Council on Enhancing Integrity in Public Procurement (2008); 4. Recommendation of the Council on Principles for Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying (2010). These recommendations consist of two or three short paragraphs asking member countries to consider issues of ethical conduct, conflict of interest, integrity in public procurement, and lobbying. As weak as they sound, they have cumulative impact, and do not stand alone—as with the Convention on Bribery, they extend into other international organizations such as the World Bank and regional banks, non-member states, and NGOs and the business community.
28.3.3. Peer Review The OECD’s signature technique of transnational governance is peer review (the logic of ‘examination’). The production of knowledge discussed earlier is a type of ‘peer sharing’, though in reality the OECD members are hardly real peers. In 1961, Greece, Spain, and Turkey were not equal to the UK or the US. However, the assumption in establishing the OECD was that members were similar in their economic aspirations, and bound together as the fulcrum of the global capitalist economy. These bonds of aspiration and connection remain at the core of the OECD’s peer-review and peer-sharing exercises (Pagani, 2002; Conzelmann, 2008; Kauffmann and Koenig, 2014). Peer reviews have a variety of formats—the most visible are the regular annual economic outlooks produced by the Economic Development and Review Committee and the Economic Department, but country reviews are conducted by almost every directorate and committee, as well as horizontal policy reviews that consider groups of countries. The logic of peer review of any sort has several key components and stages (Pal, 2012, pp. 122–33). First, it is voluntary and commissioned, requested, and usually paid for by the recipient country. As a consequence, the parameters are set in cooperation between the OECD and the government, through meetings and a preliminary scoping mission. Second, the review is based on detailed and proprietary data provided by the recipient. OECD staff typically send an initial questionnaire, and may follow-up with another fact-finding mission. Third—and this is crucial in any peer review process—there is a
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 503 phase where representatives of ‘peers’ conduct their investigation. In the OECD model, the recipient will suggest countries from which the peer reviewers be drawn (because they are leaders in the field in question, or similar to the recipient in important ways), but the final selection is made by the OECD. The peers are trusted to be neutral, but also knowledgeable in that they are senior public service practitioners. The group of peers will typically visit the country and then guide the drafting of the report (almost all of which is done by Secretariat officials). The recipient is given a chance to comment on the draft report, but only on points of fact. A final draft is then prepared and published, and will be discussed (and progress assessed over time) by the respective OECD committee. As ‘reviews,’ they are inevitably assessments, and as much as the OECD avoids the language of ‘best’ practice, it does compare against norms, trends, central tendencies, or apparently successful national practices. In 2014, for example, the OECD was invited by the government of Kazakhstan to review its central administration, and the ensuing report assessed the office of the President, the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, the Civil Service and Anti-Corruption Agency, the Ministries of National Economy, Finance, and Justice, as well as several line ministries (OECD, 2014b). Best practice examples, drawn from the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and others, were the basis of recommended reforms. The peer reviewers were senior officials from the UK, Greece, and Korea. The review led to a cooperation agreement for 2015–16 where the OECD helped Kazakhstan modernize its public administration. Peer reviews are another example of extensive networking activities by the OECD and the creation of a transnational set of benchmarks, a shared ‘administrative conceptual space,’ where officials in Kazakhstan become well-versed in the minutiae of cabinet functions in Korea or Brazil. OECD members, as members, have already accepted the process as a given, and as a useful tool for comparison. Non-members can invite reviews because they genuinely want to learn, reform, or eventually accede to the OECD (Carroll, 2014), or key actors within their governments may wish to use an OECD review process to launch reforms against opponents. Peer review is often embedded in OECD agreements as a non-invasive form of surveillance—performance can be monitored, reported, and corrected. As the guidelines for peer review by the DAC state, the reviews work through ‘holding DAC members accountable for the commitments they have made, and reviewing their performance against key dimensions of development co- operation and other domestic policies with an impact on developing countries’ (OECD (Development Co-operation Directorate), 2014). The same is true of the country monitoring reports that are required under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
28.4. Conclusion The OECD illustrates many of the complexities of modern transnational administration and policy making. It is a hybrid organization: (1) governmental, in that its members are states and the Council drives its broad agenda; (2) transgovernmental, in that it is a site
504 Leslie A. Pal of dense networks of government agencies and other state organizations that ‘manage’ global policy fields such as anti-bribery or tax coordination; (3) transnational, in that it invites participation and even involvement from international non-governmental organizations; and (4) an IGO partner with other international organizations in orchestrating horizontal policy agendas. Each of these aspects involves cascading and interpolated networks of activities that accumulate into ‘regime complexes.’ It is hybrid in practice, but is it hybrid by design, intent, and vocation? Clearly not— its hybridity is a result of accident and response. It started as a classic intergovernmental organization, with weak representation from business and labour. The MAI experience, coupled with the growth of transnational non-governmental organizations and increasing criticism of conventional IGOs, led it to embrace global consultations and policy networks. Its cooperation with other IGOs has been tempered by competition for relevance in a crowded global space, especially since the OECD’s work is less existentially necessary for the global system than, say, international financial institutions. Ideas matter, but money talks. With respect to the G20, the OECD’s Secretary-General had to hawk the organization’s potential service, and then was forced to coordinate with the World Bank and the IMF in delivering background papers for the G20 agenda.4 So the organization’s hybridity is an artefact of the forces at play in the global policy making arena, and how those forces shape transnational administrations. The OECD’s variable architecture both responds to and shapes its environment. It has certain advantages when global systems are unsettled, when fresh ideas and innovation is needed, but those same advantages—of hybridity and complexity—threaten its organizational coherence. Complex though it is, the OECD’s tools and practices are quintessentially administrative and policy related—they are tools of evidence, credible research, problem definition, ideas, discussion, exchange of experiences, norm-building, agreements, and finally monitoring and assessment. The OECD embodies the logic of ‘observatories’ (among others, it has an Observatory on Public Sector Innovation, and one on Ethics Codes and Codes of Conduct in OECD Countries), as well as ‘the gaze’ (quite literally— its flagship publications are ‘outlooks’ and ‘glances’). It is a tireless venue for meetings, consultations, discussions, and forums, and a sponsor of innumerable others elsewhere. Sometimes these yield binding agreements, sometimes frameworks of action, sometimes norms and standards, and sometimes simply research and information. But in all cases the OECD contributes to and helps construct regime complexes and transnational administrative spaces around specific policy issues. These in turn create the possibilities, though not the inevitability, for the ‘inter-operability’ of national administrative and policy systems.
Notes 1. Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and West Germany.
Standard Setting and International Peer Review 505 2. Membership in September 2018: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States. The European Commission is a partner, not a member, and while it is involved in all the work of the OECD and its various bodies, it does not have a vote. As of November 2017, the OECD was engaged in accession discussions with Columbia, Costa Rica, and Lithuania. It had started discussions with the Russian Federation in 2007, but in March 2014, after events in Ukraine, postponed them indefinitely. 3. There are also six specialized, semi-autonomous bodies that provide centres of dialogue between OECD members and other states: Development Centre, Financial Action Task Force, International Energy Agency, International Transport Forum, Nuclear Energy Agency, Sahel, and West Africa Club. 4. Interviews with senior OECD staff, June 2014.
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Chapter 29
Evolving Fu ndi ng Pat terns of G l oba l Pro gram mes a nd T h e i r Im pacts on Gov e rna nc e and Operat i ons Daniele Alesani
29.1. Introduction Funding mechanisms play a fundamental role in shaping and orienting global programmes. Funding patterns have evolved over time and the emergence of private philanthropy and global public private–partnerships (GPPPs) have created new sets of financial mechanisms for international aid. The traditional boundaries between bilateral and multilateral aid are being continuously redefined as the interactions among global players evolve. Accordingly, new financial actors and instruments are increasingly important for understanding the evolution of the governance systems and programme implementation modalities of international development financing in the transnational public administration domain.
29.2. Funding Global and Regional Programmes Official Development Assistance (ODA) is a term coined by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
510 Daniele Alesani Development (OECD) to quantify international aid programmes to foster economic development and social well-being worldwide and trace related financial flows. ODA activities can be broadly classified into two categories: ‘bilateral’ and ‘multilateral’, based on their funding source. Bilateral activities are normally associated with direct funding flows from a donor, such as a foreign government agency, to a beneficiary entity, including national governments, civil society, and others. High-income donor countries often operate through bilateral technical cooperation agencies, which are often independent entities separate from their respective ministries of foreign affairs. The largest agencies—such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) or the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). These agencies deploy their programmes on the ground directly or by collaborating with the operational arms of the beneficiary country governments. Whilst the definition of ODA includes in principle aid flows among developing countries, substantial ‘South–South Cooperation’ (SSC) flows are not consolidated into ODA statistics, due to technical and institutional problems of data definition and collection, including the separation of trade-based aid from development aid (ECOSOC, 2008). As at 2013, the official bilateral annual ODA amounted to 109 billion USD, following an upward, although not linear, increase in the last five years (a 10 per cent increase in nominal terms compared to 2008; the 2005 level of contribution was the highest recorded until 2010). Multilateral activities are implemented by, or through, International Organizations (IOs). Channelling funds through IOs may increase the technical credibility of specialized organizations entrusted by the international community with pursuing a given development theme (e.g. UN Specialised Agencies, Funds and Programmes). In certain circumstances, IOs can be more politically acceptable than direct bilateral aid as they are viewed as carrying the stamp of approval of the international community as a whole. On the other side, multilateral operations are often considered generally more costly than bilateral ones since they activate IO bureaucracy and involve one or more layers of intermediation with implementing partners on the ground. Multilateral activities may be funded through ‘core’ or ‘non-core’ funds (UN, 2015a). This distinction is important since it affects the governance of funding and decisively orients the underlying operational activities. Core funding is usually commingled and untied. Its allocation is sanctioned through a budgeting process where the secretariat presents, and the governing bodies approve, a comprehensive programme of work based on priority areas of intervention in relation to the IO’s mandate (Alesani, 2013c). By contrast, non-core funding is voluntary in nature and by definition earmarked to specific programmes that are agreed between donors and recipient organizations. Given the impact of such extra-budgetary resources on the design, implementation, and monitoring of the underlying activities, these activities are also called ‘bi/multilateral’ (UN, 2015b) and most commonly packaged as ‘Trust Funds’ managed by IOs.
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 511 As of 2013, the multilateral ODA assistance flows were worth a total of 59.5 billion USD, equal to 41 per cent of the total ODA flows (145 billion USD). The three main channels of multilateral ODA were the European Commission (12.5 billion USD or 21 per cent), the United Nations system (18.4 billion USD or 31 per cent) and the World Bank and Regional Development banks (17.8 billion USD or 30 per cent) (OECD/DAC, 2015). The remaining 18 per cent of multilateral ODA was shared among other intergovernmental organizations and mechanisms. It is worth noting that contributions to IOs are highly concentrated within the top donors. In 2014, the top twenty bilateral donors provided 95 per cent of all government contributions to global humanitarian aid funding and the top five—US, UK, Germany, Sweden, and Japan—provided nearly two-thirds of contributions by governments (Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, 2015). Concentrated funding sources are a driver of vulnerability for IOs. Operational activities for international cooperation can be broadly classified ‘by theme’ as being humanitarian aid, economic development, peace and security, and policy making. In financial terms, humanitarian assistance and economic development activities total 63 per cent of the resources spent by the United Nations system in 2013 (UN, 2015b). In actuality, the political agenda from the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) to the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit focused on strengthening the level of integration between humanitarian assistance and development aid. This objective is pursued by investing in, first, ‘preparedness’—making sure populations and national economies are prepared to absorb or minimize the impact of negative external factors; second, ‘early recovery’—an integrated approach to turning the dividends of the humanitarian action into crisis recovery, resilience building, and development opportunities; and, third, ‘reduction of long term vulnerability’—for example by removing or alleviating the root causes of instability or emergency (OXFAM, 2012; Hinds, 2015).
29.3. A Changing Landscape for Funding Multilateral Cooperation During the past three decades, funding policies and patterns have shifted towards ‘non- core’ contributions. These are responsible for most of the nominal growth of available funding amidst stagnating ‘core’ resources. As noted earlier, non-core resources are ‘voluntary’ contributions by nature, given by single, or a group of, donors for specific purposes, countries, or sectors and are accepted and managed by IOs outside the regular budgeting processes. The value and weight of earmarked funding to multilateral organizations has increased over time. It currently represents 31 per cent of total multilateral ODA funding and a remarkable 76 per cent of the total contributions received by UN system funds and programmes, compared to 56 per cent in 1998 (UN, 2015b). Some of
512 Daniele Alesani the main drivers of the escalation of non-core resources highlighted in the international literature (Sagasti et al., 2007; Michaelowa, 2014; Graham, 2016) include: • donors’ frustration with the ordinary governance mechanisms of IOs and a desire to directly orient allocation of financial resources and, in turn, influence multilateral operations; • emergence of Value for Money (VfM), allocation efficiency and output effectiveness as principles upheld by donors in making decisions about funding allocation; • progressive expansion of the multilateral aid system, with non-core funding allowing a more flexible allocation of funding to different entities and themes over time. The importance of non-core funding has arguably brought about several benefits including increased competition for resources based on organizations’ comparative advantages and technical know-how, creation of an internal market for resources and shift towards the areas of intervention perceived as most value added, stronger accountability for results and more direct reporting to donors. Nonetheless, this trend may also bear unintended negative impacts. By their very nature, non-core funding may limit organizations’ capacity to independently plan and allocate resources. The volatility of non-core funding allocations may orient IOs towards a short-term, project-focused view, which, in turn, may harm the sustainability and achievement of long-term results. Competition for funds among IOs may lead to ‘mission creep’, and the overlapping and duplication of technical activities. The multiplication of bilateral agreements with donors may also harm the multilateral nature of institutions and make administration more cumbersome (Thalwitz, 2013; Eichenauer and Hug, 2014). In a majority of multilateral organizations, acceptance of ‘non-core’ contributions lies within the delegated authority of the head of the secretariat. The main reason for this statutory provision is to leave senior executives with the flexibility to accept supplementary resources within the mandate of their organizations, but, in the current context, this risks exacerbating possible unintended negative consequences. Moreover, depending on the implementing organizations’ business model, the ‘harmonized’ rate of overhead cost recovery imposed by multilaterals—in the UN system normally 7 per cent of the direct project costs—may be insufficient to cover the required infrastructural needs, fixed capacity requirements, and preparedness costs (such as for policy advocacy activities and strengthening governance systems). Such remaining costs are left to be funded by shrinking core resources (Jenks, 2014). In other words, while the escalation of extra-budgetary resources allows organizations to continue expanding their mandates and concentrate resources in priority areas, this trend carries the risk of fragmentation, polarization, and increasing the long-term financial vulnerability of IOs. More generally, there is an inevitable trade-off between efficiency, effectiveness, and level of participation in the resource allocation and financial governance of various financing mechanisms (Alesani, 2013a). While ‘core resources’ are subject to lengthy political negotiation, where the weight of players is not necessarily aligned with the size of
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 513 their contributions, they follow in principle a more or less ‘democratic’ process consistent with the multilateral nature of IOs and normally produce a balanced allocation of funds among the areas of intervention within the mandate of the organization. On the other side, ‘non-core’ resources, which can be directed to priority areas with flexibility and speed, are attractive to VfM-oriented donors—North European donors, the UK, US, and Canada among others—and are necessary to bridge the gap between expanding needs and lagging resources. They also risk un-balancing IOs’ governance towards a new form of bilateralism and increasing the funding gap in relatively less appealing programme areas. In this context, there is a marked misalignment between the mantra recited in the high-level political agenda and the actual funding patterns followed by member-state donors. On one side, since the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the emerging political consensus has aimed to alter the traditional, donor-led model of international development and to embrace a paradigm based on alignment with beneficiary country priorities, mutual accountability, and the strengthening of ‘national systems’. In funding terms, this should translate into broader baskets of funding on a thematic basis, consistency, and simplification of aid landscape, joint programmes, and multi-donor, pooled funds. In reality, however, donors have not significantly curbed their tendency to address voluntary contributions towards single multilateral agencies and for specific projects. This might be due to the increasing domestic accountability pressure to keep control of the destination of funding or to the persisting fragmentation of the recipient landscape and the growing complexity of the multilateral architecture system. This tendency potentially fuels further aid fragmentation and sends mixed signals about the incentives toward cooperation versus competition among IOs (High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing, 2016; Thalwitz, 2013; Weinlich, 2014). From these considerations, IO senior executives have desired to improve resource predictability and to regain autonomy in planning and resource allocation as an essential condition to strengthening aid effectiveness (UN, 2006, 2015b). In turn, resource mobilization efforts are developing around such objectives to ensure a ‘critical mass’ of core resources’ (ECOSOC, 2011), to increase the quality of non-core resources through soft earmarking or innovative financing mechanisms and to attract pooled donor resources into highly visible, multi-agency joint programmes. While current efforts have produced some results, which are further elaborated in the following section, this issue is expected to continue as an obstacle to aid effectiveness in the next decade.
29.4. Multi-D onor and Pooled Funding: Regaining ‘System Wide’ Consistency? Much of the debate on the multilateral aid architecture has revolved around its fragmentation and the silos among humanitarian, peace and security, and development objectives (UNDESA, 2010; Klingebiel et al., 2016). With its focus on ‘leaving no one behind’,
514 Daniele Alesani the recently issued 2030 development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) require the multilateral system to develop synergies and to find integrated solutions to efficiently implement an ambitious, indivisible, and universal development agenda. In response to these trends, a number of initiatives are reshaping the traditional funding landscape, dominated by heavily earmarked resources flows focused on short- to medium-term projects and implemented by single IOs. The aim is to broaden the scope of programme activities, strengthen the system-wide consistency of the multilateral system and ensure aid effectiveness. In order to ‘broaden’ the scope of funding mechanisms, IOs are striving to attract ‘softly’ earmarked funding via arrangements where restrictions in use of funds are limited to a broad thematic area. In most cases, this funding is granted by a group of donors such as the ‘Multi-Donor Trust Funds’ (MDTF) managed by a single IO. This allows organizations to regain autonomy in allocating resources to programmatic and geographical areas based on their independent assessment rather than donors’ preferences. An example of the work of MDTFs was exemplified by the World Bank’s Development Grant Facility which hosted or helped launch programmes such as the Africa Agriculture Water Investment Partnership, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, and the Partnership for Child Development, amongst fifty other programmes. At the inter-agency level, ‘Pooled funding mechanisms’ enable the channelling of non-core funding from different sources to a group of IOs based on their competitive advantage. These funding facilities are managed by one of the participating organizations that is responsible for the overall coordination, allocation of resources, and liaison with donors. Well-capitalized pooled funds present to the donor a united front of implementing agencies with wide implementation capacity, well placed to act as a strategic and unifying force, creating positive externalities, economies of scale, and greater incentives for governments, donors, and other partners to ‘opt-in’. As of 2014, pooled funds represented about 11 per cent of the total value of the UN operational budget in humanitarian and development activities (UN, 2015b). In the development sector, pooled funding is used to shape global-scale programmes and to strengthen UN system-wide coherence in the field (or as often referred to, at the ‘country’ level of intervention). In fact, funding is one of the main aspects of the ongoing United Nations System Delivery as One (UN-DaO) reform. In particular, the ‘One Budgetary Framework’ principle offers a consolidated picture of the mix of core and non-core resources available to the single participating agencies. This tool is meant to visualize in one document the funding requirements of the whole UN system and to highlight funding gaps and areas for joint resource mobilization. This represents a paradigmatic shift from the traditional ‘single agency, single donor’ fundraising model and requires a process of education and adaptation, which is currently underway. The ‘Expanded Funding Window for DaO’—the MDTF used by UNDP in the ‘pilot’ countries—is a useful intermediate step towards a more unitary UN system, countrylevel programming, and resource mobilization. The provision of predictable, stable, and timely financial flows to tackle humanitarian emergencies was one of the four main pillars of the humanitarian system reform of
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 515 2005. The sizeable (½ billion USD) Central Emergency Response Fund was activated to promote early action to reduce deaths, improve response to time-critical requirements, and reinforce critical support for poorly funded response operations. The Consolidated Appeal Process is a second joint planning coordination and resource mobilization mechanism focused on protracted complex emergencies, designed for a comprehensive and coordinated programme cycle of one year’s duration. The Flash Appeal is a further inter-agency strategy and fundraising mechanism used to coordinate humanitarian responses to a sudden-onset emergency. These funding facilities are an incentive for humanitarian actors to converge and consolidate their actions throughout an intervention (Fiscale and Missoni, 2013). Ultimately, achieving a convergence on multi-donor, inter-agency funding addressed to broad priority thematic areas is key to achieving the system-wide coherence that has occupied much of the debate around the last decades’ reform attempts. To be successful, these initiatives need to address the many obstacles to system-wide coherence, including the lack of business practices’ harmonization among partner multilaterals, the scarce coherence among IOs and INGOs, and the need for transparent competition and collaboration to reach common global development goals (Kohler, 2011; UNEG, 2012).
29.5. Funding Flows Beyond ODA: A Growing Reality ODA is the most traceable and formalized source of funding for transnational global programmes. ODA also creates important externalities, including private sector funding mobilized through official financial assistance (OFA) flows. According to OECD-DAC, in the 2012–14 period a total of 36.4 USD billion in private funding for development was mobilized in the form of guarantees, syndicated loans, and shares in collective investment vehicles with a clear upward trend within the considered time period (Benn et al., 2017). Nonetheless, ODA has slowly but progressively reduced its relative weight when compared to total financial flows to developing countries. This translates to a loss in its symbolic meaning over the last five decades. At the inception of the global financial crisis in 2007, private flows—mostly foreign direct investments, philanthropy, and remittances—represented 83 per cent (325.4 billion USD ) of total flows, while public ODA stood at only 17 per cent. In this scenario, bilateral and multilateral institutions are no longer the only or main players and the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ are fading in favour of cross-sectoral partnerships (Kharas, 2011). The limits of ODA have been flagged at the UN’s International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey of 2002. This includes not only falling short on the financial targets but, also more importantly, meeting targets of aid effectiveness. In this context, during the last decade, supplementary mechanisms and new players in the development sector have surfaced at an unprecedented rate.
516 Daniele Alesani The engagement of private actors in international assistance takes various forms, but perhaps the most noteworthy is the creation of global philanthropic foundations and participation in global public–private partnerships (GPPPs). Philanthropic foundations help mobilize financial resources and work as development actors. Foundations offer a combination of large-scale investments backed by private trusts and funding from financial markets, and bold programmatic propositions aimed to demonstrate how humanitarian and development problems can be tackled. These foundations, often founded and led by technology entrepreneurs, are bringing a ‘business approach’ to philanthropy (Marten and Witte, 2008). GPPP examples include the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS and Malaria, the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization (GAVI), and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). Agencies of national governments, IOs, businesses and academia participate in these ‘hybrid’ organizations. In principle, one of their strengths lies in a lean administrative structure and flexible network approach. From a public sector perspective, participation in GPPPs grants direct access to industry players producing essential healthcare supplies, access to technology and technical innovation while also satisfying the need to ‘think outside the box’ and ‘get the job done’ (McGoey, 2014). From the corporate perspective and beyond the social responsibility motive, business entities value IO partnership as a means to influence global policy networks. These partnerships are particularly noteworthy for their potential for creating innovative financing for development, including impact investing and ‘market shaping’. Some of the major GPPPs now surpass in budget size the main UN system organizations (e.g. in 2014 The Global Fund was worth 4.0 billion USD, against an annual WHO budget of 2.3 billion USD) and are more effective in raising funds. GPPPs also catalyze resources in priority areas of need and create cross-sectoral synergies in terms of knowledge creation and resource mobilization. Nonetheless, as resources and attention are mobilized by these new players, there are warnings against their narrow, ‘single-issue’ based approach and the risk of eroding multilateral governance. This includes calls for more transparency and accountability in how they prioritize intervention and decision-making mechanisms (Missoni, 2013). These new players and other ‘hybrid’ organizations raise a fundamental issue for the ‘traditional’ IOs. While these organizations are thought to be ‘universal’ and global in nature, IOs’ financial critical mass is relatively minor related to bilateral aid (e.g. the US provided about 30 billion USD of international aid in 2013). Since this trend will continue and perhaps even accelerate, scholars (for instance, Browne, 2014) and practitioners have questioned the continued relevance of IOs. The emerging consensus from high- level fora such as Rio+20 (2012) and the World Humanitarian Summit (2016) along with the narrative surrounding the 2030 development agenda, is that IOs should be selective in their approach. They should step back from direct programme implementation whenever possible and position themselves as incubators of innovation, as well as providers of upstream policy advice and facilitators of transnational policy negotiation processes. This will allow IOs to establish themselves as catalysts and ‘capacity builders’. These roles may require a fundamental rethinking of the organizational settings, human capital,
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 517 skillsets, and operations of IOs to strengthen agility and response capacity to changing contexts.
29.6. The South–South and Triangular Cooperation Phenomenon The relative decline of ODA relative to the mix of funding sources for development may also be interpreted as the financial manifestation of a deeply changed international aid landscape from a ‘North–South’ and top-down model to a multifaceted, ‘multi-polar’ system. In this scenario, funding, design, and implementation of global and regional aid programmes are increasingly shaped by South–South Cooperation (SSC), which is often channelled through and accounted for outside traditional ODA flows and without the intervention of multilateral organizations. SSC is a broad framework for collaboration among countries of the South in the political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and technical domains; it involves two or more developing countries and may also occur on a bilateral basis at regional, sub-regional, or interregional levels. SSC is founded on a principled rejection of the DAC-related aid practices and based on solidarity, horizontality, self-reliance, and mutual benefits (Esteves and Assunҫao, 2014). Two main groups of SSC donors have been created: large and influential long-time donors looking to assert power and lead broad regional groups (e.g. BRIC) and newer, increasingly vocal, medium-size economies with a geographically or sectorally limited focus of intervention (e.g. Turkey, South Africa, Thailand). This division is mirrored by two diverging SSC philosophies: on one hand, such aid can be a bottom-up mechanism, based on the sharing of technical expertise and shared self-reliance goals. On the other, SSC can be interpreted as a trigger for regional, or even global, economic expansion and aggressive sectoral growth, contributing to concerns related to human rights, good governance, and environmental sustainability (De Renzio and Seifert, 2014). Often SSC concentrates on productive sectors such as infrastructure, energy, and agriculture and is ‘hybrid’ in nature; that is, it is aid that includes trade components and is linked to foreign direct investment. According to UNCTAD, in 2015 the total SSC value ranged from 16 to 19 billion USD (UNCTAD, 2016). Nonetheless, to date, global, harmonized data are yet not available. It is difficult to properly quantify this phenomenon due to insufficient data collection and the multifaceted, multi-polar, and decentralized nature of this SSC aid. For example, estimated annual international aid from China to developing countries in 2009—the date of the most recent quoted study on the subject—ranged anywhere between 1.5 billion (official ODA statistics) and 25 billion USD (Lum et al., 2009) when taking into account pledges of aid, loans, and government-sponsored investment projects. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the size and relevance of SSC is expanding at an unprecedented rate (UNCTAD, 2016). SSC will continue to stir debate on aid ‘effectiveness’, in particular,
518 Daniele Alesani the ‘North–South’ divide, the role of multilateral versus bilateral cooperation, and the role of trade- and private investment-related programmes in international development.
29.7. Innovative Financing for Development While international aid has traditionally operated through grants and concessionary loans, the modern financial architecture has expanded. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), require innovative approaches to integrate the private sector, key government donors, multilaterals, and other players. Notwithstanding the growth in absolute terms of funding for development and humanitarian assistance, there is a growing gap between the required and the actually deployed resources and calls for ‘innovative’ forms of financing to close such gap (Lattimer, 2015). Harnessing the power of businesses and civil society as sources for resource mobilization is fundamental to reducing gaps and mitigating funding system vulnerabilities. The following paragraphs specify several forms of emerging innovative financing which have the potential to shape the funding for development landscape in the next decade (Sandor, 2011; UNDP, 2012). ‘Guarantee mechanisms’, such as the Advanced Market Commitments, are financial schemes utilized by a public–private partnership between donor countries and pharmaceutical companies to guarantee the price of vaccines, once they have been developed, against future obligations to purchase a given amount of supplies. These commitments provide manufacturers with an incentive to invest in late stage vaccine development and expand manufacturing capacity, while ensuring governments and IOs have a stable and predictable supply of essential goods to fight pandemics. This mechanism, mostly channelled through GAVI, was worth in 2013 approximately 1.5 billion USD. Moreover, UNITAID, in the HIV-AIDS policy domain, operates through long-term funding commitments and the purchase of high-volume medicines and diagnostics to stimulate an increase in production, creating economies of scale and driving prices down. ‘Market mechanisms’ are allowances issued by governments to business entities which entitle them to produce negative externalities issued by governments in exchange for funding for development. For example, under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), governments auction emission allowances to emitters; at least half of the related revenue ought to be spent on climate change issues. It is estimated that, when fully implemented, this mechanism could generate between 2.2 and 2.9 billion euros each year in funding for development activities from private sources. ‘Debt for development swaps’ allow for bilateral sovereign debt cancellation in exchange for investment of the same amount by the debtor country in development projects. IOs may be involved in advocacy or in support of the developing country as
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 519 the country selects and implements development projects. To date, examples include ‘Debt2Health’ overseen by the Global Fund and ‘Debt-for-nature’, where the World Wildlife Fund encourages creditor countries to participate. Bilateral agreements under these mechanisms range between tens and hundreds of million USD. ‘Taxes imposed on globalized activities’—for example a solidarity levy on air tickets— are collected by national governments and channelled through multilateral organizations; participating governments normally sit on the governing bodies of the multilateral organizations to which funds are allocated. A similar mechanism is the proposed Global Currency Transaction Tax on foreign exchange transactions. This tax would be centrally collected and channelled through a dedicated financial facility. Various versions of this mechanism are politically controversial and no concrete proposals have been formulated to date. ‘Impact investing’ is a term for investments made in companies, organizations, and funds with the explicit intention of generating social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Its hallmark is the investor’s commitment to measure and report the social and environmental performance of underlying investments to ensure transparency and accountability. The latest statistics from the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) based on a survey of the major impact investment players indicate that in 2014 alone, a total 10.6 billion USD was put in social impact investments, for a total of 60 billion USD of managed assets (GIIN, 2016). Many governments have actively supported this initiative through income tax relief, by providing visibility and support to market social investing opportunities and as institutional investors through national pension funds and public insurance entities. A particularly interesting form of impact investing is the so-called ‘Development Impact Bonds’. In these arrangements, a series of public and private partners agree on a common development goal and a way to measure success. Private investors finance a programme aimed at achieving these agreed outcomes. They work with service providers—which can be any combination of public agencies, private companies, and non-profits—to manage delivery and create space for innovation, entrepreneurship, and learning. If the programme is demonstrably successful the ‘outcomes funder’ (usually the government of the donor or beneficiary countries) repays the investors (for a review, see Center for Global Development and Social Finance, 2013). ‘Blended finance’ is a further emergent strategy to mobilize additional funding for development. This mechanism works by using aid resources to leverage additional sources of finance, both domestic and international. Grants are blended with other public or private sources of finance such as loans, risk capital and/or equity, typically for infrastructure, energy, or private sector development projects. To this extent, blended finance projects can help stretch scarce development aid resources and interpret them as ‘additional’ funding to make investment possible (OECD 2016; World Economic Forum (WEF), 2015). Innovative financing for development has an enormous potential to bridge gaps between the private and public sectors and to tap into new resources, social entrepreneurship and business ideas to fund initiatives with a social bottom line. The OECD estimates that while the current size of these mechanisms amounted in 2014 to 1.9 billionUSD, its potential stands at 635 billion USD (Benn and Mirabile, 2014). For innovative financing
520 Daniele Alesani mechanisms to realize their potential, two drivers are needed: first, ‘scalability’—the potential to scale up in order to bridge the current financing gap necessary to meet development goals, and second, ‘sustainability’—the ability to finance long-term programmes in coordination with other countries. Initially, each of the above funding mechanisms was interpreted as ‘complementary’ to ODA and sought to raise additional funds to fuel existing bilateral or multilateral organizations and programmes without duplicating prior efforts. Nonetheless, the material size of the flows that could be channelled through innovative funding sources may still change the governance of the international aid system. Impacts are foreseeable in (i) the balance between public and private actors in orienting the destination of financial resources and determining the content of aid; (ii) the increasing complexification of the aid architecture; and (iii) the possible proliferation of transnational organizations devoted to raising or managing resources for international development.
29.8 Linking Between Funding and Results via Donor-L ed Accountability Debate over the linkage between public sector organizations’ ability to raise financial resources and the achievement of programmatic results has a long lineage (e.g. Moore, 2000). This link has been considered rather loose in the past but in recent years the ability of multilateral organizations to secure financial resources has become more strictly linked to their effectiveness in demonstrating concrete programmatic results to their constituencies. Drivers of this evolution include (i) the surfacing of the VfM paradigm, already part of many developing country public management reforms; (ii) the creation of a ‘competitive space’ for non-core contributions and (iii) the increasing complexity, articulation, and therefore level of competitiveness of the international development environment (Buchanan and Keoane 2006; Zweifel, 2006). In order to strengthen their ability to mobilize resources, most IOs have recently revamped their approach to ‘results-based management’ (RBM) and performance accountability. While RBM was introduced in most bilateral and multilateral organizations in the 1990s, in many cases it had been a ‘missed opportunity’; it was implemented either bureaucratically or without strong linkages to internal resource allocation and decision-making (Bester, 2012). The renewed link between funding and results represents an important moment to strengthen the expected ‘managerial dividend’ of RBM. In particular, in response to the lack of harmonized RBM frameworks among IOs, bilateral donors started their own initiatives to assess the operational effectiveness of multilateral organizations (Alesani, 2013b). A number of state donors—including the UK, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands— moved in this direction. Among these initiatives, the UK Multilateral Development Review (MDR) deserves specific mention since it is the only mechanism that directly links assessed results and programmatic effectiveness to the amount of voluntary
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 521 contributions given by the UK—and in selected cases, even the continuation of UK membership itself. MDR results are also utilized to decide on the balance between resources channelled through bilateral and multilateral aid based on their comparative effectiveness in reaching aid objectives. These initiatives are in principle a positive push toward the VfM agenda in international development. They encourage multilateral organizations to manage and report results. Nonetheless, the multiplication of these initiatives may unnecessarily increase transaction costs and the administrative burden while overstimulating organizations towards oversight (UN System Joint Inspection Unit, 2016). There is a strong argument for consolidation of these initiatives. As a logical extension of the VfM paradigm, some donors progressively started to introduce ‘pay for results’ funding schemes to link the scale of their contribution to the production of concrete results rather than to the cost of the intervention (Klingebiel and Janus, 2014). Some of these approaches—the Poverty Reduction Budget Support, the European Commission Millennium Development Goals Contracts—link financial resources to ‘demonstrable’ commitments to good governance and satisfactory progress in reduction of beneficiaries’ needs. The applicability of these mechanisms on a broader scale is still to be verified—both under the perspective of technical feasibility (e.g. outcome measurement) and political acceptability. Nonetheless, they carry the potential to move the landscape of funding arrangements in the next decade from being effort-to results-based. The strengthening of donor-led accountability as a condition for sustained trust and funding of multilaterals by bilateral donors has also manifested itself through the ‘International Aid Transparency Initiative’ (IATI), launched at the Accra High Level Forum on aid effectiveness in 2008. IATI developed a common set of standards and an open online platform for the ongoing publication of comparable, harmonized aid information by a multitude of international aid organizations. The IATI dataset aims to provide detailed information, self-generated by reporting organizations, updated in real time (monthly or quarterly), and forward looking. Such characteristics make IATI data fundamental to support decision-making based on updated financial flows and thus, a better monitoring of financial resources for development. An additional advantage is that it includes and consolidates financial information on multiple international NGOs which are difficult to capture through a ‘top-down’ ODA statistical approach.
29.9. Evolving Multilateral Programme Delivery Modalities and the Importance of Managing Financial Transfers IOs are not only recipients of funding, they are also intermediaries through which relevant ODA flows are channelled to third parties who implement aid programmes.
522 Daniele Alesani The shift in the positioning of multilateral organizations within the international aid ‘value chain’ and the increasing importance of the IOs’ ability to manage financial transfers has become noticeable in the past two decades with a comprehensive rethinking of the traditional models of technical cooperation (Baaz, 2005). This rethinking has been sanctioned through a series of high-level political agreements from the 2005 Paris Declaration to the 2012 Busan Partnership for Effective Development. The emerging model of development stands on the principles of aligning international aid with priorities determined by recipient countries and reliance on their domestic capacities and systems. Multilateral organizations have been called to progressively phase out the direct implementation of aid programmes and to become resource catalysts, ‘capacity builders’, and facilitators who channel funding and disseminate knowledge, experience, and proven processes to national/local public entities and NGOs (Kharas and Blomfield, 2013). As a result, the relationship between bi/multilateral organizations and implementing partners on the ground—public sector entities of beneficiary countries, international and local NGOs—is transforming from a bureaucratic, contractual, principal/agent relation to a strategic, peer-to-peer partnership (see also Krawczyk, this volume). From an operational perspective, this translates to a ‘National Execution’ (NEX) programme delivery modality. Under this modality, multilaterals: • contribute to the planning and design of country programmes ultimately owned by the beneficiary country government; • select implementing partners with adequate credibility, technical capacity, and financial stewardship; • transfer funding to allow implementation; and • offer technical advice as needed; monitor and evaluate results. This shift aims to generate a number of benefits (UN-JIU 2008) including an increased sense of ownership, self-reliance, and technical capacity in national and local public sector entities; improved efficiency due to use of local resources instead of international professionals; and the mainstreaming of international aid and strengthening of national systems such as national public budgeting. The strengthened role of NGOs is also expected to improve speed and quality of response to local needs, increase grassroots participation, and improve operational effectiveness. Most of the large and decentralized IOs are making progress towards this modality of intervention. In 2013, NEX was worth an average of 36 per cent of the total programme expenditures incurred by the agencies taking part in the UN Development Group Executive Committee, with percentages ranging from the 28 per cent of UNICEF to the 59 per cent of UNDP (Alesani, 2013d). Under NEX, beneficiary governments are asked to accept increased ownership and responsibility for results. In turn, IOs are required to fundamentally change not only their partnership attitude, but also their core skillset and operational settings.
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 523 Since the mid-1990s and as part of the effort to empower national institutions and beneficiary governments, bilateral and multilateral organizations have also experimented with basket funding to support ‘Sector Wide Approaches’ (SWAps) initiatives. In SWAps, bilateral and multilateral donors collectively contribute to funding an entire sector (e.g. health, agriculture) through a direct contribution to the national budget of the recipient country. In other words, financial resources normally classified as ODA are not spent to implement separate aid programmes but are channelled as revenue sources of national budgets. Among the main declared advantages of SWAps are the broadening of the scope of aid from fragmented projects to broad sectoral strategies and the increased national ownership of programmes. For multilaterals, these mechanisms also ensure a ‘seat at the table’ in important national-level decision processes, regardless of the size of their contribution, which arguably increases their ability to influence the public policies of developing countries. These mechanisms have lost some traction in the last decade due to the risks which have surfaced in pilot experiences. This includes (i) loss of control during implementation in the absence of strong sectoral strategies and policy-based national budgets; (ii) difficulty in including agreed programme evaluation parameters and activities to measure the effectiveness of aid funding; (iii) a tendency towards a ‘top-down’ approach to public policy, contrary to the prevailing ‘inclusive’ approach (McNee, 2012). In the humanitarian assistance sector, aid is normally delivered through the direct provision of in-kind assistance implemented by bilateral and multilateral organizations. Nonetheless, a trend similar to the one discussed for the development sector is underway, through the progressive increase of programmes delivered through cash transfers and vouchers to affected populations instead of in-kind assistance by humanitarian agencies. As at 2014, cash transfers from bilateral and multilateral donors totalled 1.2 billion USD, which still represents a small—6 per cent—but fast-growing portion of the total value of humanitarian aid (Center for Global Development, 2015). Cash transfers and vouchers in the humanitarian sector have the strong backing of traditional ODA donors (for a review, see Center for Global Development, 2015). The basic notion is that cash is a faster, cheaper way to deliver aid with the potential to quickly respond to local community needs. This allows beneficiaries to make choices over the mix of goods and services they need instead of the aid organizations dictating an individual’s choice. This empowers recipients and provides greater dignity. Cash has the advantage of being traceable and distributed in multiple ways from mobile phone credits to prepaid voucher or debit cards. Importantly, the availability of cash in contexts where the local economy is still capable of delivering essential goods can support faster economic recovery and preserve the viability of existing businesses by injecting short- term liquidity in the economy. While cash transfers appear an attractive option to gain efficiencies and to leverage financial sector expertise and support local economies, there are potential risks (Peppiatt et al., 2001; Farrington and Slater, 2006). Successful cash distribution depends on the ability of local markets to provide an adequate quality and mix of goods and services, the likeliness of misuse and misappropriation, the unintended inflationary effects of a cash influx into local economies; all these may depend on the
524 Daniele Alesani ability to properly target intended beneficiaries. Rather than being adopted as a ‘blanket approach’, expansion of this modality requires knowledge of the relevant economic, social, and political conditions of the affected areas.
29.10. The Future of Financing Global Programmes This chapter has described the rapid change in the international aid sector; it has explored evolving development finance-funding patterns and mechanisms. IOs are likely to keep pursuing their efforts to increase flexible, predictable funding by focusing on pooling resources from donors via multi-agency programmes and multi-year funding frameworks. Multilateral organizations will continue to progressively strengthen their synergies to ‘deliver as one’, including improved efforts to mobilize local resources and to create cross-sectoral partnerships. The success of these attempts will significantly depend on donors’ willingness to evolve their current funding policies and on multilaterals’ ability to strengthen system-wide coherence by embracing a collaborative approach. While there is a slim chance that we may see a significant restructuring of the multilateral system—like a reduction of the number of IOs—debates will influence how to manage interdependencies and to create synergies which reconcile the dichotomy between ‘becoming one’ at the field level and ‘keeping separate’ organizations at the HQ level. The emergence of a ‘multi-polar’ development system based on SSC, private funding and innovative financing for development will certainly make the development system more complex and variegated. Such a system will increasingly challenge the current multilateral governance and create further stimuli toward the bilateralization and privatization of international aid for development. In this scenario, transnational civil society and member states will claim the bottom-up transparency and accountability that will enable them to understand how to unleash the potential of innovative financing while streamlining the vehicles and mechanisms to deliver international aid. Traditional actors—bilateral technical cooperation agencies and IOs—will fight to maintain their relevance in the face of emerging actors—GPPPs, private business foundations—which may further fragment aid in the context of a decreasing importance for ODA vis-a-vis overall funding flows for development. IOs will be measured against their ability to evolve from ‘delivering things’ to ‘delivering thinking’ via incubators, policy advisors, facilitators, and capacity builders. The struggle for relevance will be based on IOs’ partnership attitude, organizational flexibility, and skillset renewal. Ongoing debates on the ‘effectiveness’ of aid will evolve in terms of increased selfreliance, a reduction of dependence on international aid, the generation of new national capacities for development, and a reduction in the long-term vulnerability of social and economic systems. These trends will present opportunities for future research to focus
Evolving Funding Patterns of Global Programmes 525 on four interrelated areas: (i) incentives and drivers for collaboration and competition among the main international aid players; (ii) overcoming divides between ‘development’ and ‘humanitarian’ aid; (iii) exploiting the potential of public–private collaboration for innovative and sustainable funding for development to bridge gaps between needs and available aid resources; and (iv) assessing IOs’ ability to align with the expectations of an increasingly demanding international community.
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528 Daniele Alesani UNDP. 2012. ‘Innovative Financing for Development: A New Model for Development Finance?’ January. Discussion Paper. UNEG—United Nations Evaluation Group. 2012. ‘Delivering as One’. 26 September. Evaluation report. UN System Joint Inspection Unit. 2008. ‘National Execution of Technical Cooperation Projects’. Prepared by M.M. Zahran and P.I. Fall, Geneva. UN System Joint Inspection Unit. 2016. ‘Donor-led Accountability and Oversight Reviews in United Nations System Organizations’, A.418, Geneva. Weinlich, S. 2014. ‘Funding the UN System’. In Browne, S. and Weiss T. (eds). Post-2015 UN Development: Making Change Happen? London: Routledge, pp. 75–95. World Humanitarian Summit. Key documents, http://www.worldhumanitariansummit.org/. Zweifel, T. 2006. International Organizations and Democracy: Accountability, Politics and Power. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Chapter 30
Devel op me nt Partnersh i ps ’ Governance St ru c t u re s , Ac c ountabi l i t y, a nd Participat i on Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott
30.1. Introduction Over the past two decades, international development has seen a rise in global partnerships (see also Alesani, this volume), a relatively new mechanism for reducing poverty and improving living conditions. The rise in these partnerships is due, inter alia, to cross-border issues requiring administrative coordination, and to the idea that pooled resources and leveraging different partners’ strengths, will lead to the best development results, validated by proper monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and ultimately helping to shape policy. This chapter builds on recent theoretical advances in the understanding of collaborative management to analyse governance structures, accountability, participation, and M&E practices of partnerships among international development agencies. The chapter addresses the extent to which these tools demonstrate that partnerships are adding value to national, regional, and global policy. It goes beyond collaboration to address the strategic political context that necessitates pooling knowledge, and moving beyond donor-specific silos (Coen and Pegram, 2015). Addressing M&E is important for understanding the overlapping jurisdictions, unclear delegation chains, and the challenges of mediating between different stakeholders that characterize these evolving examples of global policy making and transnational administration.
530 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott The chapter presents an analysis of nine partnerships: the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), Cities Alliance, the Climate Investment Fund (CIF), and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), The Vaccine Alliance (now known as GAVI), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Global Fund, and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). We assess three key areas: governance, accountability, and participation, based on a desk review of partnership reports, reports of other international organizations, and the partnership websites, as well as secondary sources on multi- stakeholder partnerships and their aid effectiveness. Although many of the partnerships cited here have been reviewed by other authors and organizations (e.g. IEG, 2007a and 2007b; IEG, 2011; Bezanson and Isenman, 2012), this chapter uses a different lens. It examines how partnerships are responding to needs in the market that other donors have failed to respond to, how well they are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to what extent they are ‘crowding in’ more funding and knowledge to solve key development problems, while enhancing participation of country partners (World Economic Forum 2005). Understanding global partnerships is important given the growth of these mechanisms in recent years and their influence over global public policy and transnational administration. Understanding these partnerships also helps contextualize new administrative structures beyond the nation state, each of which give a central role to international financing bodies, civil society groups, and private businesses and foundations in their functioning.
30.2. The Partnership Principle Collaborative partnerships bring organizations together to address challenges better than would be the case with a single organization (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003). Organizational boundaries are becoming more open and porous, with organizations reaching out to tap knowledge, resources, and innovative ways of undertaking activities and expertise that add value and solve complex governance challenges, including those cutting across the boundaries of sovereign states (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, p. 290). A range of processes can be used for this, including networking (Van Alstyne 1997; Hasan and Poutsti 2006), information sharing (Abrams, 2009), research and development consortia, communities of practice, technical working groups, and inter-agency partnerships. Despite the importance of increasing collaboration, there are many challenges that may need to be addressed. There may be unequal power among partners, and stronger partners may take undue advantage of this. Organizations may focus too much on protecting ‘their turf ’, rather than having an open mind. Collaboration can take time and resources, and lead to delays and sometimes less achievement than would be the case if organizations acted on their own. Goals may be watered down to reach a consensus. And finally, there may be intra-organizational constraints, such as a push for
The Governance Structures 531 collaboration by enthusiastic senior managers who do not see the difficulties of work on the ground (Agranoff 2012, pp. 18–19). Collaborative partnerships have well-defined governance and operational structures, as well as rules regarding the way that partners work together. Typically, these relationships are codified in governance documents. In addition, there are usually guidelines or policies regarding inclusion and participation of beneficiary countries or stakeholders. Representatives on Boards may consult with large constituencies in the background. They may have hierarchical governance and operational structures, or they may work in a hub and spoke model. In addition, many of the health-focused partnerships’ governance structures and programme implementation arrangements have been at the centre of much debate due to their provision of services in a ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’ manner. Vertical funds are typically used in addressing specific diseases and other development issues, such as the Global Fund, GAVI, and GEF. Horizontal funds take a more comprehensive approach by identifying the root causes of a problem within a sector and related areas. A ‘horizontal’ approach in the case of health, for example, might focus on the administration of prevention and treatment for all diseases, not only a specific one (Easterly and Freschi, 2010; Buse and Harmer, 2007). Another example is the Global Partnership for Education, which takes a sector-wide approach by requiring that countries have a full education sector plan based on an extensive education sector analysis to ensure that policies and programmes are focused on addressing the root causes of problems. This approach is more complex than a vertical approach, and it often takes years to assess progress or results. Placed in an historical context, partnerships evolved as part of a new paradigm for aid and development. By the end of the Cold War, donor governments and aid agencies realized that their different approaches were imposing costs on developing countries through requirements such as parallel implementation systems. This reflected a donor perception of weak country systems and a donor’s need for financial accountability. Aid agencies dictated their terms for the provision of aid, and wanted sound fiduciary practices. Often donors had unrealistic time and budget constraints and lacked alignment with national development policies. Due to a combination of weak negotiating capacity and insufficient financing alternatives, recipient governments had little bargaining power vis-à-vis conditionality and the earmarking of funding (OECD, 2001–11). Non- governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector were rarely consulted (see Krawczyk, this volume). The bourgeoning aid industry was increasingly fragmented and inefficient. Citizens both in donor and developing countries began demanding greater policy coherence. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) created the strategic political context for a shift to a world where design and implementation became a more collaborative relationship between development partners and developing country governments. The number of development partners increased to include not just government-run (bilateral) aid agencies, multilateral aid agencies combining both donor and recipient governments, national and international NGOs, CSOs, private foundations, and corporate social responsibility units within private businesses. The Organization For Economic
532 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott Co-operation and Development’s Working Party on Aid Effectiveness recognized that promoting sustainable development was not just about the amount of aid, but also about how aid was given, monitored, and evaluated (OECD, 1996). Other research contributed evidence pointing to a positive correlation between improved M&E and better outcomes in countries with sound institutional and policy environments, and low levels of corruption (Denzier, Kaufmann, and Kray, 2013). Building on four high-level forums, stakeholders articulated a set of principles to improve M&E, transparency, accountability, and aid effectiveness as key components of global public policy processes. Aid effectiveness was defined to include a number of key principles. Recipient countries should own and lead their development policies, and donors should align their support to these policies, strategies, institutions, and procedures, and minimize the use of other, parallel procedures. Both donors and recipients are accountable for results, with an effort to broaden the range of development partners as discussed above (OECD 2005, 2016) Three other factors were also vital in this transformation, including a strengthening of capacity, participatory processes, and South–South cooperation. Past aid programmes and projects had often failed because donors were too focused on resource transfers and not enough on sustaining achievements and investments once the donors had withdrawn support. Participatory processes, particularly those engaging civil society and the people expected to benefit, are viewed as essential to establishing clear, locally owned priorities (CIDA, 2002; OECD, 2011). It was against this concern for increased aid effectiveness that new organizational arrangements among donors and beneficiaries arose. Partnerships have become a fixture in this updated architecture of global policy making for development assistance (International Civil Society Centre, 2014). They comprise donors and other stakeholders, whose interests do not always coincide, but who share joint accountability. Partnerships are defined as ‘voluntary and collaborative relationships between various parties . . . in which all participants agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task and to share risks and responsibilities, resources, and benefits’ (United Nations, 2005, p. 3). In this chapter we look at nine partnerships which bring together recipient governments, private sector entities and foundations, nongovernmental organizations, international civil society organizations, and bilateral and multilateral aid agencies as members of the global partnerships reviewed.
30.3. Strengths and Weaknesses of the Partnership Model Partnerships typically foster wide-ranging collective action incorporating government, business, CSOs and international donor agencies. Partners contribute and pool resources (financial, technical, staff, and reputational) towards achieving agreed-upon
The Governance Structures 533 objectives, and the activities of the programmes supported are global, regional, or multi- country in scope (IEG, 2011, p. 4). Partners often establish a new organization with a governance structure and management unit to deliver these activities. The partnerships analysed in this chapter have their own Board, with a secretariat that runs day-to-day operations with strong links to partners at the global and local levels. Most have strong mechanisms to ensure communication and implementation at both levels, although this may vary depending on the nature of the work. Partnerships typically supply public goods. While public goods such as basic health and education services are usually deemed key responsibilities of nation states, in many ways they are also regional and global responsibilities as well (Menashya, 2011; Winthrop and Bulloch, 2012; Smith, 2003; see also Kaul, this volume). Often single states do not have the resource capacity to tackle many of the most pressing issues in education, health, the environment, etc. In addition, traditional financial mechanisms have often not been able to bring the necessary resources and stakeholders together in order to create sufficient critical mass and ownership to tackle huge issues, which may be another reason for the continued relevance and rise of partnerships. The benefits of diverse stakeholders pooling together to solve these issues also provides large amounts of knowledge, learning, and insurance against future instability. As recognized by the United Nations, partnerships have an effective role to play in filling gaps in funding, skills, implementation, and participation, by ensuring that a wider group of stakeholders’ views are considered (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and McKinsey & Company, 2005). Partnerships can attract greater financing to issues and help bridge the implementation and financing gap between what governments and traditional donors can provide. They share knowledge and resources to improve effectiveness, thereby building a country’s policy making and planning capacities. They may build improved transparency by strengthening programme monitoring and catalyse technical assistance. They can create momentum and attract attention to issues—attracting both greater policy advocacy and thereby encourage more research and evidence-based policy making at the national and global level. Partnerships may also help to align funding to national priorities through pooled funding mechanisms. Despite this long list of positive effects, partnerships do not replace traditional bilateral or multilateral donors. Instead, they serve to complement what others can do and can serve to leverage additional resources and expertise (Runde, 2013). Criticisms of partnerships also exist. Taxpayers may question the value added of the aid funds they are providing (Jackson, 2012). Much of the idealism surrounding the MDGs has given way to scepticism over the SDGs along with concerns that scarce domestic resources are sent abroad rather than being used at home (Easterly, 2015). This provides a challenging context for the future advancement of partnerships. Bezanson and Isenman (2012) point to the fact that partnerships have multiple actors, each with their own constituencies and interests, which can make decision-making difficult, bureaucratic, and time consuming. They also show that these institutions can be top heavy with much of the work and time being consumed
534 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott feeding information to partners and meeting the needs of the Board and various sub-committees (Bezanson and Isenman 2012). Others are concerned that ‘the private–public nature of many of these partnerships means that the private businesses could gain too much influence in setting international political priorities. In other cases, membership in partnerships by countries could mean merely lip service, while painting governments (which may use this for political gain) in a positive frame’ (Caines et al., 2004; Al-Tarawneh, 2012). A growing number of reviews that have been carried out during the past decade have sought to learn lessons on how best to run a partnership. Are they adding value and delivering on the goals they set? What are the key characteristics/elements of an effective partnership? In undertaking our literature review for this chapter, we found that most partnerships suffer from similar weaknesses in three areas: governance; accountability; and participation. In the area of governance, there may be no clear understanding of the roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities of partners, Board, and management, which can impair performance. Strategies may not be realistic, affordable, sustainable, or suitable to the context. There may be unnecessary transaction costs from the use of parallel systems, when adequate country systems are in place (Patscheke, 2014). In the area of accountability, performance indicators and assessments may focus on compliance, rather than measuring the value added and performance. There may be weak M&E to track outputs and outcomes, and a lack of compelling theories of change. In the area of participation, the voices of developing country partners may not always come through clearly; and there may be inadequate change management support to make this happen. All of these weaknesses have also been found in traditional donor implementation, suggesting that while the partnership form may be a new organizational innovation, it has not yet alleviated many of the traditional challenges in achieving aid effectiveness. In 2014, a study of 330 partnerships assessed various aspects of their work, including their M&E, effectiveness, outputs, stakeholder diversity, legitimacy, and other dimensions. The assessment/review showed that partnerships have not been living up to their expectations. The study’s analysis demonstrated that of the 330 partnerships sampled: . . . 38 per cent of all partnerships sampled are simply not active or do not have measurable output. 26 per cent of all partnerships show activities but those are not directly related to their publicly stated goals and ambitions. Their output (such as research, capacity building, training or building infrastructure) does not match their self- reported function (e.g., service provision, knowledge transfers or standard setting). In 12 per cent of the sample, the output partially matches with the self-reported function and in 24 per cent of the sample, all output matches with their self-reported function. (International Civil Society Centre, 2014, p. 9)
Despite these weaknesses—which are also well recognized in non-partnership aid—the number of partnerships both within the UN system and outside it, have continued to grow since 2000 and the launch of the Millennium Development Goals along with the
The Governance Structures 535 inception of three important partnerships: the Global Fund, GAVI, and GAIN. In addition, the United Nations has signalled that partnerships will play a critical role in the implementation of the SDGs. There are various criteria that have been used for evaluating partnerships. For example, the Bali Guidelines on Partnerships cover the objectives of partnerships, the voluntary nature/respect for fundamental principles/values, the link with globally agreed outcomes, the integrated approach to sustainable development, a multi-stakeholder partnership approach, transparency and accountability, tangible results, funding arrangements, new/value-added partnerships, local involvement and international impact, and follow-up processes. A full description of the Guidelines can be found in Wessal and Wescott (2015, Annex 2). Another set of guidelines brings in elements of good governance that can be taken into account in assessing partnerships, including (adapted from Dodds (2014)) accountability, transparency, effectiveness, equity, flexibility, participation, and independence from vested interests. We have drawn from both sets of criteria for our framework for reviewing partnerships. The scholarship and reporting on partnerships that we have reviewed emphasizes three basic areas where partnerships can add value: (i) governance, (ii) accountability, and (iii) participation. Key questions must be considered when assessing and reviewing partnerships for the post-2015 agenda. Research questions in the governance area include: Is the initiative a multi-stakeholder initiative with a list of members? Does the partnership have a clearly articulated governance structure with defined roles and responsibilities? Is there a strategic plan in place? How sustainable is the partnership? Research questions in the accountability area include: Does the partnership have clearly stated objectives? Is the initiative in line with internationally agreed goals and targets including the SDGs? Does the partnership publish results and documents? Are they committed to transparent decision-making? Is it a member of the International Aid Transparency Initiative? Does the initiative have clear and measurable outputs and deliverables, codified in a results framework or similar tool? Does it use the results framework to monitor performance to ensure it is delivering the intended results and working towards achieving its objectives? Does the partnership undertake regular impact evaluations? How often? Does it use evaluation results? Research questions in the participation area include: Does the partnership strive to include all types of stakeholders and does it strive to build consensus based on equally valued contributions from all partners? Does the partnership have connections that are local to global and vice versa? Does the partnership focus on innovation/use of technology? Does the partnership focus on producing knowledge? What type? Does it focus on knowledge sharing? The above questions are not only relevant for assessing or evaluating the value of multi-stakeholder partnerships; they can also be applied to traditional aid organizations. However, based on the emphasis of partnerships on multi-stakeholder participation, the assessment emphasizes this important dimension.
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30.4. Comparative Analysis and Findings Using the above criteria, nine of the largest and most visible multi-stakeholder partnerships were reviewed to determine if they have a robust governance structure in place to support the post-2015 SDGs. It is difficult to compare these partnerships and their results due to diversity of goals, funding sources, capacity complexity, level of engagement (local to global), and size and diversity of partners. While it is not possible to reach overall conclusions on the nature of performance deficits, a snapshot of how these partnerships operate, what type of results they are achieving, their focus, and, in some cases, how sustainable and effective they are is provided as well as a sense of their value-added proposition (see Wessal and Wescott, 2015) and whether it is realistic. Our analysis of the nine partnerships had the following findings.
30.4.1. Governance Seven of the nine partnerships clearly listed in their website all their stakeholders. ADEA and GAIN also listed their stakeholders, but with less clarity. In the case of ADEA, partners and donors are listed, including country stakeholders (ministries of education and others) and academic institutions. However, it is also clear that, depending on the project, country, or initiative, not all the same actors are involved; nor is it clear which actors and stakeholders are involved in each area, and how they are represented. In the case of GAIN, the donors and partners are listed, but there was no list of other stakeholders, such as the beneficiaries or how they are represented. Second, most partnerships had well- described, independent, and robust governance structures with the exception of ADEA, which operates out of the African Development Bank and has a small secretariat. Despite this, there were shortcomings. Cities Alliance has a lack of clarity in the roles and responsibilities of its governance structures, including the governance oversight role of the secretariat (Universalia, 2005; IEG, 2007a). It introduced Board committees in 2014 as part of a revised governance structure. The Global Fund and GAVI both have in place a formal committee structure which has helped improve decision-making and efficiency. Cities Alliance, CGAP, CIF, and GAIN also have formal sub-committee structures. ADEA has working groups and GEF has a partnership council. GAIN’s multi-stakeholder governance structure, like the Global Fund’s, was found not to be producing ‘durable partnerships’ with the global organizations represented on the Board, and revisions to the governance structure have been recommended, as part of one of its most recent external evaluations. An evaluation of GAVI found a number of issues regarding oversight over
The Governance Structures 537 responsibilities, which led to introducing a stronger performance framework, a business plan, and other measures. Third, seven of the nine partnerships reviewed reflected on their website, or through an evaluation or review, that they have a strategic plan or its equivalent in place. There were only two partnerships where this was unclear. ADEA says it has one but it was unavailable through the site, and it was unclear whether CIF has one. Strategic plans for the other partnerships were available on their websites. In most cases, the plans defined 3–5 year strategies. Fourth, on the question of sustainability, most partnerships reviewed are highly dependent on donor funds, and their ability to leverage financing from country partners, including the private sector. For most of these partnerships, the key for raising financing is the results they can show, and the expectations that they will operate efficiently, add value, and achieve results in the future. Donor and partner countries are keen to show citizens that investments are producing results, and are requiring co- financing from partners or clients to whom benefits are being delivered, results-based financing, or matching funding. For example, GAVI has recently worked to expand its donor country base, expand its public and private donor base, develop innovative financing for vaccines, and increase co-financing from countries receiving support. In the case of ADEA, a review found it to have sound financial and budget management, but there has been high variability in some of the funds. Multiyear pledges from donors improved the situation; however, it is unclear if ADEA could ever become completely self-financed through donor funding and membership contributions. A CIF evaluation found that if not enough attention is ‘paid to sustainability (e.g. in terms of profitability of production-oriented investments), and bringing in complementary financing from private sector and securing payments for ecosystem and environmental services, many (forest investment projects) risk ending as isolated interventions with limited impact beyond project life or project site’ (ICF 2014). It is important to recognize that although sustainability depends on financial sustainability and the ability of partners to leverage financial resources, sustainability rests equally on stakeholder commitment to multi- stakeholder partnerships and their ability to ensure the future viability of the partnership. The financial sustainability of Cities Alliance is unclear given that it relies heavily on donor funds with the largest amount coming from the Bank’s catalytic fund. CGAP’s future has been sustainable due the support of its stakeholders. Both the donors and the average contribution increased from the prior phase. However, there is uncertainty over the World Bank, the largest single core contributor. GAIN partners with business and the public sector to multiply the amount invested in the fight against malnutrition. Currently, for every 1 USD GAIN invests in its nutrition projects, the private sector is investing an additional 4 USD and the public sector an additional 1 USD. Overheads are kept at 15 per cent or less, and it has been deemed sustainable by one evaluation (see Dodds, 2014). GAVI has also introduced innovative financing mechanisms and raises money from the market. In addition, country co-financing commitments increased to 69 million
538 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott USD in 2013. An evaluation in 2010 also found that the Alliance has been successful in attracting funding that would not have been provided had the Alliance not been put in place. GEF recently undertook its sixth replenishment, relying on a mix of donor and private sector funding. It is unclear if the GEF would be sustainable without the donor funding it receives. The GEF has strong co-financing mechanisms and is developing other mechanisms. The GEF website notes that the recent replenishment has enabled it to make 3 billion USD available for climate finance in the next four years, with an expected 30 billion USD being leveraged from other sources. A Global Fund review suggested a ‘sustainability strategy’ for programmes going forward. The main issues to be addressed included: (i) identifying triggers, enablers, and challenges to the transition countries; (ii) other criteria for transition countries in addition to income level; (iii) increasing the level of collaboration with other development partners; (iv) identifying strategies and approaches used by other development partners and transition countries for replication; and (v) recommending sustainability strategies that could be developed (Global Fund, 2016). GPE is highly reliant on donor funding. The Partnership introduced pledging conferences in 2011 and this has been important for enhancing sustainability. The GPE has disbursed over 4.4 billion dollars in grants since 2003. A review of Global Health Partnerships by McKinsey and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF, 2005) notes that in Bangladesh, the World Health Organization has provided support to the country in the Global Fund’s grant application process for all five rounds. This work included the WHO organizing a review of proposals prior to their final submission. In Zambia, the Roll Back Malaria partnership; ‘helped galvanize in-country partners to design the five-pronged malaria strategy and accelerated progress in developing this strategy (BMGF, 2005, p.6).
30.4.2. Accountability First, all nine partnerships had clearly stated objectives or goals. Most had prominently placed vision and mission statements as well as principles in some cases. The objectives were less clear in the case of the CIF, but this could be due to the unusually complex nature of the partnership and its multiple funded programmes. There is also evidence of proactive fine-tuning of objectives as global conditions change, such as the recent prioritization of work in fragile and conflict-affected states (e.g. Menashya and Dryden-Peterson, 2015). Second, all of the partnerships reviewed have strong mandates to support the MDGs and now, the SDGs. The CIF, the GEF, and the GAIN support more than one future SDG, although this did not seem to have an impact on their performance. For example, the GPE supports the SDG promoting quality education with grants to help countries develop sector plans. The Partnership provides up to 500,000 USD in initial funding
The Governance Structures 539 to eligible countries. Up to half of the grant funding supports education sector analysis to ensure that countries’ education sector plans are based on evidence. The GPE also encourages countries to use an in-country coordination mechanism, known as Local Education Groups (LEGs), as a vehicle for policy dialogue. LEGs comprise all key education stakeholders including, but not limited to, civil society organizations, teacher organizations, unions, private sector partners, development partners, and others. In this manner, GPE encourages a transparent, inclusive, participatory education sector planning process that is based on evidence. The financing has enabled countries, including fragile and conflict affected states, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, and Madagascar, to plan and receive technical assistance in developing a sector-wide (not just basic education-focused) plan. Third, in regard to transparency, all of the partnerships have documentation from governance meetings, publications, financial documents, and annual performance reviews available on their websites. The partnerships’ reviews for the most part have made efforts to ensure that they are sharing information with the public and receiving feedback. Nearly all partnerships reviewed, except CGAP and GEF, are members of the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Fourth, eight of the nine partnerships had an M&E strategy and/or results framework. GAIN did not seem to have an overarching results framework for the whole programme but it does for individual programmes/projects, as does CIF. Both partnerships employ M&E specialists. Only ADEA did not have a results framework, monitoring, or clear M&E plan/strategy. Each partnership tends to use its M&E differently. However, in most cases, targets were tracked against performance frameworks. Despite such M&E, it is difficult to measure transformational impact and value added. In most cases, M&E has not been used for learning but, instead, for tracking results. Learning is implicit in some cases but in many partnerships the feedback loops between the M&E are not clear. For example, the GPE helps its partners to track progress when implementing their education plans. In 2012, the GPE began its Sector Monitoring Initiative, which brought together fifty-four of the then Partnership’s fifty-nine partners at the time, via a capacity development workshop to help countries improve their national monitoring of their education sector action plans. In addition, in Zambia, the GPE grant also provided funding to strengthen the government’s capacity to monitor programme performance and evaluate results. The GPE also supports the undertaking of Joint Sector Reviews. This encourages transparency and accountability for monitoring of sector programme performance. GAIN was the only partnership where it was not clear whether when an evaluation had occurred. The other eight partnerships have had at least one evaluation in the last six years. The larger multilateral stakeholder partnerships such as GAVI, Global Fund, and GEF have evaluation policies in place (Global Environment Facility 2014). In all evaluated partnerships there is a strong interest from donors and recipient countries in using evaluation results to improve performance.
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30.4.3. Participation Seven of the nine partnerships have a strong focus on the inclusion and participation of all stakeholders at country and global levels, as set out by their statements of intention and actual practice. Of all the partnerships, the Global Fund seems to have the most inclusive and representative participation, because of its ability to involve communities and stakeholders from the ground up, in particular direct beneficiaries, such as those affected by disease. The Global Partnership also has a high focus on inclusion and participation and provides funding to civil society organizations and to ensure mobilization, and active participation from stakeholders in planning, monitoring, and delivery processes. Only two partnerships were considered to either have an unclear focus on inclusion (ADEA) and participation or to not be very inclusive (GAIN). For ADEA partnership was rather unclear from information on the website and in documentation. The site did not mention the actual participation of stakeholders. GAIN was considered to not be very inclusive by a past evaluation. There are a number of partnerships that are considered to be focused on inclusion and participation but have had issues achieving this objective. CGAP and GAVI are considered inclusive but also rather top-down despite stakeholder participation through their constituency representation. In the case of GAVI, its civil society organization (CSO) programme has had trouble ensuring CSO engagement (Bezanson and Isenman, 2012). GEF has also had stakeholder participation issues but has developed strategies to seek engagements in projects which impact the incomes and livelihoods of local groups. CSOs have actively participated in GEF operations since its inception. A more formal role for CSOs was established with the creation of the GEF NGO Network in 1995 (now renamed as the GEF CSO Network). Since then, the Network has been the main mechanism for involvement with CSOs. In recent years, the GPE has made changes to strengthen developing country partner and civil society participation in GPE governance; however there is still room for improvement and strengthening country capacity is a key area. Despite the GPE Civil Society Fund supporting CSO participation, its ability to influence GPE Board decisions is unclear. There is evidence that developing country CSOs have faced challenges in communicating and determining their positions. Second, nearly all partnerships fostered both local and global participation. Some of the partnerships had stakeholder engagement strategies for specific issues, such as for audits. Although local involvement is encouraged by all of the partnerships, it was less clear in some cases how this was operationalized. In the case of the Global Fund, local fund agents implement the partnership’s work through local partners and with CSOs. In the case of GPE, the situation is similar with a local education group, and with national and subnational stakeholders including civil society, unions, government, and donors being represented. In GAVI’s case, stakeholder engagement was welcome in terms of
The Governance Structures 541 advocacy and implementation. The GEF has guidelines for consultations and implementation of public involvement. GAIN has built an infrastructure to create and to support a national cross-sector group known as the National Fortification Alliance (NFA). The NFA is a collection of representatives from government, private sector including food processing industries (e.g. oil refineries, flour millers, and salt factories), civil society, international agencies, development agencies, and academia at the country level. In contrast, CGAP takes more of a community of practice approach to social and stakeholder engagement by convening local stakeholders around important questions relevant to innovative finance for smallholder families to build momentum behind ideas and it aims to provide the platform to synthesize and operationalize these ideas. CIF involves stakeholders, such as Indigenous communities, as part of its stakeholder engagement strategy, while the Cities Alliance partnerships are built on bottom- up local involvement and a belief that cities and local governments are the building block for global change. The website articulates the importance of local governments, stating ‘Local Governments play a key role in urban development, yet often lack the political, institutional and financial resources and powers to fulfill their mandate’ (Cities Alliance, 2016). In the case of ADEA, local involvement is less clear; typically it is through working groups and task forces, with representatives attending high level meetings, but the connection between the local and the global is more nebulous. In general, most of the partnerships have strategies to ensure that they are close to beneficiaries and involving stakeholders but none of the partnerships reviewed seem to have stakeholders themselves or beneficiaries as a member of their Boards or executive committees. Third, most of the partnerships are focused on innovation or the use of technology in one form of another (cf. Burns and Stalker, 1961). ADEA has a working group on Information and Communication Technology, as it is an important form of educational delivery. Cities Alliance (Van Alstyne, 2006; Cities Alliance, 2016) looks at the innovation of a proposal when deciding whether or not to finance a project. For CIF, technology and innovation are critical parts of the work as most projects are based on the better use of technology for improved energy, natural resource management, and decreased impact on climate change. CGAP leverages technology to make content accessible to an ever-growing community of stakeholders, many of whom are based in developing countries. CGAP uses mobile responsive design so that content can be accessible on a range of devices. They also integrate social sharing, multi-media, and data visualization, to reach stakeholders in the format they prefer. For GAIN, technology and innovation in terms of combatting malnutrition and hunger are vital; it is less clear how they encourage or operationalize this. In the past few years, the GEF has focused on how it can solicit expert perspectives on enhancing its role in facilitating the use of Information and Communication Technology to address global environmental challenges. GAVI has placed an emphasis on working with its current members to create innovative financing mechanisms, and
542 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott has introduced new technologies to boost immunization coverage. The Global Fund has a clear focus on the use of technology and funding innovation; many of their grants go to improving technology for detection and treatment of diseases. Lastly, the GPE has emphasized innovation and technology as a method to improve education delivery and learning. Lastly, all the partnerships reviewed focused on producing knowledge whether in the forms of publications, blogs, media productions, webinars, books, or guides for gleaning lessons from the implementation of past projects or programmes. Knowledge about successes and challenges coming out of country work often helps to inform the work of other partners. How effective partnerships are at achieving this varies, depending on the partnership’s operational model.
30.5. Conclusions and Next Steps This chapter reviews and builds on recent theoretical advances in the understanding of collaborative management, and in strategic political contexts that necessitate pooling knowledge, and moving beyond donor-specific silos. This chapter uses a framework to analyse the governance, accountability, and participation processes of international development partnerships, and the extent to which they add value to national, regional, and global policy. Beginning with a history of how and why such partnerships arose, the benefits and challenges of multi-level policy coordination are examined. Second, the discussion observed areas where nine international development partnerships seem to be responding to global and local political contexts by pooling knowledge and adding value to the work of individual donor agencies. However, there are weaknesses in some partnerships regarding governance structures, inclusion, and participation, financial sustainability, and M&E challenges in showing attribution and value added. Attribution is defined as the ‘description of a causal link between observed (or expected to be observed) changes and a specific intervention . . . Attribution refers to that which is to be credited for the observed changes or results achieved. It represents the extent to which observed development effects can be attributed to a specific intervention or to the performance of one or more partner taking account of other interventions, (anticipated or unanticipated) confounding factors, or external shocks’ (OECD, 2010). Because making the causal link between an intervention and a change can be difficult to make, we often speak of contributions. However, identifying attribution is significant if it can be done since it identifies the specific variable/activity creating the change and leading to impact. Overall the use of our framework has helped to understand international development partnerships better, including their strengths and weaknesses, and their evolving place within global public policy and transnational administration. Each of the nine organizations differently manage the partnership space and each are rising actors within the current international aid architecture. Despite the risks associated
The Governance Structures 543 with these partnerships, such as their questionable sustainability, they have made a difference in a variety of areas and redefined the client/partner/stakeholder relationships for aid/development organizations. Although concrete analytical evidence remains difficult to ascertain for these global policy innovations, what is clear from the review is that partnerships are responding to very real needs, to which the market and other national, bilateral, and multilateral organizations have failed to respond adequately. Their continued existence, if not success, may be due to an ability to ‘crowd in’ more funding, knowledge, and technical know-how to solve problems. In some cases, evaluations have even indicated that had it not been for the process of shedding greater light on a problem or issue, the requisite support may not have been allocated to the specific issue. Partnerships are changing relationships and the way donors engage with stakeholders, encouraging greater consultation and participation in problem-solving. This includes drawing on diverse actors to solve specific sectoral issues and to produce and share guidance and knowledge for the benefit of others. Further work is needed to help partnerships incorporate and utilize advanced M&E techniques. This will allow them to find greater ownership, attribution, and value added. Many of the potential challenges of broad cooperative endeavours need more in-depth analysis. For example, to what extent are these partnerships limited by unequal power among partners? How are challenges addressed of large donors dominating small ones, and donors as a group dominating recipient countries? To what extent are unnecessary delays caused and additional resources needed to support collaboration? Do the partnerships encourage a sensible division of labour based on the comparative advantage of each partner? Do the partnership secretariats take on functions for which they are technically qualified, and which are essential to their mission? Or are they spreading themselves too thin and duplicating functions that could be better performed by others? Should partnerships aim for sustainability, or should there be an exit strategy as recipient countries increasingly take over responsibility for their well-being? To date, M&E has only scratched the surface in developing clarity on these kinds of questions. A better understanding of these issues is important for improving the contribution of these partnerships to global policy, and to a clearer picture of these innovative examples of transnational administration.
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544 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott Bezanson, Keith A. and Isenman, Paul. 2012. ‘Governance of New Global Partnerships: Challenges, Weaknesses, and Lessons’. CGD Policy Paper 014. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1426627. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and McKinsey & Company. 2005. Global Health Partnerships: Assessing Country Consequences, http://www.who.int/healthsystems/gf16.pdf. Burns, Tom and Stalker, G.M. 1961. The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock Publications. Buse, Ken and Harmer, Andrew M. 2007. ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Global Public- Private Health Partnerships: Practice and Potential’. Journal of Social Science & Medicine, 64: 259–7 1. Canada International Development Agency (CIDA). 2002. Canada Making a Difference in the World. A Policy Statement on Strengthening Aid Effectiveness. Quebec. Caines, et al. 2004. Assessing the Impact of Global Health Partnerships. Synthesis of findings from the 2004 DFID Studies: Global Health Partnerships: Assessing the Impact. London: DFID Health Resource Centre. Cities Alliance. 2014. Cities Alliance Medium Term Strategy 2014–2017: Promoting Equity in Cities. Cities Alliance. 2016. Communications and Advocacy, http://www.citiesalliance.org/ communications-advocacy. Coen, David and Tom Pegram. 2015. ‘Commentary: Wanted: A Third Generation of Global Governance Research’. Governance, 28 (4): 417–20. Denizer, Cevdet, Kaufmann, Daniel, and Kraay, Aart. 2013. ‘Good Countries or Good Projects? Macro and Micro Correlates of World Bank Project Performance’. Journal of Development Economics, 105: 288–302. Dodds, Felix. 2014. Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships: Making Them Work for the Post-2015 Development Agenda, http://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/newfunct/pdf15/2015partnerships_ background_note.pdf. Global Environment Facility. 2014. GEF6: Results Framework for GEFTF, LDCF, and SCCF. Excerpts from the Summary of Negotiations of the 6th Replenishment of the GEF Trust Fund, May, Cancun, Mexico (GEF/C.46/07/Rev.01). Global Partnership for Education (GPE). 2015. How the Global Partnership for Education Adds Value, http://www.globalpartnership.org/fr/download/file/fid/2392%20. Easterly, W. 2015. The SDGs Should Stand for Senseless, Dreamy, Garbled. Foreign Policy, http ://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/28/the-sdgs-are-utopian-and-worthless-mdgs-development- rise-of-the-rest/ Easterly, W. and Freschi, L. 2010. The World Bank’s ‘Horizontal’ Approach to Health Falls Horizontal?, http://w ww.nyudri.org/aidwatcharchive/2010/06/t he-world-bank%E2% 80%99s-%E2%80%9Chorizontal%E2%80%9D-approach-to-health-falls-horizontal Hasan, H. and Pousti, H. 2006. ‘SNA as an Attractor in Emergent Networks of Research Groups’. CD Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Conference of Information Systems (ACIS 2006), Adelaide, 6–8 December 2006. ICF International. 2014. Independent Evaluation of the Climate Investment Funds. Washington, DC: World Bank. International Civil Society Centre. 2014. Multistakeholder Partnerships, Building Blocks for Success. Berlin, Germany. Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). 2007a. Global Program Review Cities Climate. Washington, DC: World Bank.
The Governance Structures 545 Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). 2007b. Sourcebook for Evaluating Global and Regional Partnership Programs: Indicative Principles and Standards. Washington, DC: World Bank. Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). 2011. The World Bank’s Global and Regional Partnership Programs: An Independent Assessment. Washington, DC: World Bank. Jackson, P. 2012. ‘Value for Money and International Development. Deconstructing Myths to Promote a More Constructive Discussion’. OECD Development Co-operation Directorate, http://www.oecd.org/development/effectiveness/49652541.pdf. Menashya, Francine .2011. ‘Education as a Private or a Global Public Good: Competing Conceptual Frameworks and Their Power at the World Bank’. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/29812/3/Menashy_Francine_S_201106_ PhD_thesis.pdf. Menashya, Francine and Dryden- Peterson, Sarah. 2015. ‘The Global Partnership for Education’s Evolving Support to Fragile and Conflict-Affected States.’ International Journal of Educational Development, 44: 82–94. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (OECD). 1996. Shaping the Twenty- First Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation. Development Assistance Committee, Paris, http://www.oecd.org/dac/2508761.pdf. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2001–2011. The High Level Fora on Aid Effectiveness: A History, http://www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/thehighlevelforaonai deffectivenessahistory.htm#Rome. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2005. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Paris: Development Assistance Committee. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2010 Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results Based Management. Paris: Development Assistance Committee. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2011. Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation –Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, Busan, Republic Of Korea, 29 November-1 December 2011, http://www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/ 49650173.pdf. Patscheke, Sonja et al. 2014. ‘Shaping Global Partnerships for a Post-2015 World’. Stanford Social Innovation Review, http://ssir.org/articles/entry/shaping_global_partnerships_for_ a_post_2015_world. Runde, Daniel F. 2013. ‘The Future of Public–Private Partnerships: Strengthening a Powerful Instrument for Global Development’. Center for Strategic and International Studies, https:// www.csis.org/ analysis/ f uture- public- private- p artnerships- strengthening- p owerfulinstrument-global-development. Smith, Richard D. 2003. ‘Global Public Goods and Health’. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 81 (7): 475. Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. 2006. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio. ‘The Global Fund Sustainability, Transitioning, and Co-financing Policy’. 2016. The Global Fund 35th Board Meeting, 26–27 April. Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. The Guardian. 2015. ‘Sustainable Development Goals: All You Need to Know’. Monday, 19 January, https://w ww.theguardian.com/g lobal-development/2015/jan/19/sustainable- development-goals-united-nations. Tran, Mark. 2012. ‘Mark Malloch-Brown: Developing the MDGs Was a Bit Like Nuclear Fusion’. The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/nov/16/ mark-malloch-brown-mdgs-nuclear.
546 Arianne Wessal and Clay G. Wescott United Nations. 2005. ‘Enhanced Cooperation between the United Nations and all Relevant Partners, in Particular the Private Sector’. UN Doc. A/60/214. Universalia. 2005. Evaluation of ADEA 2, Appendices. Washington, DC: World Bank. UN Women. 2018. The Process to Identify the Sustainable Development Goals, http://www. unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/post-2015/sustainable-development-goals. Van Alstyne, M. 1997. ‘The State of Network Organization: A Survey in Three Frameworks’. Journal of Organizational Computing, 7 (3): 88–151. Van Alstyne, M. 2006. ‘Independent Evaluation of the Cities Alliance’. 3 volumes, http://www. citiesalliance.org/Independent%20Evaluation%202006. Wessal, Arianne and Wescott, Clay. 2015. How Effective are International Development Partnerships? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2720925. Winthrop, Rebecca and Bulloch, Gib. 2012. The Talent Paradox: Funding Education as a Global Public Good. Washington, DC: Brookings, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/ posts/2012/11/06-funding-education-winthrop. World Economic Forum. 2005. Partnering for Success: Business Perspectives on Multi- Stakeholder Partnerships—Committed to Improving the State of the World, http://www. weforum.org/pdf/ppp.pdf.
Chapter 31
Governanc e a nd Administr at i on in Gl obal H e a lt h Organiz at i ons Considering the Legacies of the ‘Golden Era’ of Global Health Policy? Carmen Huckel Schneider
31.1. Introduction There have been numerous attempts over the past twenty years to develop novel governance mechanisms for sustaining health as a global political priority. These include multi-stakeholder funds with large capital throughputs, coordinating bodies that work within and between multilateral organizations, market-adjusting public–private partnerships, and knowledge communities linked together in various forms ranging from self-coordinated networks to legally registered associations (Kickbusch and Cassar Szabo, 2014; Lee et al., 2009; Shiffman, 2017; Steyn, 2011; Stone and Ladi, 2015). In each case, the establishment of new organizational forms can be seen as responding to a need to moderate the process of cooperation in dynamic political environments where health and medical knowledge is advancing, resources are scarce, interests are dispersed, and priorities are contested (Aginam, 2005; Castells, 2008; Frenk and Moon, 2013; Gostin and Mok, 2009). The so called ‘golden era’ of global health, spanning approximately 1998–2008 (although some scholars extend it further to approximately 2015) was marked not only by a dramatic increase in funding and political attention for global health, but arguably radical change in the processes of global health policy making (Fidler, 2009; Kickbusch,
548 Carmen Huckel Schneider 2016; Lang and Rayner, 2015; Lidén, 2013). One area of innovation was in the administrative, executive, and oversight structures of newly established global health organizations, which can be seen as both a response to, and a part of, an evolution in the global health architecture (Fidler, 2010). There has been considerable academic interest in the governance of global health organizations emerging during this era. This includes particular interest in the membership of Boards of Directors (or equivalent) and whether they represent a shift away from the principles of multilateralism underpinning international organizations (in particular, the World Health Organization (WHO)) (Brugha et al., 2004; Buse and Harmer, 2007; Gill and Benatar, 2017). A decade on, new questions emerge surrounding the legacy of these innovations and whether new norms of global health organization have become established. The emergence and consolidation of new global health organizations of this era has been analysed in terms of the historical context of the period, the role of both key individuals that championed change, the activities and political constraints in the World Health Organization at the time (Lidén, 2013) as well as the broader conceptual changes that were ushered in with the World Bank’s increasing norm-setting role in global health policy from the early 1990s (Ruger, 2005). Further scholarly focus has been on the parallel development of a ‘private turn’ in global health (Kay and Williams, 2009; Williams and Rushton, 2011a), and an ongoing debate about legitimacy—in particular around technical authority, and its juxtaposition with representative and cosmopolitan democracy (Bartsch, 2011; Frenk and Moon, 2013; Shiffman, 2014). Most of this work has aligned with broader questions surrounding governance beyond the state, with strong influences from the field of International Relations and its subset Global Governance (Bartsch et al., 2009; Benford, 2011; Bexell et al., 2010; Finklestein, 1995; Gordenker and Weiss, 1995). In contrast, there has been far less attention paid to the internal structures and cultures of these new organizations and how each creates and reflects new standards of transnational administration, management, and oversight. It is worth exploring the emergence of these new standards of global public health policy since they have repercussions not only for the way decisions are reached within global health organizations, but also for evolving expectations and administrative practice in international organizations such as the WHO (Lee, 2017). This chapter argues that organizations matter and so do their administrative structures, cultures, histories, and the individual influencers that determine how decisions are made, how information is processed, how budgets are allocated, and how financing is managed (see Alesani this volume). These elements of administration are usually considered separately and distinctly from questions of organizational effectiveness and legitimacy. This creates a gap in the literature on global health policy. This chapter uses a multidisciplinary approach drawn from public administration, corporate governance, and organizational sociology to understand the transnational administration of global health organizations and how such organizations create new standards of global public policy making. After discussing key definitions and providing a description of the landscape of organizations in global health policy making, the chapter highlights some of the key
Governance in Global Health Organizations 549 organizational features that identify new global health organizations as separate from prior international organizations. The chapter concludes with prospective remarks around the consequences of new standards of transnational administration for multilateral international organizations.
31.2. Organizations and Global Health Governance Global health policy is dynamic and highly politicized. Goals, priorities, and the broader conceptual frames that guide global action are contested. In the broader global health policy literature, the concept of global health governance is used to capture the mechanisms for negotiation and mediating this contestation (Fidler, 2010; Kickbusch, 2016; Schrecker, 2017). Global health governance is defined in various ways, often dependent on the context and nature of the surrounding discourse in which the term is used (Lee and Kamradt- Scott, 2014). A descriptive and functional approach to global health governance is focused around the architecture of the global health landscape, including the actors that play various roles, the power that they wield, their interests and how they are linked through various networks (Møgedal et al., 2011). A more institutional approach centres on the ‘rules of the game’, with a focus on norms and conventions that persist through time. This approach articulates logics of appropriateness that explain patterns of behaviour and cooperation that can appear to defy the self-interested pursuit of interests or even self-preservation within a recognized world of complex interdependence (Fidler, 2007; Hanrieder, 2014; Inoue and Drori, 2006). Global health governance can also be defined broadly as the politics of global health, including the political determinants of the health of people and populations (Gill and Benatar, 2016). This definition is more frequently used as a contrast to bio-medical, investment, and social determinant approaches to global health, to emphasize the impact of factors such as participation, representation, oppression, conflict, discrimination, political identity, and self- determination over health (Stone and Ladi, 2015). This chapter tightens the focus of global health governance specifically to analyse the conditions under which actors agree to cooperate (Lee and Kamradt-Scott, 2014), in particular within the boundaries of an organization. The focus here is on structural elements that organize decision-making, creating a reciprocal relationship between inputs, processes, and the acceptance of outputs. From a global public policy perspective, the focus on organizations and how they function is principally important for three main reasons. First, discussion of global cooperation in health has been dominated by the creation of organizations, their actions and effectiveness, and critiques of these organizations. Most significantly, a key locus of this criticism has been the World Health Organization and its regional arms (including the Pan-American Health
550 Carmen Huckel Schneider Organization), its predecessors, including the League of Nations Health Organization and Office International d’Hygiène Publique (OIHP), and the various other organizations (states, multilateral agencies, corporation, civil society organizations) they interact with (Hanrieder, 2014; Lidén, 2014). Second, empirically we have seen the formation of a large number of new organizations for global health not just during the ‘golden era’ described above, but also well beyond it. This suggests that, even in instances where informal networks have flourished, there is a need, real or perceived, for formalized structures that enable cooperation in order to reach agreement on goals and actions. Third, the study of organizations and how they ‘work’ is essential to understand the complex global health architecture. With an ongoing academic debate over the meaning and relevance of structure and agency, framing and norms, interests and power, and deep ideological cores, the majority of literature on global health still refers to organizations as cohesive units to be analysed in terms of their external actions. Understanding organizations from within, however, is essential to understanding reasons for action as well as the process of policy making. In this chapter, the term international organization is used to refer to international state-based organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank; while the term ‘global health organization’ refers to collectively agreed modes of cooperation to work towards global health-related goals. This broader conceptualization is used to reflect the newly diverse landscape of organizational types involved global public policy for health and the extent to which locations of global public policy making can no longer be clearly demarcated along dichotomies such as public versus private (or even public private partnerships) or state versus multilateral. In addition to multi-stakeholder (public private) funds like The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), which are analysed further below, there are many other organizations that do not fit neatly within these usual categories. The policy arena of health is highly focused upon technical innovation, knowledge, and specialized workforces, while acknowledging a large potential for grassroots mobilization and a need for coordination. Global health organizations can therefore combine elements of workers associations, epistemic communities, charities, international coordination, research institutions, advocacy coalitions, and market mobilization in various forms. While the World Health Organization still represents the eminent global health policy making body, the transnational administration of health has become more complex (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Williams and Rushton, 2011a). For example, the World Health Organization itself ‘houses’ several smaller organizations, which operate partly independently in terms of the extent to which they determine their own scope of activities, financial revenues, and lines of accountability, but which are still linked with the WHO in terms of office infrastructure, legal status, management regulations, and co-branding. As will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, these are indications of new norms and standards of global administration manifesting themselves as adjusted transnational administrative practice within international organizations.
Governance in Global Health Organizations 551
31.3. Legacies from the ‘Golden Era’ The era from 1998 to 2008 has been described as a golden decade in global health (Fidler, 2009; Lang and Rayner, 2015; Lidén, 2013). This label is based not only on advancements in health outcomes during this time (in particular the reversal in global trends of rates of new HIV/AIDS infections) but also the dramatic increase in global aid channelled towards health during this decade. It has been estimated that development assistance for health, from all sources including both public and private, increased by 11.3 per cent annually between 2000 and 2010, whereas in the previous decade it increased by 5.4 per cent annually and in the years since (until 2014) it increased by 1.4 per cent annually (Dieleman et al., 2015; McCoy et al., 2009; Ravishankar et al., 2009). The apparent elevation of health as an issue of concern in the realm of ‘high politics’ (Williams and Rushton, 2011b; Zacher, 2007) is also considered a marker of this era. For example, on several occasions health was placed on the agendas of the Group of 8 (G8) and Group of 20 (G20) summits (Schrecker and Labonte, 2007). This was also a period during which there was dramatic change in processes of global health policy making, including global health organizations (Kickbusch, 2016; Lidén, 2013). Among the most studied innovations in governance during this era were the formation and establishment of the two major health funding organizations: the Global Fund (see for example Bennett and Fairbank (2003); Lu et al. (2006); Ravishankar et al. (2009); Vitoria et al. (2009) and GAVI (see for example Clemens et al. (2010); Marchal et al. (2009); Storeng (2014)). The reasons for their establishment have been documented as a combination of historical circumstance, innovators, and enablers (such as the then Director-General of WHO, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and philanthropic donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) (Lidén, 2013) and a continuation of a trend that had grown since the 1980s on behalf of donor states to prefer to channel funds into specific global health programmes rather than a broader WHO budget over which they had less control (Huckel Schneider, 2009). The influence of the World Bank, particularly following the release of the influential ‘Investing in Health’ report in 1993, is seen as another factor that cemented a paradigm shift promoting broadly inclusive governance arrangements. An analysis of organizational structures and administrative practices demonstrates how this paradigm shift manifested itself in the formation of new global health organizations during the ‘golden era’. GAVI, for example, was preceded by the Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI), which had been housed within the World Health Organization. This was run in parallel with the WHO’s internal Global Programme on Vaccines which had its own Standing Committee that included WHO, UNICEF, UNDP, and the World Bank. Over time the Children’s Vaccine Initiative’s administrative practices became increasingly weighted towards input from its ‘CVI Consultative Group’ comprised of ‘representatives of national immunisation programs, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organisations, development-stage firms, commercial vaccine
552 Carmen Huckel Schneider manufacturers, public-sector vaccine manufacturers, and national development assistance agencies’ (Sanford et al., 1993). Frustrations among leadership of the CVI over their inability to formally engage and acknowledge the members of this group, coupled with policy outputs such as new vaccine developments that required their participation (a significant feature of global health policy and also discussed by Borrás, this volume) are cited as having created a momentum towards a new independent organization outside the WHO (Widdus, 1999; Sandberg et al., 2010). Similarly, impasses in funding at the WHO for HIV/AIDS (due to both underpaying of dues and budgetary decisions) led to several proposals for alternative organizational forms that could channel funds through agile administrative structures. The Global Fund was established as an independent organization, along the lines of GAVI in 2002. Founded around the turn of the century, both GAVI and the Global Fund focused on raising the profile of specific diseases and technologies as well as procuring and dispersing funds to affected populations. Their organizational structure centred on a governance board with diverse membership, including representatives of the governments of leading donor as well as recipient countries. Both organizations also included board seats for representatives from the private sector (both for- and not-for-profit) including philanthropic organizations (in the early years dominated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and the civil society sector. Business and civil society representation in these funds distinguishes these bodies from traditional international organizations. Their internal structures have become increasingly intricate with multiple secretarial, advisory, and decision-making structures added over time. Central decision boards of GAVI and the Global Fund are linked to their own secretariat through non- voting board membership for the Chief Executive Officer and to international organizations through ex officio positions. They also have a number of technical committees dedicated by subject-matter expertise. Maintaining links to international organizations while increasing their technical focus is also a distinguishing feature of these new global health organizations, as is a focus on efficiency, innovation, financial policy instruments, and espousing return on investment as a legitimation strategy. Over time both organizations have expanded organizational resources dedicated to financial management (for example GAVI’s International Finance Facility for Immunisation) and audit oversight branches of the organization (for example the Global Fund’s Audit and Finance and Ethics and Governance Committees). The Global Fund has more recently added a separate policy arm (Strategy Committee) and GAVI a Programme and Policy Committee. In both organizations, there are regular activities aimed at increasing contact with smaller organizations, including implementing and advocacy organizations. Both are legally wholly independent of WHO or any other international organization: GAVI is legally registered as an international institution in Switzerland and as a charity in the USA while the Global Fund is a non-profit foundation in Switzerland with a Swiss Headquarters Agreement. Examples of other new organizations linked to the era include the Roll Back Malaria and Stop TB Partnerships, each initially located within the World Health Organization but afforded a special status that enabled more formal ties with key
Governance in Global Health Organizations 553 non-state stakeholders (Lidén, 2013; Lidén, 2014; Vitoria et al., 2009); UNITAID, a financing organization which collects contributions from airline ticket taxes (Atun et al., 2012); and the International Health Partnership+, which provided funds and in-kind support with the aim of improving health aid effectiveness (Shorten et al., 2012). Each of these organizations embodies at least some organizational features similar to those mentioned above, such as separate financing and auditing branches, interest-and/or representation-based board composition, ex officio links to multilateral international organizations, and structures that embed technical knowledge into the organization. More recently, organizations that aim to rebalance market incentives to promote the development of new products, such as PATH and the TB Alliance (not to be confused with the Stop TB Partnership mentioned above) also increasingly take on similar structures. It is notable that the establishment and success of global health organizations of the type and scale of the Global Fund and GAVI have not been repeated. With the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, there were concerns that the period of generosity in global health would end (Leach-Kemon et al., 2012)—with some explicitly asserting the end of the golden decade (Fidler, 2009, 2010; Woods, 2010). Accordingly, the hurdle of the exceptionally high level of political and financial attention and support required to get organizations such as the Global Fund and GAVI launched was not expected to be met again. Some scholars have described the last ten years as a post-golden era period, marked among other aspects as one of less innovation in global health governance (Kickbusch, 2016; Lee, 2017). There has however still been a continuation and evolution of global health organizations since the end of the ‘golden era’. Over the past ten years, as different issues have come to dominate the global health agenda, notably non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and universal health coverage (UHC), there has been renewed activity to form new, or reform existing, organizations to garner political attention, advocate for action, share resources, and determine policy actions (De Cock et al., 2013). The NCD Alliance was formed in 2009 as a conglomerate of four large global NGOs for diabetes, heart health, cancer, and lung disease and has since evolved its organizational structure to include executive and non-executive members on its board and regional representatives. It is undergoing a further process of formalization in which internal structures and board composition are being further refined. In 2015, the Global TB Partnership moved from being hosted within the WHO to being administered by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) at the same time further embracing organizational features that include non-state actors in decision-making. In 2016, the International Health Partnership+ morphed into UHC2030 for the advancement of Universal Health Coverage. This was accompanied by changes to its organizational structure, which is now centred around a steering committee that allocates seats for representatives of different ‘interest constituencies’ such as low-, middle- and high-income countries, multilateral organizations, philanthropic foundations, civil society, and the private sector. Thus, while the legacies from the ‘golden era’ are therefore unlikely to be found in repeats of major funding organizations like the Global Fund and GAVI, there are indicators that more global health organizations have adopted characteristics that
554 Carmen Huckel Schneider appear remarkably similar to those found in the ‘major’ forerunners. Examples include board compositions that combine regional representatives with individuals from various sectors, separate financing oversight boards, structured roles and relationships between boards and advisory/scientific committees, structured modes of stakeholder engagement and often very similar relationships between executives, technical, and administrative staff in secretariats. The reasons for this might lie in the logics of goal-oriented strategy, institutional learning, expectations of the large number of co-dependent stakeholders now active in global health, or simply the legal requirement to gain status as a formal association. One important tradition of public policy studies suggests that innovation and change may be less a result of measured deliberation about available options but arise from ‘muddling through’ key decisions, on the basis of historical precedents, limited information, time constraints, personal preferences, and the dynamics of the group (Lindblom, 1959). Nevertheless, the above observations suggest that patterns are emerging in transnational administrative practice that warrant study with respect to their underlying norms and principles.
31.4. Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Understanding Global Health Organizations Global health organizations and their structures change over time. Some are planned at inception and evolve with changing internal and external demands, others emerge organically from informal networks but have a need for more formal structures to ease the processes of cooperation in highly contested policy environments. Structure and administrative practice is determined through a mix of goal-oriented and norm- based practice, often implemented based on experience from public and private, as well as national and transnational administration elsewhere. Concerns include how to integrate experts with the technical knowledge central to the goals of the organization (for example through establishing technical review committees); how to offer essential implementing partners a sense of ownership in decision-making to maintain their interest and cooperation (for example, by designated ‘seats’ for implementing partners on governance boards); how to maintain resource flow (for example through legal registration as a charity); and how to ensure that legal obligations (such as financial reporting) are met. This, sometimes slow and incremental, and sometimes rapid, punctuated, change in administrative practice suggests a complexity in global health organizations that can be best understood by drawing on insights from multiple disciplines that examine internal and external dynamics as both a cause and effect of global public policy making.
Governance in Global Health Organizations 555 For example, two broad analytical lenses of organizational theory can be applied to the study of the structural features and administrative practices of global health organizations. First, taking a rational pragmatic lens, global health organizations can be analysed with a focus on function—determining the extent they take on features and practices designed to maximize efficiency in achieving organizational goals, including organizational survival (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2013). Global health organizations are likely to spend more time on these practical considerations than most global health policy scholarship suggests. As we have seen in the examples briefly mentioned above, there is a deliberate and continual structuring and restructuring to ease the process of achieving goals. Analysis from this perspective seeks to determine: What are the pragmatic factors that determine the structuring, restructuring, and administering of global health organizations? Second is a cultural-normative lens, in which ‘. . . formal structure moves beyond functional requirements in ways that are not obvious reflections of aggregated self- interests . . . and not necessarily most efficient’ (Bromley, 2016, p. 472). This approach addresses questions such as: To what extent do global health organizations take on common features that do not serve the purpose of maximizing goal achievement, but rather fulfil others’ expectations and follow externally determined norms (Thornton et al., 2015)? In practice, it can be difficult to distinguish between cultural-normative influences and rational-pragmatic considerations; and there can certainly be a large overlap between the two. For example, administrative principles that underpinned the early years of GAVI and the Global Fund were centred on efficiency, innovation, and market-based policy instruments (Sandberg et al, 2010; Rushton and Williams, 2012). It is not clear whether this was the result of normative-pragmatic considerations or a broader socio- cultural shift in policy and administration practice. Critical analysis of organizational case studies can help identify instances where function either explains, or comes secondary to, expectation and organizational trends; and then identify the origins of the norms that set those new expectations and trends. More attention should therefore be paid to different disciplines that can offer key insights into both rational-pragmatic and cultural-normative-based reasons why global health organizations take on the structures and administrative practices that they do. Experience of evolving health governance within industrialized states has increasingly shown that: Historically, the traditions of governance in private, public and voluntary organisations are rather different. However, with the government reforms of the public sector, and the growing introduction of management practices derived from business into the public and voluntary sectors, the boundaries between the sectors have become blurred. Increasingly, it is relevant to ask what the similarities and differences are between the different sectors. (Cornforth, 2003, p. 6)
The following three disciplines are examples that can further our understanding of public policy and transnational administration in health. First, over the past twenty
556 Carmen Huckel Schneider years, global governance scholarship has explored many international norms and their role in global health policy. These include a range of norms (many of which are exclusive or even non-compatible) relating to sovereignty, hegemony, multilateralism, cosmopolitan democracy, accountability, complex interdependence, liberal institutionalism, responsibility, and legitimacy (of the input, throughput, and output kinds) (Bartsch, 2011; Benford, 2011; Bexell et al., 2010; Kay and Williams, 2009). Many of these are reflected in features of global health organization structure and practice (McInnes et al., 2012; Ng and Ruger, 2011; Ruger, 2012). For example, in recently restructured global health organizations, such as UHC2030 and the Stop TB Partnership, specific seats are allocated to members who represent both interest constituencies (NGOs representing people living with ill health) and states (e.g. Ministers of Health). Second, sub-disciplines of organizational sociology that relate to the corporation, the not-for-profit organization, bureaucratization, and specialization, particularly from business management and corporate governance, offer further insights into the norms that influence organizational structure and restructure (see, for example, Chhaochharia and Laeven (2009); Coffee Jr (1998)). Recent work on transnational networks, epistemic communities, and public–private partnerships have demonstrated that global health governance today need not follow the precedents of international relations (Shiffman, 2009; Shiffman and Smith, 2007) and yet, standards and expectations of organizational form management and business studies have rarely been discussed as a major influencing factor. Many global health organizations have no intrinsic obligation to operate as multilateral organizations do in terms of being standing bodies to ease negotiation between states on mutually recognized matters of concern. By contrast, most have more in common—in both legal status and administrative practice—with charities and corporations. Corporate governance (including not-for-profit governance) builds on norms related to financial discipline and performance rooted in technical rationality (Considine, 1988), such as instrumentalism. In turn, norms of corporate governance that have applicability in global health organizations include rules of transparency and financial disclosure, fiduciary responsibility, independent audit, the ability of boards to deliberate separately from executives, risk management, performance reporting, and product format. An example is the Global Fund, which repeatedly emphasizes its principles of fiduciary responsibility (Banati and Moatti, 2008), the product development focus of PATH and the TB Alliance, and the introduction of risk management strategies at GAVI. Scholarship on not-for-profit governance has developed parallel to that of corporate governance; and has focused around the characteristics of board membership that contribute to overall performance of the organization. In particular, the focus is on the membership and dynamics of a board that allow it to effectively lead policy debate, contribute to organization strategy, hold management accountable, and be responsive to external demands (Coombes et al., 2011; Cornforth, 2001; Cornforth, 2003; Mordaunt and Cornforth, 2004). For example, we see deliberately crafted board membership comprising of individuals with expertise in management, financial planning, politics, public
Governance in Global Health Organizations 557 administration, and transnational administration on the central boards of all global health organizations mentioned in this chapter. Third, public administration has rarely focused on the study of global health organizations. Again, this is surprising, as the set of practices underpinning the New Public Management and New Public Governance are frequently discussed in domestic public policy and public administration scholarship in conjunction with trends towards privatization, marketization, and monetization of health (Dickinson and Sullivan, 2014; Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012).This debate is paralleled in the global health literature (Bexell, 2013; Kay and Williams, 2009; Rushton and Williams, 2012), however, the extent to which administrative and policy practices are built into global health organizations is rarely discussed. Elements from one aspect of public management that manifest as features of global health organizations include competition, incentivization, return on investment, outsourcing, performance standards, and decentralization (Osborne, 2010). We see this manifested in global health organizations that have a strong focus on standard reporting measures, lean operating budgets, and in the commonly used legitimation practices that emphasize return on investment (see also Storeng (2014) on GAVI extending these same principles to strengthen health systems). Rather than a singular focus on the (international) politics of global health policy, combining these three disciplines ‘brings in’ an examination of principles from business management and corporate governance, as well as public administration and organizational theory, to offer a more complete picture of the complex mix of pragmatic-rational decisions to maintain functionality and cultural influences that determine what is ‘appropriate’ inside global health policy making. The mix of these norms can be seen as a new standard of transnational administration in global health.
31.5. Conclusion: Consolidation of New Standards of Transnational Administration Despite considerable interest in the history, legacy, and nature of global health governance during the so-called ‘golden era’, there has been little scholarship examining global health organizations from organizational theory, public administration, and corporate governance perspectives. This gap in the global health policy literature means that there is still much to learn about what drives policy action. By examining distinguishing organizational features of global health organizations and the way they shape decisions and actions, it is possible to identify both rational-pragmatic and cultural-normative trends in transnational administration; as well as how far these trends spread back to international organizations. Global public policy, including global health policy, still rotates around international organizations. The World Health Organization holds a unique and unenviable position
558 Carmen Huckel Schneider of being undeniably the global authority on health and medical technical knowledge, but at the same time constantly critiqued for its inadequacies. This has undermined the organization virtually since its inception. Crucially, however, most of the more recent criticism of the World Health Organization (in both academic and journalistic literature) by far has been less about its overarching legitimacy, but more about its so-called bureaucratic inefficiencies, such as lack of transparency, inability to respond quickly to changes in the policy environment (most recently the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the war in Syria), and inconsistent goals (Kamradt-Scott, 2016; Kelland, 2016; Lee, 2017). The World Health Organization is both highly lauded for its innovative programmes (such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) and punished for its failures (for example the creation on UNAIDS as a separate UN organization to lead policy on arguably the biggest health policy issue of the last fifty years). There is pressure for the World Health Organization to reform and adapt accordingly. There has been an apparent resurgent interest in reforming structures within the World Health Organization, potentially to realize lessons and legacies of the golden era while maintaining its core multilateral framework. The Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FTCC), and the more recent Global Coordinating Mechanism for Non-Communicable Diseases both move in this direction. In both instances the World Health Organization has taken steps to utilize policy instruments available to international organizations—such as the FTCC Conferences of Parties and the Global Coordination Mechanism’s link to commitments made and reported to the United Nations General Assembly—while at the same time acknowledging some of the advantages in administrative practice of global health organizations such as the Global Fund. Established in 2011, following a Special UN General Assembly Session on Non- Communicable Diseases, the Global Coordinating Mechanism for NCDs was formed after the WHO was tasked with determining the ‘. . . options for strengthening and facilitating multi-sectoral action for the prevention and control of non-communicable disease through effective partnership’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2011). Several organizational forms and features were considered including the option of a formal, independent partnership with participation of civil society and the private sector, to facilitate ‘speedy decision making, timely transparent monitoring and accountability’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2012). The end result was a mix of UN state-based principles, WHO-based administrative practice, and features that embody new norms such as measurable targets and better engagement with non-state actors through a new system of Global Coordinating Mechanism ‘participants’ (Huckel Schneider et al., 2017). Progress on embedding these features has however been slow, moving parallel to wider WHO reform of its official relations with non-government organizations. Only in 2017, with WHO’s new Framework for Engagement with non-State actors (FENSA) coming into effect has the official gate to non-state actors participating in increased activities been opened. The FENSA framework contains significant novel developments on what has been standard WHO (and international organization) rules of engagement with non- state actors in the past (Khayatzadeh-Mahani et al., 2017). However, most changes are in regard to administrative rules that govern policy direction, formulation, and
Governance in Global Health Organizations 559 implementation rather than formal decision-making—a further indicator that real change in transnational policy making happens inside transnational administration— such as the involvement of non-state actors in capacity building, product development, operational collaboration, technical committees, and strategic consultation. Possibly the most significant change in the new FENSA however is not its new explicit rules of engagement, but the change in language used in the formal document. There is clear encouragement for stronger private sector involvement in WHO policy formulation, signifying a shift in discourse ‘ending the long standing official policy that WHO should not engage with organizations that are “primarily of a commercial or profit making nature” ’ (Khayatzadeh-Mahani et al., 2017, p. 1). As such, new norms appear to be acknowledged, if not yet fully embraced. Recent work on orchestration in multilateral international organizations suggests that engaging with private actors can improve capacity to work towards policy goals (Abbott and Snidal, 2010), which WHO has increasingly done in recent years (although unevenly, depending on various contextual factors (Hanrieder, 2015)). This concept is in part embodied through the WHO’s ‘housing’ of smaller organizations, which have administrative links with their host (such as branding, infrastructure, and some management services), but may be independent in terms of decision-making, performance monitoring, and accountability and financing. This allows for greater flexibility within these ‘housed’ organizations to take on features seen in new global health organizations, such as joint decision-making with non-government organizations, independent financing, and new technical committee structures. This is but one indication that we need to rethink the way that norms spread throughout international administration. Not just in terms of who gets to formally sit in the highest levels of decision-making—but the the underlying principles that permeate the ways in which knowledge is gathered, options are considered, approaches are implemented, and agendas are adopted. This includes how global health organizations create and reflect new standards of transnational administration, management, and oversight, such as the integration of state and non-state actors, formalized input from technical and financial committees, performance monitoring, and organizational structures that separate multiple levels of oversight and accountability. Greater attention to these structural features of global health organizations from a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating public administration, corporate governance, and organizational sociology, would acknowledge the complexity of transnational administration in health and the norms that underpin it.
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Chapter 32
Organized Busi ne s s a nd Gl obal Publi c P ol i c y Administration, Participation, and Regulation Karsten Ronit
32.1. Introduction With the development of global public policy across a wide field of issue areas, we need to explore which actors are engaged in formulating and implementing policies, and we are compelled to move beyond the domain of states and intergovernmental organizations and search for multiple private sources (Cerny, 2010). At this juncture, business takes a prominent position by contributing to and administering a variety of policies. Indeed, business is a highly globalized interest category that is able to organize and represent interests, and, in many respects, with a capacity to implement policy. However, business is very diverse and active in global public policy through many different types of actors. Much research has examined the power of large multinational corporations (for example Dunning, 1997; Mikler, 2013) and how they hinder or facilitate global public policy; alternatively, how they adopt rules and norms and install practices that may benefit society, as advocated, for instance, by the United Nations (UN) Global Compact. Contributions to public policy from single firms are exciting to study in their own right, but corporations embody particularistic interests and do not enjoy support from industries as a whole or the general business community. Consequently, we need to concentrate on actors who are capable of formulating and implementing policies for large segments of a given business group. Even if impaired by certain legitimacy deficits, such private actors and their various policies and rule- making activities—such as codes of conduct, licences, standards, and arbitral awards— may become functionally equivalent to a public policy managed by traditional public administration. Hence, this chapter is concerned with the role of global business associations and similar entities which provide a framework for cooperation between
566 Karsten Ronit competitors and with which global politics abounds. This requires that associations be representative of the interest categories they seek to organize, that they avoid significant free-riding, and that they become recognized by important institutions in their institutional environment, including relevant intergovernmental organizations. The study on public policy was for many years exclusively concerned with the role of government in a domestic or comparative perspective, and space was not offered to private actors, such as associations, that were considered secondary to political parties, parliaments, and governments. However, organized interests were gradually recognized as important in the formation of policy. Later the international angle was added, but primarily outside the tradition of public policy: First, organized interests were recognized as assisting governments in defining positions to be represented in negotiations with other states (Putnam, 1988). Second, special contributions of private actors were emphasised in the transnational approach to the study of international affairs (Keohane and Nye, 1971) and later highlighted in scholarly work on global governance. These developments have in their own way given impetus to the study of organized interests in the formation of global policies. Unfortunately, theoretical developments have sidestepped the role of organized business in these policy processes. Addressing this issue this chapter moves forward in three steps. First, it discusses the administrative capacities of global business associations as one of the preconditions for their contribution to global public policy. Second, it examines how global associations become integrated into the work of many intergovernmental organizations and participate in policy making structures. Third, it analyses how global business associations are capable of designing various schemes of self-regulation and may offer alternatives to traditional public policy. The chapter ends with a conclusion that sums up the findings and discusses the theoretical challenges in the study of global public policy.
32.2. The Administrative Context of Organized Business Important administrative structures to coordinate activity are available in the secretariats of business associations. These structures and the resources they harbour are much needed in global policy processes, and they add to many other administrative capacities hosted outside the control of states (Stone and Ladi, 2015). These private bureaucracies, such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) organizing the business community in general, and the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) representing a specific industry, are supposed to work for their members as such and according to priorities negotiated between affiliates, and not promote the interests of single corporations or specific national interests. This does not suggest that members always have the same influence on the scope and character of this delegation or have the same opportunities to control delegation. In fact, business associations must cope with various
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 567 asymmetries in power distribution among members, a feature common to many organizations (Coleman, 1990): members represent economies of different sizes (national associations) and different shares of the market (corporations). Yet, to achieve a clear theoretical understanding of the governance structures of business associations, the balance of power is essential. It is crucial not to alienate particular members or groups in the associations and to settle different concerns in order not to lose members or discourage new members from joining, and in general secure a reputation of representative associations. Bylaws are supposed to regulate these relations, of course, but historical practices are also important. Members grant staff authority to follow a range of issues, and secretariats are often experienced entities with a good understanding of what members expect, and what is politically feasible. Indeed, it is a strategic role of the leaderships and the secretariats to balance the preferences of members (logic of membership) with the expectations of their key interlocutors, as for instance international agencies (logic of influence) (Schmitter and Streeck, 1999). In this organizational thinking, it is further important that the leadership and management of associations make efforts to organize interests comprehensively to become representative of an industry or the general business community and to meet the expectations of key institutions in their environment (Streeck and Kenworthy, 2005). This ambition, of course, also has a bearing on the finances and administrative resources of associations. There are considerable differences in the size of the secretariats, but it is important to note that the sheer size is often only a vague indicator of the resources that are really behind organized business. Essentially, the size of secretariats shows the ability and willingness of, and the necessity for, the members to invest resources in a collective enterprise, resources which they, in principle, could have used themselves for similar activities. Thus the allocation of resources reflects an element of trust between members, and between members and organizations. Secretariats can draw on their members’ vast knowledge and experience and add to the competences and resources pooled in associations. Large firms with experiences from many countries are themselves global organizations, and in many cases the headquarters of these entities are huge and considerably more diversified than the global associations. Accordingly, many firms are in a position to provide economic, legal, and technical expertise and thus add to the formal resources of the global associations. Indeed, this kind of experience is particularly valuable because it reflects the situation ‘on the ground’ to which the administration of global associations does not have immediate access. There is a risk, however, that this kind of knowledge, if not balanced against other sources, will reflect the situation of specific corporations and is therefore not generalizable. However, the ongoing dialogue between staff and many different members helps in synthesizing these experiences. In addition, it is important for global associations to draw on national associations and their staff. In most cases, they will not be able to bring global experiences to the associations, but they have significant experience in managing the diversity of member interests and in interacting with institutions in their political environment.
568 Karsten Ronit In such cases, the multiple domestic sources of global knowledge need to be evaluated in the formulation of policy. In some cases, national associations may have larger bureaucracies than the global associations. The representative status and resource capacity of the Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände (BDA) and the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI) in Germany are ready examples, and they provide significant support to a body like the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD (BIAC). Yet it is important to remember that the tasks of the different territorial levels in the associational system vary and cannot always be meaningfully compared. Global associations engage in global tasks and tend to avoid national or regional issues, and national associations are engaged primarily in domestic issues. The formal structure of the secretariats shows how major global policy challenges are perceived and which areas are given particular attention. As a rule, the secretariats mould the understanding of many issues by bringing the individual interests of their members together and they display an ambition to cater to general member interests. Occasionally will there be divisions in the secretariats that manifest and address the concerns of sub-groups only, when shifting concerns in the constituency need special and sequential attention without compromising other interests in the association. Administrative resources are built up through contacts between staff of associations and staff of member firms and associations, but they are further obtained through different committee systems. Committees and similar entities reflect the different priorities in the associations and reveal which policy fields and issues are dealt with on a systematic and permanent basis. The International Fertilizer Association (IFA), for instance, operates four different committees on agriculture, international trade, technical knowledge, and communication. The committees support staff by functioning as useful accumulators of knowledge and idea generators in policy development. There is a huge variation between global business associations. To improve our understanding, we roughly distinguish between (1) peak associations addressing trans-industry concerns, and (2) industry associations representing specific industries (Ronit, 2018). While the former community of global peak associations consists only of a handful of associations, the latter community is diverse and embraces a vast number of entities. We observe a division of labour between these two layers. As a rule, peak associations devote activities to general issues that are of relevance to the overall business community and not to particular sectors of business, although it is also possible to find such examples, while industry associations tend to be active in specific policy fields, and design secretariats accordingly. Turning first to the peak associations, there is an important distinction to be made between those representing producer concerns and those representing employer interests (Ronit, 2016). At the global level there are peak associations that engage mainly in producer-related policies (International Chamber of Commerce, ICC), and associations that concentrate on employer issues (International Organisation of Employers, IOE). Even so, hybrid associations, such as BIAC, mix the two fields. Of course, the basic commitments of these associations have a strong impact on their administrative structures. In addition, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has a significant policy portfolio. The WEF is not representative in the same way as the ICC with national chambers in its
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 569 constituency and the WEF draws only on large corporations from the affluent parts of the world. Nevertheless, it is extremely active in setting agendas and offering analyses on a large number of issues, and it expands its own administrative capacity by inviting external experts into its work (Pigman, 2006). The World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) also has the status of a peak association, but like the WEF, it builds on single-firm membership and is even less representative, as it is primarily engaged in environmental issues for business across different industries. The policy portfolio of the ICC, especially, is wide-ranging. The organization is involved in scores of issues, and today it is obviously the global business association with the broadest commitments in global public policy. In the main, it is engaged in producer-related policy fields, and although some efforts are made in relation to social affairs, it leaves employer- related issues to other global associations, especially the IOE and BIAC. Yet, even such a specialized employer organization as the IOE has expanded its policy domain and addresses issues that are not narrowly employer-related. Interestingly enough, there are certain overlaps and areas that both the typical producer and the typical global employer associations embrace. This includes, for instance, an old theme, such as economic policy, and a more modern issue, such as corporate social responsibility, but in the case of functional overlap, the peak associations tend to address such questions from different angles. However, the mandate creep of the IOE leads in some ways to stronger competition with the ICC and other peak bodies in business. The administrative capacities of the peak associations in global business display stark differences. The ICC is not just the organization with the most encompassing commitment, but also the body with the strongest secretariat. It is in a league of its own with around two hundred staff. Associations such as the IOE and BIAC have significantly smaller secretariats, with teams consisting of between about ten and twenty experts. By contrast, the Global Business Coalition (GBC) (formerly the Business20 Coalition, or B20, (which parallels the Group of 20 structure) does not dispose of any permanent staff and real secretarial infrastructure. This indicates that the ICC is able to manage a larger number of policy areas through a relatively diversified secretariat. It further suggests that in areas covered by different peak associations in business, the ICC has comparative advantages because it usually has access to a large variety of staff when developing policies and responding to initiatives from other actors in the global realm. Turning next to industry associations representing smaller sections of business, we find numerous bodies, showing that it is also possible for business engaged in the same sector to foster advanced forms of collective action through a rich diversity of formal organizations. In fact, it seems there is almost no industry without a global association. However, there are interesting variations, and contemporary processes of globalization have propelled the emergence of new associations, adding to a significant number of industries with a longer historical tradition of associability. We need to get a better grasp of these entities and the basic technological and economic properties of the industries (van der Pijl, 2015), and understand how they are translated into political action. The material basis of business, manifested through the decline of old industries and the growth of new and innovative industries, changes the very foundation of associations.
570 Karsten Ronit Hence, there has been a reconfiguration of associations accompanied by a rapidly changing industrial activity of business. The industry associations typically cover a smaller subset of policy areas, a fact clearly reflected in their secretarial structures. Usually they do not cater to encompassing issues of relevance to the entire business community but develop activities of relevance to their members only, although some general issues will have a bearing on single industries. Industry associations do not have the authority to speak for broader segments of business and are therefore hesitant to engage in broader policy fields. This does not suggest that the industry associations are too weak to adopt such tasks, but it shows that there is a division of labour between horizontal and vertical policy fields without this being settled in formal agreements between peak and industry associations. In fact, there are few connections between the relatively few peak associations and the countless industry associations. Moreover, industry associations are not built into the structures of peak associations as members of a federation but are rather stand-alone entities with their own administrative structures. However, industry associations may in their individual domains be powerful and dispose of significant resources and secretariats. Sometimes they are much larger than those of the peak associations. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), organizing the world’s airline companies, has been seen as ‘the most lavishly staffed international business organization in the world’ (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, p. 461), and this provides an important potential for equating resources with impact and influence over policy. Although many industry associations have large secretariats, the administrative resources of global industry associations cannot be examined on the basis of the secretariats alone and the resources formally allocated to the associations. In some cases, important regional associations, strong national associations, and large corporations harness considerable resources and dispose of significant expert knowledge, and they can employ these in a coordinated fashion. The International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), for instance, is based on a rotating secretariat provided by regional associations instead of having a permanent global secretariat. The global association itself does not have a huge staff but it relies for help on the relevant regional entity that hosts the secretariat, and it also draws on the other regional bodies, or for that matter, on national associations and companies. This structure is relevant because public regulation is often regional in this policy field. Indeed, many administrative models exist across the diverse community of global industry associations.
32.3. The Participation of Organized Business in Intergovernmental Organizations Intergovernmental organizations are traditional places for the formulation and adoption of global public policy, and globalized domestic policy fields, and actors are enabling
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 571 factors in intergovernmental cooperation (Coleman and Perl, 1999). Organized business makes important contributions to influence and direct—and occasionally avoid— the adoption of these policies as manifested in conventions, programmes, statements, and the like. Sometimes organized business is involved through formal participation in relevant consultative bodies, and sometimes through other activities, such as project- driven partnerships between the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and business (FAO, 2013). It is important to stress that organized business, unlike single and otherwise capable corporations, can represent business in inclusive ways and is thus preferred by intergovernmental organizations as relevant exchange partners. However, single corporations, and especially multinational corporations, may in some cases collaborate directly with intergovernmental bodies without any intermediaries, such as associations. Indeed, the development of the UN Global Compact is meant to facilitate such contacts (Kell, 2005) and has been seen as a project promoting the interests of big capital. In many ways, however, this arrangement is an exception to the general pattern of participation, where associations are granted consultative status in intergovernmental organizations and individual firms are not represented. Various civil society groups have been critical of such arrangements. The patterns of participation are closely related to the policy fields in which business is engaged. If we, for instance, examine policy fields, such as food, shipping, tourism, and telecommunications, we find significant participation from associations in these industries. Intergovernmental organizations are typically mandated to cover some core domains, although certain overlaps exist, and here organized business is active in the formulation and implementation of policy. It is part of this development that business globalizes faster than does government coordination in global public policy (Reinicke 1998). Obviously, these agencies are highly relevant for business, and there is often a match between international agencies that tend to attract associations that represent general business interests, and international agencies that appeal to specific industries. Hence, it is possible to establish a basic and relatively stable exchange pattern, and the associations enjoy different forms of consultative status and interact with the agencies in numerous ways. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), for instance, refers to ‘general’ and ‘special consultative status’ as well as ‘Roster’ as categories of participation that give associations rights to different forms of participation and different forms of information from the UN (UN, 1996). While relations between associations such as ICC, IOE, BIAC, and GBC are managed in a formal framework, the relations of WEF and WBCSD with intergovernmental organizations tend to be of a less formal character. They often relate to concrete projects and it is therefore difficult to systematically map and record them. In the case of the WEF, the organization tries to integrate various experts, also from the agencies, in relevant projects, and thus participation is turned around, with public administration becoming involved in the work and agendas of private organizations. There are several interesting features in these relationships and they offer important clues as to the role of business in the development of global public policies.
572 Karsten Ronit Intergovernmental organizations tabling economic and social policy, and having relevance for business as such, tend to attract participation from peak business associations. The policy profiles of these public and private organizations share many similarities and there seems to be a high degree of fit, although they have different commitments and orientations. The participation of the ICC in UN ECOSOC, of GBC in the G20 consultations, of BIAC in the OECD, and of IOE in the ILO demonstrate this widespread pattern. In special agencies focusing on specific industries rather than business in general, we also find participation by industry associations, such as the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) regarding air transport policy, the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on maritime policy, and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) in the World Health Organization (WHO) on select global health policy concerns. These intimate relations may bear the risk that business associations are coopted by the agencies and become tools of their strategies, as outlined in general organization theory (Selznick, 1949), or that the agencies are captured and turned into instruments of powerful business interests, as studied in regulation theory (e.g. Stigler, 1971; Wilson, 1980). It is useful to consider these ideas in the analysis of global public policy and organized business. In cases where business represents consolidated interests through representative associations, disposes of superior resources, and is generally not challenged by civil society groups, we may hypothesize that organized business is more likely to capture agencies, and cooptation is more likely in areas where the representation of business is fragmented, resources are inferior to the agencies, and civil society is an active force. The contribution of organized business varies with the policy field and the institutional context. Some intergovernmental organizations discuss issues and seek to reach a broad agreement on the formulation of overall principles and general programmes without being seriously involved in the implementation of policy. Other organizations focus on concrete issues and detailed measures to implement policy. The role of business associations, therefore, varies with the organizational context and specification of tasks. Often business associations can work at different levels and combine these functions, but there is a tendency for industry associations to become involved in more operational work. Organizations such as ICAO, IMO, and WHO, but also FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and ITU (International Telecommunications Union), address specific industries, or rather clusters of industries, and there is a comprehensive regulation for business to address and implement. This regulation is often needed for business transactions of different kinds, and therefore essential to the functioning of markets, but regulation is also demanded by governments and civil society, and organized business must respond to such challenges and find ways to manage complex relations. Table 32.1 summarizes the current situation of exchange relationships between selected peak (ICC and IOE) and industry associations (ICS, IATA, and IFPMA) and
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 573 Table 32.1 Participation and Collaboration between Major Peak and Industry Associations and Major Intergovernmental Organizations ICC
IOE
✓
✓
ICS
IATA
IFPMA
✓
✓
UN & Special Agencies UN
✓
ICAO ILO IMF
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
IMO
✓
ITU
✓
UNIDO ✓
WHO WIPO
✓
World Bank
✓
✓
✓
✓ ✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
WMO
Other UN Bodies GLOBAL COMPACT
✓
✓ ✓
OHCHR
✓ ✓
UNAIDS UNEP
✓
UNCITRAL
✓
✓
UNCTAD
✓
✓
UNEP
✓
UNFCCC
✓
✓
✓ ✓
UNICEF
Other INT. Bodies ✓
CITES G20
✓
✓
IOM
✓
✓
ISO
✓
✓
OECD
✓
✓
WCO WTO
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓ ✓
574 Karsten Ronit intergovernmental organizations, as these are recorded by the associations. They show great variation between the peak associations, between the peak and industry associations, and between the industry associations; further variation would be found if including a larger group of business interests. The participation of associations is not limited to the occasional meetings in forums designed for interested parties in the world of non-governmental organizations. There is also a rich variety of examples of associations that exchange with specific subsets of an organization, such as selected committees, departments or offices, without necessarily having formal relations with the main agency. In many cases, there are daily exchanges between staff of intergovernmental organizations and the corresponding staff of business associations, and these bureaucracies cover many of the same issues in the search for joint solutions—and in the struggle over regulation. It is important to recognize the reciprocities between the public and the private organizations. Business has a strong interest in influencing public policy developed by these organizations. At the same time, these agencies have a strong interest in drawing on expert knowledge accumulated in business associations and in adopting regulation that is considered legitimate, is understood, and is complied with in the business community. This relationship must be analysed in the context of intergovernmental governance where agencies need to demonstrate to member states that they are actually capable of developing and implementing policies. The literature stresses that these organizations have a certain degree of autonomy, vis-à-vis member states (Oestreich, 2012), but this research could develop this theory even further if the alliances with organized business were examined and integrated into the analysis. There are many scenarios to consider. Organized business can build alliances with intergovernmental bodies and solidify their position, but organized business can also exert control over these bodies and take control out of the hands of member states. Indeed, global public policy is in many cases developed in tandem with contributions from both the public and the private side, and public and private bureaucracies become interdependent in the combination of resources. Sometimes it is hard to disentangle the different functions in the solving of mutual problems, and there are many traces of co-evolution between agencies and participating organizations (Reinalda, 2015). The scenarios and examples presented here demonstrate that organized business is taking an active part in the work of numerous intergovernmental organizations, and that labour tends to be divided between encompassing peak associations and specialized industry associations. Just as global peak associations do not encroach on the core domains of the industry associations and usually refrain from contacts with special intergovernmental organizations, so too the industry associations do not engage in matters of general importance to business but, as shown in the table, they do engage with them in specific issues handled by them. Several dynamics, however, challenge this picture. Today many intergovernmental organizations have expanded their mandates and become engaged in new policy fields, for instance in environmental, social, and human rights issues. As a knock-on effect, associations are pushed into areas where they have no solid traditions. In such a process, organized business tends to become involved in
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 575 more areas of global public policy and assists agencies by default rather than design in fulfilling their missions. The attention to business interests follows a pattern different from business interests within domestic politics. Here, public administration is dedicated to improving national welfare and productivity, and organized business can play an important role in meeting such goals, and for the same reason is deemed an essential partner (Kellow, 2002). Intergovernmental organizations do not have the same kind of ‘constituencies’. However, intergovernmental organizations have various global missions, such as to improve economic and social development based on the market economy in the case of the OECD, or to enhance the effective and safe use of drugs in the case of the WHO. Relevant business associations assist in the formulation and implementation of these policies. Sometimes such organizational goals are quite abstract, sometimes they are very concrete, and assistance is therefore provided at different levels by offering consolidated knowledge as well as political support. As a rule, intergovernmental bodies prefer to recognize only one association for each interest category (Willetts, 2011), and the given association is supposed to present a coordinated business view. This is to avoid representation through a diversity of competing associations. In other words, business has to solve various internal conflicts and not leave this complex task to the agencies to sort out. Of course, several business associations may be in official relations with an intergovernmental body, but, in principle, only if each represents distinctly different parts of business. In other words, international agencies do not welcome any given pattern of interest representation but seek to shape the associational system by encouraging coordination. There are important drivers in the business community that facilitate coordination, but the implicit as well as explicit preferences of the agencies may further contribute to coordination in an industry or in business more generally. Some international organizations do not confer official consultative status on associations; however, smaller reforms aimed at an improved dialogue have been considered and introduced. The World Trade Organization (WTO), for instance, which is involved in variety of trade-policy matters, has not had a practice of recognizing non- governmental organizations (McGuire, 2012). In many ways the same applies to the two Washington-based organizations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which do not have formal participation from civil society and business Nevertheless, many exchanges and other types of official relationships can be found. This lack of formal participation does not rule out the fact that business agendas may have a strong bearing on these institutions (such as the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business Index’). Indeed, these economic and financial organizations are designed to further competition and trade and consequently are much in line with business thinking. While the formalized participation of business associations is limited, other avenues of informal engagement through invitations to dialogues and conferences, or opportunities for sponsorship, abound. The focus on the structural power of business, a broad theme in the research on business and politics for several decades and also lively today (Marsh et al., 2015), captures
576 Karsten Ronit cases where business gains influence over public policy without necessarily being engaged in direct political action to leverage official decision-makers and public institutions more generally. Indeed, certain intergovernmental bodies have adopted strong pro-market orientations without formal participation from organized business. Business associations are able to pursue and refine these agendas, and confirm, or maybe adjust the course of these bureaucracies. Although various intergovernmental organizations rest on strong traditions, it is doubtful whether they are able to sustain and effectively implement their policies without the capacity of business to monitor developments and voice interests, even if they stand outside the formal machinery of decision-making structures. In other words, we must assume that an organized private force is needed to promote a market paradigm in global public policy, albeit sometimes from a distance, and that public bureaucracies cannot do the job alone. This influence is also needed to counter agendas and proposals from civil society.
32.4. The Activities of Organized Business in Self-R egulation In addition to activities in intergovernmental contexts, organized business is involved in the making of public policy through the adoption of various schemes that commit business to comply with specific rules, norms, and practices. Global self-regulation involving a larger group of firms through peak associations, industry associations, or other collective entities is today a common feature in many different policy fields. A rich diversity of private bodies are available to adopt and implement policies, some of which are aggressively marketed as effective alternatives to public regulation, some of which are living their own solitary life without attracting significant attention outside particular segments of business. These various efforts are generally neglected by realist scholars of international relations who find it difficult to acknowledge that policy is formulated and implemented beyond public authority. Relatedly, these efforts tend to be sidelined by transnational scholars who appreciate the efforts of civil society organizations but neglect to study the associations of business. Different forms of self-regulation are not new and historical examples are numerous, but with the debates on ‘global governance’, it is increasingly recognized that governance at the global level embraces alternatives to intergovernmental cooperation (Ronit, 2007). Governance is also provided by actors in the market, and, under specific circumstances, organized business is capable of managing a range of policies across different jurisdictions. However, there is today much conceptual confusion concerning the many private forms of regulation in which business is involved. The various concepts and characterizations found across different disciplines, associated with different policy fields and applied to different industries, may undermine the general message that business through
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 577 collective efforts makes interesting contributions to public policy and not merely via states and intergovernmental organizations. Although there is considerable institutional innovation in global business intended to engage firms more strongly in the solving of global problems, and sometimes with the distinct goal of evading public regulation, there are, after all, a number of commonalities across the many arrangements. The paramount feature is the negotiated surrender of certain elements of corporate authority, and the essential role of business compliance with private rules (Cutler et al., 1999). The strategic situation for the adoption of private rules varies considerably. In a theoretical context, a plethora of scenarios are possible at the global stage, indicating different kinds of directionality: sometimes private rules can be actively encouraged by public bodies; sometimes they are ignored or just tacitly accepted; and sometimes they are opposed and seen as going against public plans. From the perspective of business, private regulation results from explicit encouragements; sometimes it is designed independently of any public engagement, and sometimes it is developed to avoid public regulation and keep ‘governments out of politics’ (Underhill, 1995). The contributions of business to self-regulation cannot be fully understood through the interaction—or lack thereof—between public and intergovernmental organizations and business and its associations. Civil society groups active in environment, human, and labour rights, consumer affairs, and many other areas are important in leveraging business, and sometimes these groups are involved in designing and managing schemes of self-regulation. These combinations make self-regulation institutionally complex (Levi-Faur, 2011). The emergence of private rules to govern the behaviour of global business raises a number of normative issues (Porter and Ronit, 2010). An overriding question is whether these instances of private regulation are valid alternatives to public regulation in the development of global policies. Indeed, several criticisms have been voiced against the role of self-regulation. First, business is driven by self-interest and it is not obvious how business can pose a serious alternative or complement traditional forms of public policy. Second, there is a great risk that many firms free-ride, and do not observe the rules formulated in self-regulation schemes. Third, the adopted standards are often low and are established mainly to forestall public regulation. These criticisms are serious, but very often there is no simple choice other than to fall in with such arrangements when effective public regulation is not readily available. The potential of private initiatives should not be underestimated. Indeed, business has a key interest in demonstrating that it can define and respect broader goals in society. In some cases, pioneering firms will agree on higher goals, sharpen their profile, and seek advantage in competition, for instance in apparel and furniture production. Although not all firms in a given field comply with the rules and norms, it can still be important that a major part of an industry or leading firms do observe them. Although standards may initially seem low, there may nevertheless be some value in having certain standards imposed, and over time they may become more encompassing and ambitious. We find some interesting patterns in the drawing up of self-regulation through global associations, but there are striking differences. Most peak associations show modest
578 Karsten Ronit interest in self-regulation, and do not provide administrative resources to manage such schemes. A key factor is obviously that it can be difficult to align the different concerns in large and heterogeneous associations and give priority to self-regulation when many other issues need attention. The ICC is clearly an exception to this pattern, however. The ICC was a pioneer in the development of self-regulation in times when governments were unable to define sufficient global rules to regulate business. The classic example is the creation of the International Court of Arbitration (ICA), established in 1923 to solve disputes in the global business community. This body is still highly active. The ICC has also established rules in areas where global regulation agreed by governments was missing, as, for instance, in advertising through the ICC Consolidated Code of Advertising and Marketing Communications Practice, first adopted in 1937 and most recently revised in 2011 (ICC, 2011), and these rules are regularly reviewed and adapted to globalization. Quite tellingly, no strong attempts have been made to create new rules through intergovernmental bodies to replace the established regulatory framework created by business. The efforts of the ICC are recognized by intergovernmental bodies and the business community, which build on these rules and practices and use the Court to solve conflicts. If we turn to industry associations, we find the situation quite different. Here we find numerous examples of self-regulation by organized business. In some of the industries already discussed, self-regulation has been installed by the relevant associations, but the pattern varies (Hale and Held, 2011). In air transport, self-regulation tends to be a series of activities rather than a single piece of regulation, and some of the measures are introduced to follow up regulation adopted at the intergovernmental level through the ICAO. The same situation can be found in shipping, where the ICS also covers many issues of relevance to the industry and works in close collaboration with the IMO. In the pharmaceutical industry, the IFPMA is engaged in several activities, but of special importance is the IFPMA Code of Practices (IFPMA, 2012) that regulates relations with professions, health systems, and patient organizations. In the food industry, a highly diverse cluster of industries, no single global industry association exists to represent this large and heterogeneous group, so self-regulation tends to be managed by bodies focusing on different products. In all these industries, business has a capacity to administer various codes of conduct alone and without cooperation from other interested parties. However, many cases of global self-regulation are not managed by business associations, or at least not by business associations alone, and they cannot build on an already existing cluster of firms and associational bureaucracies that otherwise help implement rules. Such schemes are typically directed by independent bodies that certify firms that comply with a given programme, but the compliance of business is always crucial. The firms join on an individual and a voluntary basis, and certification is intended to enhance the reputation of enrolled firms, especially in competition with laggard firms who stand outside such arrangements (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002). As a consequence, the design of self-regulation affects competition and power relations in business. Often, labels such as those managed by stewardships (Forest Stewardship Council, Maritime Stewardship Council and Aquaculture Stewardship Council) are
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 579 used to display the responsible behaviour of business and signal to consumers that complying firms have adopted various kinds of standards. Such bodies are usually detached from other business activities and they often dispose of significant expert knowledge to develop and implement schemes effectively. These bodies have their own small administrations, but business is involved in a dialogue and adds to their administrative capacities by filtering in experiences from firms and industries. Furthermore, the participation of experts and critical civil society groups may draw alternative voices into regulation. Indeed, such arrangements challenge the authority of business and bring in wider economic and social concerns. However, these private forms of public policy are not flawless either. Because arrangements are essentially voluntary, significant parts of the business community may prefer not to subscribe, and unlike self-regulation managed by business associations where a joint strategy is negotiated between firms and all members are committed to abide by the rules, voluntary arrangements are characterized by the individual and uncoordinated actions of firms. Nevertheless, arrangements by independent bodies may also contribute to the solving of problems and deliver important inputs into the formation of global public policy. Whereas scepticism can be directed toward the role of organized business and the ineffectiveness of this kind of pure business self-regulation, especially in the stage of implementation (Porter and Ronit, 2015), it is also important to point to the shortcomings of civil society participation and the various dilemmas of such arrangements. Various civil society groups may bring in new social and economic perspectives, but these highly specialized groups are not necessarily representative of the interests they claim to represent and usually they are not backed by broader movements. It is also doubtful whether such groups and initiatives have the necessary administrative resources to pose an effective countervailing power, monitor the behaviour of firms, and impose powerful sanctions. Mindful of these criticisms and recognizing the perennial challenges of finding optimal forms of regulation, we should analyse self-regulation as undergoing various forms of institutional evolution through which elements of global public policy are defined. Our picture of self-regulation at the global level is incomplete, and we tend to get the impression that self-regulation in its very diverse forms is found mainly in fields such as environment, fair trade, and social and human rights. In reality, however, self-regulation is today widely applied and therefore poses a challenge to traditional public regulation on a much wider front.
32.5. Conclusion To study organized business in global public policy, we must confront various biases in existing research that highlight certain perspectives and ignore others, with the general effect that the role of business is sidestepped, which is the case in state-centred approaches to international affairs or, if recognized, limited to the activities of only some business actors, such as multinational corporations. Furthermore, the administration,
580 Karsten Ronit participation, and regulation examined in this chapter are not necessarily brought together in research but are often analysed separately, for instance in studies on participation in intergovernmental organizations or on global regulation, leading to only a partial understanding of organized business and global policy making. Consequently, we need to address a number of challenges in future research where a number of theoretical issues need attention. First, we have to integrate the role of business into the analysis of global public policy and refrain from only examining the positions of states and intergovernmental organizations, no matter how diverse and innovative these relations are. We further have to discard the argument that a heightened attention to civil society will give us a full picture of global politics, because attention to the various actors emerging from the globalization of markets is central to analysing the processes of global policy making. Second, a major fallacy in the study on global business is a bent toward equating firms, and especially large multinationals, with global business, neglecting the tradition of collective action in global business, and forgetting actors that are not immediately present in the market. At all levels, from very specific industry associations to peak associations, business is organized through associations or other formal organizations, demonstrating that the individualistic business creed is tempered in the pursuit of joint interests. Third, organized business disposes of a rich diversity of resources and, in addition to the public bureaucracies found in intergovernmental organizations, we find a diverse group of private administrations in the associations. Administration has empirically as well as theoretically mainly been understood as public administration. However, these private administrations manage both general and specific policy issues and provide services primarily to their members but also to ‘attentive publics’ and policy makers in international organizations, government departments, and regulatory networks. They are capable of accumulating and integrating knowledge from across the business community, a capability essential to the engagement in global policy making. Fourth, the associations negotiate and represent a coordinated business view in different institutional contexts. Of primary importance is the engagement of the associations in the policy processes of intergovernmental organizations. There is a strong tradition of granting various forms of consultative status to representative business associations whose contributions are essential to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of public policy. In many cases this points to a general interdependence between private and public organizations rather than unilateral pressures from business. Fifth, global public policy is not only influenced by business, but in some cases even provided by organized business outside the machinery of international agencies. Thus, associations are involved in many forms of self-regulation where rules and norms are adopted and implemented in a private framework, sometimes by business alone and sometimes in arrangements with other actors. Although these arrangements have various deficiencies, they form an interesting element in the development of global public policy where governments and intergovernmental organizations sometimes lack
Organized Business and Global Public Policy 581 the initiative and capacity to adopt and implement regulation, a theoretical but also a practical possibility that calls for the scrutiny of regulatory alternatives.
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Chapter 33
T he Role of L a rg e Manageme nt C onsu ltancy Fi rms i n Gl obal Publi c P ol i c y Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel
33.1. Introduction Recent discussions of the development of global public policy have pointed to the significance of large management consultancy firms (LMCFs) such as McKinsey, PWC and Accenture in this process (Stone, 2013). The use of consultants in national policy contexts has long been recognized (Martin, 1998; Saint-Martin, 2000) and debates have developed on their impact as servants of power, unaccountable technocrats, purveyors of neo-liberal ideas and practices, or as a neo-colonial arm of the Global North (Prince, 2012; Howlett and Migone, 2013; Wedel, 2014). Much of this research emphasizes that management consultancies offer their public sector and NGO clients legitimacy as well as expertise—‘reputational intermediaries’ (Stone, 2004, p. 557). As long-established purveyors of advice and practices to large private sector organizations in much of the industrialized world, their expertise is often treated relatively unproblematically, even to the extent that it should also be applied to public sector contexts, including public policy. Clearly this perception is, in turn, deeply embedded in neo-liberal ideas of increasing the influence of private sector practices in government and undermining the notion of a distinctive public sector bureaucratic ethos (du Gay, 2009). Thus, much of the analysis of what is often termed the ‘consultocracy’ emphasizes that, within many national contexts, it has become increasingly legitimate to bring private sector ideas into
584 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel government through consultancies, even if only as the ‘footsoldiers’ of the clients rather than innovators (Hodge and Bowman, 2006, p. 116). It has long been suspected that something similar is happening in global or transnational public policy (Stone, 2004, 2013). However, there has been very little research on management consultancy in this context (O’Mahoney and Markham, 2013). In this paper, we focus on the role of large consultancy firms. Specifically, we focus on multinational consultancies, most of which are headquartered in the US and the UK with a network of offices spread across the most important economic centres of the world (Morgan, Sturdy, and Quack, 2006). Whilst there are differences in the origins, governance structures, business focus, reputation, and rankings of these firms (Kipping and Kirkpatrick, 2013: Engwall et al., 2016), over time significant similarities have developed around their ‘professional’ model and organization of consulting (see David et al., 2013). In particular, given the intangibility of the product, heavy reliance is placed on relationships with clients and fostering the reputation for expertise and reliability through various signals or professional practices (Kipping, 2011). They also share a reliance and focus on multinational and transnational client bases, both as a source of income, networks, and prestige and as a way of gaining a foothold in new geographical markets. Finally, the services offered typically include four elements offering expertise, legitimacy, the facilitation of internal organizational change, and the provision of extra labour (so called ‘body shopping’) to help clients deal with new projects (Sturdy, 2011). The global public policy sphere is particularly important for this group of consultancies. Firstly, many of their existing clients may be affected by the emergence of new transnational policies, approaches, and regulations, making it important for LMCFs to keep themselves informed and act at this transnational level to support their existing clients. Secondly, this sphere offers potential new business as governments and firms respond to regulatory and policy changes, especially when consultancies are finding maintaining their existing markets and clients is increasingly difficult. Thirdly, LMCFs have the potential to be influential in global public policy because of its relative permeability and the fact that it is sometimes substantially less organized than national policy domains (Seabrooke and Tsingou 2015). In national contexts, the key actors, institutional arenas, mechanisms of accountability, and framing devices are generally well-known, even if contested. In the global sphere, however, these phenomena often tend to be more diffuse and vary in their degree of organization, enabling large multinational consultancy firms to access this arena. However, two key issues need to be considered in determining how this occurs. Firstly, how do these firms translate their legitimacy from within national public policy contexts to the global level? Secondly and just as importantly, what gives LMCFs the capacity to involve themselves in this arena and contribute to the formulation and framing of global problems, as well as engaging in the development of possible solutions that are both technical and detailed in scope and also politically acceptable to powerful actors? At the same time, LMCFs may also have certain vulnerabilities in the sphere which we wish to explore. As powerful and largely unaccountable actors, and ones often cloaked in a secrecy based around developing a corporate mystique and on claims to client
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 585 confidentiality, consultancy is subject to considerable critique (Sturdy, 2009; Mohe, 2008). This critique of rule by the ‘consultocracy’ (Hodge and Bowman, 2006) takes various forms and is directed to some of the very qualities that make consulting attractive to clients, such as its outsider status, generalized solutions and notional independence. In the public policy context, critiques are further directed towards a lack of transparency and accountability in contexts where such processes are normalized together with the high costs of consultancy services. Therefore, our approach involves recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of management consultancies in global public policy. In order to explore the role of LMCFs, we first take a particular firm and case of global public policy—the global strategy-based consultancy, McKinsey & Co., and its central role in problem formulation and solution building in the REDD+ initiative. The acronym REDD stands for countries’ efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. In this programme, from 2007, McKinsey rapidly became what was described as the ‘go-to’ company for countries seeking advice on how to access funds from REDD+, an extension of the original REDD project. However, in 2011, its role was attacked by a number of NGOs, most prominent amongst them was Greenpeace. Subsequent to this, McKinsey’s public involvement in REDD+ was scaled down as more actors entered the processes of problem definition, solution identification, and programme implementation. We then discuss the organizational strategy and structure of LMCFs like McKinsey which make them both capable of being influential in the transnational sphere and yet also vulnerable to criticism from competing actors.
33.2. Forming Global Public Policy: The Case of REDD+ The origins of REDD+ lie in the gradual intertwining of concerns over deforestation, particularly of tropical rainforests, and climate change. The question of deforestation first emerged in the 1980s, but little was done until the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and the publication of its first major report two years later. The IPCC concluded that humanity’s emissions are adding to the atmosphere’s natural complement of greenhouse gases, and that this addition could be expected to result in increased global warming. The IPCC report, and other publications at the time, called attention to the fact that tropical forests are crucial for storing carbon emissions. That such forests were being cut down and not replaced as a result of both legal and illegal logging was therefore a contributory cause. Following this report, governments agreed in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, to the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has met annually since then and is supported by the UN secretariat. Its key objective was ‘stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would
586 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ (Article 2 of the UNFCCC adopted in 1992). The Kyoto Protocol that was agreed upon in 1997 constituted the next step in the UN policy aimed at reducing emissions. However, progress on forests through UNFCCC was slow and the initiative passed to NGOs and particularly to the idea of establishing forest certification. This involved setting up a multi-stakeholder framework of rules whereby forests could be certified as being managed in a sustainable manner. Forest owners and users of timbers were supposed to follow rules about what could and could not be used from forests and what should be planted in order to replenish timber stock (Gulbrandsen, 2010). FSC certification appeared as a badge on wood products in general and in the retail market, particularly in furniture. As with other certification efforts, e.g. Fair Trade, the assumption was that aware consumers would buy FSC certified products. Voluntary codes put some pressure on producers via their reputation amongst consumers. In more recent years, the US government and the EU have also used these voluntary codes in association with their own regulatory efforts (Overdevest and Zeitlin, 2014). In the early 2000s, as concerns about climate change escalated, the UN, the World Bank, and a number of governments and NGOs became concerned that progress was too slow and using voluntary certification schemes was not a sufficient response (see Wright and Nyberg, 2015). It was out of this concern that, at ‘COP13’ held in 2007, an action plan began to take form to encourage emerging economies to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) (Bok, 2014). Even at this early stage, McKinsey was involved and developing what became its key technical input to the process—the cost curve. As a 2008 report from their Australia office stated: ‘McKinsey and Company has worked with leading institutions and experts over the past two years to develop an understanding of the cost and potential of different options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—first at the global level, then through country specific analyses including efforts in the UK, the US and Germany’ (Lewis and Gomer, 2008). The discussions at COP13 involved a marked shift back in terms of forest issues from voluntary self-regulation of producers to a focus on government action in emerging economies. The new policy was however couched, not so much in the language of regulation and enforcement, but rather that of ‘incentives’ and ‘monitoring’. The REDD and REDD+ initiatives were to provide a financial value to the maintenance of forests to combat the idea that it was only by logging that forests could generate value. REDD+ extends REDD by emphasizing not just reducing emissions through stopping deforestation but also adding payment to affected parties to encourage them to take part in sustainable forest management, conservation of forests and the creation of carbon sinks. Governments and companies were to receive funds according to how much carbon they kept locked up in their forests by ensuring that deforestation was reduced and forest resources managed better. First of all, this required other (e.g. Western) governments, but also potentially and subsequently other actors such as large multinational corporations, the EU, the World Bank, and national governments in the developed North to agree to put funds into a pot that could be used to create such incentives. Unlike carbon markets in other contexts, however, the REDD+ system did not compensate or benefit
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 587 the donor, e.g. in the form of generating carbon credits that could be used to offset carbon emissions in the donor’s country. The scheme was given an initial impetus by the government of Norway coming forward and contributing funds to the REDD+ programme later followed by the US, the UK, Germany, and other developed economies, together pledging around 3.5 billion USD by 2009. Interest in accessing these funds from countries with tropical forests was high. Drawing on a variety of sources (inter alia, Greenpeace, 2011, Dyer and Counsell, 2010; Bock, 2014; McDonald, 2013), we can show how McKinsey engaged with this developing process. First of all, in 2007 McKinsey developed a quantitative technique embedded in an analytical tool, which they described as the Marginal Abatement Curve (MAC). The role of the MAC was to evaluate how to produce the greatest effect on reducing emissions for the least cost. For example, would undertaking a certain activity or carrying it out in a new way lead to a saving for those involved, or a cost, and what would be the consequences for reducing carbon emissions? Thus, for example, it was found that switching from incandescent to LED lighting would save people money, but that the impact on carbon emissions would be relatively small. At the other end of the scale, fitting coal power stations with proper carbon capture and storage facilities would be very expensive but would have a much more significant impact on overall greenhouse gas emissions. McKinsey investigated the cost and impact of around forty such activities and produced a clear visual representation of this in a number of their publications. In particular, this revealed that reducing deforestation would lead to a significant positive impact on emissions at a relatively low cost compared to other abatement activities. In effect, it gave a substantial boost to both donor countries and to potential recipients to believe that providing financial incentives to reduce deforestation would be highly effective in terms of dealing with climate change. McKinsey had taken an active part in redefining or translating an abstract global ‘problem’ into a seemingly concrete and manageable one, identifying ‘quick wins’ for those wishing to reduce emissions. The problem was articulated in practical terms (that is, it was identified through the use of a series of quantitative technical measures for understanding the relationship between costs and mitigation impacts). Once the problem was identified and the solutions appropriately ranked, then it was a simple question of getting on with implementing the solution. This opened the road for McKinsey to participate in developing (and selling) acceptable implementation plans and then for engaging in business relationships with clients through offering these solutions and implementation plans (Sturdy, 1997). Why was it seen as legitimate for McKinsey to involve itself in this global policy arena? It is relevant to note that McKinsey has a long-established reputation as an advisory and problem-solving organization for both the public and the private sector going back some decades (McKenna, 2006; McDonald, 2013). It particularly cultivated a reputation for ‘thought leadership’ through its journal The McKinsey Quarterly and, subsequently, through the McKinsey Global Institute which published freely available reports on a variety of issues. From 2000, McKinsey also established its Climate Change Desk to explore and shape the emerging debates in this particular area. It was
588 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel therefore engaging with public policy, and particularly climate change, from relatively early on. It is important to recognize two aspects of this engagement. Firstly, McKinsey had substantial resources and organizational slack to invest in such activities without expecting an immediate payback. This reflects its business strategy and model which, whilst not unique in the area of professional service firms, is uncommon more widely, including in public policy domains. Secondly, it is important to highlight the contrast between the outward facing thought leadership of consulting on the one side and on the other the often highly secretive internal processes where proprietary knowledge is jealously guarded. The latter lie behind and follow on from the former in that tools and techniques are developed and client projects are conducted based on knowledge and techniques developed by McKinsey over decades and delivered by consultants trained and skilled in the implementation of this knowledge. It is because its clients believe that this knowledge and skill set is (a) valuable and (b) not attainable or imitable elsewhere that McKinsey is able to generate its substantial revenues even in an increasingly competitive market for consultancy services. The development of the MAC curve illustrates these phenomena. McKinsey has always kept the details of how it reached the MAC conclusions a secret, refusing to divulge details on commercial grounds. Yet its conclusions were significant for setting the agenda for global policy discussions amongst interested actors (international organizations, national governments, expert networks, NGOs and transnational social movements) in the period from 2009–2011. They also had very public consequences even though the public was not able to evaluate in detail how these conclusions had been reached, McKinsey were not the only ones working on a MAC curve; there were academics who were also engaged on this and issuing words of caution (e.g. Kesicki and Ekins, 2012). Nevertheless, in the first instance, policy makers accepted as legitimate McKinsey’s data and model without subjecting it to rigorous analysis. McKinsey did its best to place the model at the centre of the debate amongst governments and NGOs, drawing on its closeness to other powerful actors with their own claims to legitimacy in this field to reinforce the importance and validity of its model. McKinsey was instrumental in organizing a high-profile meeting chaired by Prince Charles in May 2009, to raise awareness of the need for emergency action to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in tropical rainforests following the inconclusive outcome of the UN Bali climate change conference in 2007. Other high- profile participants included Hillary Clinton, Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Kevin Rudd, Taro Aso, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Jens Stoltenberg, Jose Manuel Barroso and Robert Zoellick. The involvement of political leaders reflects the effort to build legitimacy for the emerging new idea—the MAC curve and the key contribution of McKinsey—by mobilizing a highly visible network of people perceived to be influential through their organizational roles, their own extended networks, and their reputation for leadership in global affairs. McKinsey moved swiftly to develop the business opportunity that was evolving. It produced tailored reports for both governments from the North interested in using deforestation as a way to mitigate climate change, and governments from emerging
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 589 economies with high levels of forestation (and deforestation) which would benefit if they were able to successfully apply for funds under REDD+. The basic model was to show the long-term consequences of current rates of deforestation and carbon emission given trends in a particular country and then to identify how much would be needed to compensate the actors in that country sufficiently to cause deforestation to stop. Of course, the rate of deforestation depended on multiple factors, including the strategies of big logging companies, but also illegal loggers and, associated with that, weak, inefficient and often corrupt enforcement. These factors and others varied across countries and McKinsey offered its expertise to individual governments in low-income countries which lacked the administrative capacity to do such analyses on their own to the level that would satisfy Western donors. McKinsey’s involvement was reassuring to governments in the North who often part-funded reports. In this period (2009–2011) therefore, McKinsey were commissioned by a number of governments (e.g. Brazil, Mexico, Guyana, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea) to prepare readiness plans which identified options for reducing deforestation. However, Greenpeace (2011) and others like the Rainforest Foundation, and Friends of the Earth, subjected the assumptions of this model to severe critique from 2010 onwards. Reducing deforestation through stopping what was labelled as ‘slash and burn’ agriculture by indigenous peoples was deemed to be ‘low hanging fruit’ in the sense that it was low cost but offered substantial savings. However, the criteria by which McKinsey managed to define the loss of aboriginal habitats and ways of life as ‘low-cost’ (i.e. little compensation) was never made explicit. On the other hand, McKinsey argued that encouraging large timber companies not to cut down forests was to be seen as a high cost to the companies. These firms therefore required high levels of compensation to cease this activity. Such arguments were challenged by Greenpeace and others as projecting unsustainable and highly unlikely growth trends in terms of demand for forest products. More realistic projections would therefore reduce greatly the compensation needed for large logging. To the NGOs, it became quite clear that McKinsey’s priorities were with its private sector clients (such as the forest companies) and those in government who could buy their services and by implication they were relatively unconcerned about the fate of those who actually lived and survived in the forest. Governments with tropical rain forests were keen to access funds as soon as possible and were therefore willing to use McKinsey’s services to produce a well-articulated case for their claims. According to REDD Monitor—an independent website devoted to the exploration of ‘the contradictions and controversy’ behind REDD—and other sources, McKinsey was also used by a lot of countries because at the height of initial REDD+ enthusiasm, they had the capacity to produce reports for potential recipient governments within a matter of weeks using their now well-established template. Further research would be necessary to understand exactly how these emergent critiques impacted on REDD+, but what does appear clear is that the whole process suddenly slowed down at about the time the criticisms were at their height. In one review, Anglesen (2016) refers to the slow progress of REDD+ and the ‘cynicism’ surrounding it. No money has actually been handed out for REDD+ via the UN though here have been
590 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel some bilateral REDD+ deals particularly with Norway (Angelsen, 2016). Instead, there has been substantial funding of ‘capacity-building’ activities to prepare for REDD+ funds. This reflects the degree to which, after 2011, the politics of REDD+ became more salient and funders and sponsors began to emphasize the need to involve and secure the support of different groups of forest stakeholders. Since the sustained attack on McKinsey by NGOs in 2011, the firm has been less visible in the REDD+ process. Rather, through an initial process of capacity building, the UNFCCC has sought to engage a wider group of stakeholders and address some of the distributional issues associated with REDD + measures before actually disbursing funds.
33.3. The Influence of Management Consultancies in the Global Public Policy Arena The REDD+ example provides a useful context in which to understand how global management consultancies play a role in the formation of public policy. Although our focus has been on one company, McKinsey, it is clear that others have been involved. Deloitte, for example, has been involved in evaluating REDD+ projects emerging from cooperation between Norway and Tanzania. In Indonesia, the local managing director of Accenture became the inaugural head of Indonesia’s REDD+ Management Agency in 2014, illustrating the close links that had emerged between the consultancy and REDD+ projects. Central to this influence is that these organizations possess immense prestige and legitimacy from their decades of experience and contemporary networks of clients and elites more generally. In the case of REDD+, as Bock (2014) points out, donor countries and the UN were likely to take more notice of what McKinsey said about ways of implementing REDD+ than they were of NGOs, at least in the early stages. Similarly, in keeping with the legitimating role of external consultants and the high profile of McKinsey (McDonald, 2013), potential recipients could see that if they had reports written for them by the firm, and if they incorporated these suggestions into their funding bids, they were likely to get a more favourable hearing than if they either did it themselves (usually impossible as few of them had the capacity to do so) or employed a less well-known and less networked company. This matches understandings and research on consultancy in other policy contexts (Stone, 2004) and, more generally, where its legitimating function is as important as its expertise, and often more so (Sturdy, 2011). Where does this legitimacy come from, and how impregnable or impervious is it to criticism? Existing literature on LMCFs provides some insights as to how McKinsey and others may have gained global authority and trust among REDD+ donors and clients. First, these companies are seen as repositories of expertise across a huge range of areas in business, management and the public sector. As Bock points out, this expertise is
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 591 presented as ‘neutral’, as technical and ‘objective’. However, many commentators would also argue that this knowledge is far from neutral, and not simply in terms of reflecting their particular market interests (Wedel, 2014; O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016). It is typically based on neo-liberal frameworks where solutions to public policy problems are constructed through markets, privatization, and private actors pursuing profit opportunities whilst public actors adjudicate and make sure that market failures do not occur (Jupe and Funnell, 2015). The fact that management consultancies hold their expertise as proprietary knowledge means that, unlike much of the knowledge generated in universities and public organisations, fundamental assumptions are not revealed or as open to scrutiny. As the REDD+ example and the role of the McKinsey MAC makes clear, the outside world is meant to ‘trust’ the technical calculations of the consultancies and is not given the tools or the data to ‘test’ or challenge them independently. Central to this is the LMCFs’ cultivation of a reputation for delivering public goods as well as gaining private profit. Their claim to ‘thought leadership’ is based on the idea that the LMCFs occupy a unique position where they can blend their own expertise with their massive practical experience on projects for all sorts of clients across many parts of the world. Their ‘thought leadership’ is therefore a ‘gift’ they bestow on the world and reflects the fact that as firms, they are responsible corporate citizens interested in exploring ideas and processes with other opinion-formers before such ideas become business opportunities. It becomes an input into defining or co-constructing ‘problems’ in the transnational sphere (Seabrooke and Tsingou, 2015). Thought leadership, for example, is visible at McKinsey in its sponsorship of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and the McKinsey Quarterly. Both stand on the border between business schools and more client-focused activities (see also Momani, 2017). ‘Thought leadership’ or attempts at contributing to debates in a manner which indirectly supports commercial interests, is, of course, a cost to the companies; it does not generate immediate revenue. It is not therefore a capacity that can be developed without having a business model that can support such non-revenue generating activities. This business model is essentially based on the consultancy firms’ ability to sustain a high- cost model, justified by a belief amongst senior executives in clients that employing consultants can generate high-value returns. Whilst this approach to consulting has recently come under some pressure from a variety of sources, such as cheaper competitors, clients using internal resources, and the use of new technologies and outsourcing (Christensen et al., 2013; Sturdy, Wright, and Wylie, 2015), it also evolves and adapts in response to such challenges, including moving more than ever into public sector business as private sector business has suffered from the financial crisis and recession (McDonald, 2013). Secondly, legitimacy comes from a variety of features of the firms. One is their recruitment policy to recruit the best and the brightest from the top universities and business schools around the world, like other professional service organizations such as law firms and accountancies (David et al., 2013). In doing so, they reinforce the image of themselves as a high pressure/high reward organization and the image of individual consultants as the best and the brightest, recruited seemingly because of their
592 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel successful meritocratic performance at school and university (Khan, 2010; Rivera, 2016). Characteristic of these emerging elites is that they do not enclose themselves in limited circles of social and cultural capital but on the contrary what they learn at private schools and elite higher education institutions is to navigate multiple social and cultural environments in a globalizing world. Legitimacy also comes from the ability of the firms to undertake tasks quickly and effectively. This is possible because of the availability of expertise and the creation and leveraging of social networks (Maister, 2003). The firms recruit very large number of graduates at the bottom rung of the career ladder who are expected to work very long hours and show high levels of commitment. Such firms are willing to face high levels of attrition in the early years (up to 80% may leave in 5 years) (O’Shea and Madigan, 1997), as some people decide this is not what they want, or it is decided for them, following frequent and intense staff reviews. Indeed, some firms operate a ‘rank and yank’ policy to ensure that each year a certain percentage of the cohort are ejected from the firm. This creates an intensely competitive atmosphere (Boussebaa, Morgan, and Sturdy, 2012). Few of the original cohort are likely to make it all the way to the top of the firm, but in this way, recruitment and selection can produce highly loyal, highly competent and hardworking employees. These large numbers of early entrants constitute a huge, flexible and capable resource for the companies. It is a resource which can be mobilized quickly to deliver on projects driven by tight timetables, often in diverse cultural contexts. It is also a resource which is present in key economic centres across the world. Individuals can, in principle, be moved at relatively short notice from one geographical area to another (Pereira and Derudder, 2010). As global companies with highly integrated management, communication and information systems, teams can be assembled relatively quickly even if there may be resistances from some lead (e.g. US/UK) offices to giving up resources (Boussebaa, Morgan, and Sturdy, 2012). Such companies also develop shared proprietary knowledge resources, such as the McKinsey MAC, which are available across the organization in standardized knowledge banks. Clients can bring problems, even ill- defined problems, to these firms and know that they have the resources available quickly to help articulate the problem and co-produce or support an ‘answer’ (Sturdy, 2018). In an era that has been described as one of ‘fast policy’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015), management consultancies have a structure and strategy that enables them to respond. It is important however, to recognize that management consultants rarely fit the traditional image of the technical expert prescribing a solution to clients in a report (such as discussed in the chapter by Sending, this volume). Projects and client-consultant power and trust relations vary (Fincham, 1999), but most involve clients and consultants working together, such that ‘solutions’ are, to varying degrees, tailored to client needs (Sturdy et al, 2009). Another strength of LMCFs is that in contexts where knowledge and its quality is highly uncertain, reputation is sustained, in large part, by social networks and associated trust relations (Armbruster, 2006). The phenomenon of revolving doors at senior levels of government is well-known in many countries and management consultancies
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 593 provide many examples (see Craig, 2005), e.g. the example noted earlier of the Accenture executive in Indonesia becoming leader of the country’s REDD+ management system. Just as important, but less visible, is how junior and middle ranks of consultancies participate in this process. As governments have thinned down their internal resources, the use of secondments from consultancy into the middle ranks of the civil service to help form policies has become a naturalized part of government reflecting the increased interpenetration of public and private and the downgrading of the bureaucratic ethic as described earlier (Crouch, 2016). This solidifies connections and networks for when fast policy is required and can be associated with what has become known as ‘double- dealing’ (Engwall and Kipping, 2006). In the REDD+ case, consultants help construct problems with regulatory bodies such as the UN or EU Directorates and then, subsequently, advise the organizations affected by the regulation they have helped to devise (also O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016; Wedel, 2014). Probably the most significant networks for firms such as McKinsey are its former employees or alumni who often assume influential positions. McKinsey is widely known for its impressive alumni body and makes great play of it when, in other contexts, it can be very secretive (Mcdonald, 2013). No matter what the circumstances in which a person left, ‘ranked and yanked’, voluntarily leaving or being head hunted into a different organization, they are encouraged to think of themselves as members of the extended McKinsey community. It is a badge of high status on the CV and offers a network of linkages across firms, across governments and across countries. While such a process operates in other professional services firms, such as banking, and law, it is particularly visible in LCMFs where it is part of the attraction of joining: one will forever be marked as a McKinsey alumni in the same way one might carry the Harvard or Oxford connection through life as a marker of distinction.
33.4. Contesting Consultancy It is however important to emphasise that this trust and legitimacy is fragile or, at least, subject to challenge. Both now and historically, consultants have been subject to critique, reflected in media and NGO scrutiny of their activities. An easy target has been the amount of consultancy fees which have been paid out by governments at a time of austerity, particularly where there has been a failure to demonstrate a positive impact from their intervention (Kirkpatrick et al., 2018). Another element of this process is revealed in the REDD+ case, where Greenpeace among others has argued that McKinsey’s underpinning technical model and the recommendations emerging from it are shaped by their concern to protect the interests of their major corporate clients at the expense of the occupants of the forest (Shankland and Hasenclaver, 2011). This reflects the critique (Wedel, 2014) that they are closely identified with neo-liberal market ideas and practices, with the discredited elites who were responsible for the 2008 financial crash and with a set of interests and epistemology that reinforces the power of the North and fails to recognize
594 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel alternative subaltern voices from the South (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2012). This critique can, paradoxically, serve to reinforce their powerful position as they can serve as a distraction or a lightning rod to divert attention from the roles of other actors such as politicians, policy makers, and managers—consultants can be made scapegoats for failures elsewhere (Sturdy, 2009). As consultancies move into more political and public policy issues, they become more visible and more susceptible to the sorts of campaigns which have potential to spill over into other areas and undermine their legitimacy. In that sense, consultancies face a dilemma arising from possible loss of reputation as they engage in more public policy matters. At a time when governments are still divesting themselves of a range of activities in response to austerity and neo-liberal ideas of New Public Management, consultancies have a potential large expanding market but the dynamics of working in the public arena are different from the private sector. Transparency demands in the public arena are much stronger than in the private sector where commercial secrecy can be invoked. Therefore, consultancies may find themselves challenged to reveal their inner workings more than they have experienced in the past. Assumptions about pricing services which may go unchallenged in the private sector can lead to harsh and public criticism of value for money in the public arena. Consultancies might become cautious about how they intervene in public policy in order to avoid some of these transparency requirements or criticisms of their profitability. NGOs such as Greenpeace can considerably damage consultancies under some circumstances but rather than withdrawing altogether, consultancies may simply choose to participate in more closed networks and processes. It is important therefore to recognize the contested and contestable nature of their position, rather than treating them as all-powerful and all conquering.
33.5. Conclusion In this chapter, we have explored why and how large international management consultancy firms have become so important in global public policy. Whilst recognizing the value of explanations which point to the importance of expertise and the legitimacy which it generates as well as the embeddedness of this expertise in the dominant ideological framework of neoliberalism, we have aimed to go beyond them both in two ways. Firstly, we have argued that expertise and legitimacy are embedded in the particular global structures and strategies of these companies. As our REDD+ case suggests, in less organized, diffuse global policy arenas in which leadership is not formally granted to a single international organization, and where boundaries are fuzzy, coordination and control of the process of policy making is difficult to achieve. Here, then, the global legitimacy and organizational capacities associated with the international LMCFs appear to give them an advantage in determining the rules of the game. At the national level, other actors may have the necessary networks, knowledge, and expertise—embeddedness— to compete with LMCFs and resist their solutions. In less organized or, at least, less
The Role of Large Management Consultancy Firms 595 established global policy arenas, no other single social actor has the necessary networks, capabilities and expertise that would be recognized by both global and local authorities in the global north and south, by governments and big corporations, to be able to shape and promote a global policy in the way that McKinsey has done. Global consultancies’ high cost/high value business model—w hilst under threat from competitors and economic recession—still provides a level of resource that enables the firms to spend on ‘thought leadership’, a non-revenue generating activity, but one which facilitates the development of prestige and reputation and therefore, indirectly, revenue. This model is built on high leverage ratios and the recruitment of a veritable army of the self-proclaimed ‘best and brightest’ to work on projects at short notice. Clients can expect ‘fast policy’ to be generated out of these structures. This is also reinforced by the development of secondments and internships from the management consultancy firms into government and regulatory organizations. The development of alumni networks as the cohorts of recruits are thinned out provides a further set of contacts that can be used to respond to the requirements of fast policy formation. The international nature both of these networks and of the firms and consultants themselves, as well as their high levels of technical competence, reinforce this ability to be present in the early stages of problem definition and identification as well as in the creation and implementation of solutions. Paradoxically, however, when LMCFs have very few potential competitors in the shaping of the global policy phase, their own work can contribute to the construction of a better organized and less diffuse policy arena. This institutionalization renders them more visible and less distinctive. Our second contribution then, of showing how these firms are not all powerful is reinforced, in that LMCFS can be challenged by NGOs and governments, particularly as they step more clearly into the political, public policy arena. Furthermore, the trust they have established with their key clients elsewhere is less pervasive amongst the sorts of NGOs and social movements which have emerged in policy arenas more strongly since the 2008 crisis. On the one hand, LMCFs are tempted into this field by slower growth in the private sector and potential scope of reach, but on the other hand, this can open them up to more scrutiny and criticism. They therefore have to be prepared to develop new ways of doing business in the global public policy arena that reduce visibility and potential critique. These conclusions are tentative; there is a need for much more research on different areas of global public policy in which consultancies have been active. Indeed, there remains a dearth of research on the power of consultancy in general, beyond studies of specific client-consultancy relations (O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016). Climate change, deforestation, and carbon markets together offer many interesting empirical possibilities, as do other areas, including the more established arenas of global public policy, such as health, demography, education, energy provision, food production, and security. Although we have focused on some of the common characteristics of LMCFs, there is a need to go beyond a single firm and case and look at other organizations, large and small, to assess if their influence, methods, and models differ significantly. Furthermore,
596 Glenn Morgan, Andrew Sturdy, and Michal Frenkel with networks energized by individuals as well as firms and their reputations and with doors constantly revolving, it is important to follow the individuals, perhaps using different methods, such as shadowing, network analysis, prosopography, and the analysis of data collected from social media, e.g. LinkedIn and Twitter. We have only touched the surface of consulting critiques and their sources and effects. Are such dynamics evident more widely among policy actors, including clients, and at what stages and what forms do they take? Finally, we still know very little of the market itself. What are the sources of demand for LCMF input, and how do they interact in this sphere with governments, international organizations and global civil society actors, such as corporate philanthropy foundations, think tanks, firms, and lobbying organizations, NGOs, and multi- stakeholder governance organizational forms? By pursuing some of these new research areas, a better understanding of the key actors in global public policy and their impact on outcomes is achievable.
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Chapter 34
C om plian c e i n Transnati ona l Regul at i on A Global Supply Chain Approach Fabrizio Cafaggi
34.1. Introduction The past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable development of transnational standards produced by new actors, primarily private ones (Buthe and Mattli, 2011). These standards are implemented at international, regional, and national levels through different channels, including public regulation. Hence, the transnational and domestic level are intertwined, and this interaction becomes even more visible when it comes to compliance and enforcement. Transnational private regulators issue standards concerning the environment, social aspects, sustainability, anticorruption and legality, human rights, data protection, product safety, and financial instruments. The private standards are complemented by the hard or soft law produced by international organizations (IOs) and by nation states. Often IOs stimulate the development of transnational private standards given the weaknesses of state-based compliance mechanisms in the context of global chains (Abbott et al., 2015). The theme of this chapter is not the interplay between transnational private regulation (TPR) and domestic public regulation (e.g. Cafaggi, 2015); rather, the focus is on the use of global supply chains (GSC) as an example of an instrument to implement and enforce transnational standards (Koenig-Archibugi, 2017) and on the issues of policy design that are involved in TPR. Transnational private regulators design their monitoring systems to ensure compliance by the GSC with the objectives enshrined in the standards, and implement the
600 Fabrizio Cafaggi evaluation instruments defined therein. GSCs are made of organizations and networks (Coe and Yeung, 2015). Multinational corporations (MNCs) via due diligence and codes of conduct are obliged to ensure compliance with the standards along the GSC. Contractualizing commitments related to standards’ implementation add contract and company law instruments to the more conventional public regulation. One example is Integrity Pacts, initially designed by Transparency International, and used in public procurement, and now by MNCs to fight corruption along GSCs. Transnational private compliance monitoring is combined with oversight by national public regulators. Domestic regulators monitor compliance with global standards, often going beyond the geographic scope of their jurisdictions. However, extra-territoriality of domestic public regulation is limited and cooperation among regulators is needed to ensure coverage of the entire chain. The intensity and effectiveness of multilateral regulatory cooperation in the public domain varies (OECD 2016a) but the current instruments are certainly inadequate to ensure effective compliance. When violations occur in many jurisdictions, as the famous Siemens case shows (Sidhu, 2009), public regulators and courts can enforce different standards via dissimilar sanctioning systems for non-compliance. The effectiveness of compliance is therefore the result of the combination of multiple- related mechanisms, including transnational and domestic, that must be coordinated to minimize the risks of violations and their consequences. TPR is symptomatic of the shifting borders of public and private in the global arena (see Volkmer, this volume) whereby transnational public administration is substantially blurred and diluted by private regulatory initiatives and market-based mechanisms.
34.2. Compliance in Transnational Private Regulation: Voluntary Versus Mandatory Standards Transnational private regulation is based on voluntary standards subscribed to by regulated entities (usually MNCs) that contractually bind their business partners to comply with the principles and rules (Cafaggi, 2018). Its effectiveness depends on the instrument’s choice concerning monitoring compliance (Cafaggi and Renda, 2014). In the context of TPR, participation in the regime is voluntary but compliance can be mandatory according to contract and/or corporate law rules. Voluntary standards are perfectly compatible with mandatory compliance. Parties, freely joining a transnational regime, legally commit to comply with the standards and with the sanctions resulting from non-compliance. Transnational regulators not only define substantive standards but also design compliance tools to measure and evaluate regulatory performance by MNCs and their supply chains. In the field of sustainability, the ISEAL Alliance has published the Credibility Principles and the Assurance Code of Good Practice while the Food and
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 601 Agricultural Organization (FAO) has designed the SAFA Guidelines—Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems—to be directly implemented by MNCs. At the end of the 1990s, four certification organizations—the Forest Stewardship Council, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, Fairtrade and Marine Stewardship Council—discussed the feasibility and benefits of collaboration. Although these organizations cover different sectors— timber, fish, organic, and fair- trade agriculture—there was some systems overlap. Four more organizations were brought onboard—the International Organic Accreditation Service, Marine Aquarium Council, Rainforest Alliance, and Social Accountability International—and the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance was launched in 2002 and is now just referred to as the ISEAL Alliance. In the sector of civil aviation, IATA defines safety compliance monitoring mechanisms consistent with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards addressed to air carriers and their supply chains. In the area of financial reporting, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have been developing a high quality, internationally recognized set of accounting standards that bring transparency, accountability, and efficiency to financial markets around the world and collaborate with IOSCO (the International Organization of Securities Commissions) to have uniform financial reporting standards implemented by national regulators. A different case is represented by the International Standardization Organization (ISO) where the technical regulator abstains from prescribing implementation and verification regimes, leaving them to the individual standard taker (buyer) or to national legal systems when they impose compliance via legislation. However, ISO has addressed compliance in its many facets. ISO’s relevant standards concerning risk management (ISO 31000), corporate social responsibility (ISO 26000), and anti-bribery (ISO 37001) often constitute the reference points for the drafting of compliance programmes by transnational private and public regulators. IOs have also played an important role in defining standards related to compliance. The UN organizations, for example, have defined the principles of protect, respect, and the remedy supporting human rights that MNCs commit to abide by. Subsequently, evaluation instruments have been designed to measure compliance with those principles. In the field of anti-corruption, the OECD designs the standard to which MNCs and their suppliers can voluntarily subscribe (OECD, 2016b, 2011; see also Pal, this volume). The OECD, together with other international organizations like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has defined anti-corruption standards addressed to multinationals. Analysing compliance in the context of transnational voluntary standards requires a change of perspective from the domestic context where standards are mandatory. In the domestic arena administrative and criminal law are the rule and private law instruments are the exceptions. Responsiveness to mandatory standards differs from responsiveness to voluntary standards. Market-based mechanisms, and in particular the reputational consequences of compliance and non-compliance, play a much stronger role than the threat of legal sanctions. Even in the public domain, regulatory changes introducing
602 Fabrizio Cafaggi responsive regulation and management-based instruments have changed the relationship between the regulators and the regulated and, as a result, the design of compliance mechanisms (Ayres and Braithwaite, 1992; Coglianese and Nash, 2006). Nonetheless, the differences between ensuring compliance with voluntary and mandatory standards remain significant. In the world of transnational voluntary standards, a plurality of standards often co- exists along the same supply chain. Depending on the policy area, there might also be competition over standards’ design and compliance monitoring. One of the main governance tasks of a global supply chain leader is to ensure uniformity and avoid conflicts. At times, choices are better made at the industry rather than at the individual supply chain level. It is well established that no regulatory competition should occur over compliance in areas like the fight against corruption. For this reason, the adoption of industry-level standards is preferred over the choice of standards by individual enterprises belonging to the same sector. There are three main actors involved in the compliance monitoring. This includes: (1) the standard-setter and independent monitors (including NGOs, media), (2) the directly regulated entities (MNC), and (3) the business partners (suppliers, distributors, licensees) linked to the MNC. Monitoring instruments vary depending on the actors. Within the realm of voluntary standards, the approaches by private regulators, which have to attract regulated entities, might differ from those used by independent monitors whose beneficiaries are those who will benefit if standards are implemented correctly. Often NGOs like Amnesty International, Oxfam International, and the World Wildlife Fund independently monitor compliance by using scorecards or reporting where they rank the regulatory performances of individual firms or clusters. Six main variables have to be considered when analysing monitoring instruments: (1) the approach to compliance, whether hierarchical or collaborative; (2) the unit of analysis, e.g. whether it’s an individual organization or the entire supply chain; (3) the costs of direct monitoring versus the costs of delegating compliance controls to the individual regulated entity and its supply chain, including independent suppliers; (4) the ability to adopt and administer compliance programmes; (5) the definition of sanctioning systems, including rewards, and (6) the interaction between legal and non-legal enforcement. Compliance programmes represent one of the most used monitoring instruments. They define policies and objectives as well as mechanisms and sequence. Their content varies from those focusing only on crime prevention, to those including human rights, sustainability, and product safety. Various tools are deployed to monitor whether rules are complied with, objectives are achieved, and, in the case of non-compliance, which consequences should result. The supply chain approach includes not only the leading organizations but also their business partners. Compliance programmes are directed to both members of the organization (employees, shareholders) and external stakeholders (consumers, customers, investors, general public). Different addressees may call for different strategies concerning reactions to non-compliance and in particular remedies to
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 603 rebuild organizational trust. For example shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests related to remedies and sanctions for non-compliance may differ. Effective compliance is not strictly related to legal aspects. Compliance programmes also include social norms. Social norms influence both design and enforceability. Social acceptability of non-compliance may make compliance much harder to achieve than inadequate legal sanctions. Many norms are enforceable through non-legal instruments, some through internal rules, others with the intervention of courts and alternative dispute resolution systems. They define objectives and targets, often calling for significant organizational changes within the chain (Adidas, 2017). Corruption is certainly one of the clearest examples where international conventions and national legislations have adopted a supply chain approach, often making customers liable for suppliers’ corruption (e.g. the United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the UK’s Bribery Act). Private rules that implement international anticorruption standards proliferate with Transparency International playing a pivotal role (Transparency International, 2013). Fighting corruption along supply chains means collective engagement in prevention and remediation with a common policy and a coordinated compliance and enforcement system (UN Global Compact, 2016). Risks of corruption along the chain are mapped, and, when risks arise, action should ideally be taken. If prevention does not work, then the causes of corruption have to be eradicated and remedies must remove the harmful consequences. One example is global procurement. The link between compliance and procurement policies has become a pillar of the overall organizational architecture. Selection of suppliers, monitoring their activity, favouring mutual control among those operating in the same chain’s segment, constitute strategic elements of compliance programmes that aim to prevent corruption and promote compliance (OECD, 2016b). Effectiveness of compliance is the key regulatory issue for the implementation of global standards. Three core questions need to be addressed to analyse compliance with transnational standards: (a) What is evaluated? (b) Whose compliance is evaluated? (c) How is compliance evaluated?
34.3. What is Evaluated in Compliance Monitoring? The effectiveness of transnational standards increasingly depends on the instruments to assess compliance and to react in case of non-compliance. Whether a transnational regulatory regime delivers the expected outcomes depends upon the degree of compliance by MNCs and their business partners (regulated entities), their ability to correct design weaknesses in the standard, and its mode of implementation. Effective compliance programmes result from an appropriate risk assessment and the ability to define accurate risk profiles about compliance deficits. Mapping the risks and
604 Fabrizio Cafaggi identifying where, when, and why they emerge, cannot be a static exercise. Compliance officers, through their monitoring, need to re-adjust the risks map continuously in relation to the chain’s composition (Cafaggi, 2013). The main challenges of a compliance programme are: (1) to set the right incentives to prevent violations; (2) to make violations observable; (3) to detect them; (4) to create effective remediation systems should violations materialize; and (5) to distinguish between sanctions and rewards. Compliance programmes related to supply chains have to internalize geographical, legal, and economic differences. The causes of non-compliance may be sector and region specific, calling for a tailored approach. Similar remedies may work in the context of industrialized and relatively corruption-free countries but not in areas where corruption is high and business relationships are informal. In the world of voluntary standards, effective compliance relates to incentives, costs, and the capabilities of regulated entities. Taking into account these variables leads to the distinction between large MNCs and small and micro-enterprises. For instance, in the World Wildlife Fund (2016) the analysis of market behaviour differs between retailers, food services, manufactures, and supply chains. Compliance with transnational private regulatory regimes has undergone several transformations in the past two decades. From the ‘auditing society’, where reporting and due diligence represented the key pillars, a first important change was driven by the ‘beyond compliance’ approach (Gunningham and Grabowski, 1998; Coglianese and Nash, 2006). The ‘beyond compliance’ proposal focused on several weaknesses manifested by the auditing approach: (1) those related to the reporting incentives, especially when the reporting entity did not have full control over the entire supply chain; and (2) those related to the objectives of a compliance regime and the consequences of non-compliance. Often compliance officers were unable to find the relevant information within the organization, a difficulty that increased when independent suppliers were involved in the compliance programme (Deloitte, 2015). Among the main difficulties, knowledge about the chain composition stood out. At the end of last century, the structure of the supply chain was often not known to the chain leader, who was delegating many monitoring functions to intermediate lead suppliers. Moreover, suppliers did not have adequate incentives to reveal to large buyers the problems or the obstacles of compliance, all while bearing the risk of being penalized had they made full disclosure of their weaknesses. The second factor, driving the move away from auditing, concerned the subjectmatter of compliance. The recurrent question was, What exactly is the purpose of compliance? Linking compliance techniques with effectiveness required a focus shift from the rules to the objectives of a transnational standard (Cafaggi, 2014). Compliance with the standard can be defined in relation either to the rules, on the one hand, or to the objectives, e.g. the outcomes to be generated by the correct application of the rule over time, on the other. The assessment in the past was primarily about compliance with rules without providing relevant information about the effective attainment of regulatory objectives, such as respect of human rights, the level of environmental and social
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 605 protection, and the degree of product safety. Rules may require the adoption of a green technology or the definition of a product’s safety features but will often not define the outcomes stemming from the compliance. This includes how much pollution should be eliminated when using the new technology, how many accidents can be reduced by adopting product safety features, how many crimes can be eliminated by complying with anti-corruption rules and/or how many lives can be saved in a healthier working environment. Increasingly, compliance has been assessed against the objectives of the standard and not against the rules. These objectives are partly determined by the standard-setter and partly by the regulated entities themselves that can specify pace and targets according to their own business models and to the form of their supply chain (ISEAL, 2013 in particular, the Engagement principle). Including regulatory objectives in the analysis leads to redefining the relationship between compliance monitoring and enforcement. Failure to achieve the objectives does not usually result in conventional sanctioning. It may call for an action plan to remove the obstacles to compliance. At times, it can translate into financial penalties for the business units or for the subsidiary which has not achieved its target. Very rarely, it ends up in contract termination for breach by independent suppliers (Adidas, 2016). An example is the supplier assessment in the Johnson & Johnson supply chain, where all site audits are conducted using the audit protocol and checklist developed by the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative. The final assessment score ranks suppliers as low, medium, or high risk. Where the individual supplier score falls below the minimum rating, the supplier is required to institute a formal improvement programme. If significant non-conformity cannot be resolved, the relationship with the supplier may be terminated (Johnson and Johnson, 2017). Violations of rules remain an issue for enforcement. Hence non-compliance with objectives and violations of rules are now well distinguished. ‘Going beyond compliance’ also means increasing short-term operational costs even when considering the long-term benefits. Persuading shareholders and managers, that going beyond compliance was a profitable business strategy in a world of voluntary standards, such as that of TPR, required a change in business culture that was often contested (Reinhardt, 1999). Shareholders were not the only players who needed to be convinced. The necessity of encompassing the entire chain made interaction with suppliers a strategic dimension of compliance strategies for transnational voluntary standards. The most recent data suggest that problems of compliance arise much more in the supply chain than within the chain-leader organization (Koenig-Archibugi, 2017). Control of the entire chain represents a daunting challenge. Concerns about compliance costs and their distribution are of primary relevance. Often those who pay the costs along the supply chain (the suppliers) are not those who gain from compliance. Suppliers saw increasing costs without parallel benefits, which were usually pocketed by intermediate or final players, down the chain (ISEAL 2013, in particular the Accessibility principle). Misalignment along the chain can also occur in case of non-compliance since the compliers often end up paying part of the costs of non-compliance given the degree of interdependences among regulated entities along
606 Fabrizio Cafaggi supply chains. Those who do not comply generate external negative effects that penalize those who do. Both forms of misalignment may distort incentives to comply and to correct mistakes. Aligning the costs and benefits of compliance with categories of actors in the chain is one of the major challenges of compliance programmes. As a result, two changes have been encouraged: the development of a ‘measurement culture,’ generating indicators to warrant an objective assessment of compliance (Davis, 2012; Coglianese, 2012) and the move toward impact analysis of standards implementation. The link between ex-ante expectations and ex-post evaluation became a key aspect of the compliance evaluation methodology (Coglianese, 2012). Mistaken definitions of the expectations related to MNC behaviours, and failures to select the appropriate indicators could lead to inaccurate evaluation of the implementation process. Incorporating uncertainty and learning during the standard implementation called for a new change in the compliance approach. ‘Beyond compliance’ approaches have marked a radical transformation of compliance assessment’s instruments and objectives, but the relationship between non-compliance and subsequent corrective actions has yet to be effectively addressed. More effective detection is a necessary yet insufficient condition to ensure compliance (WWF, 2016).
34.4. Whose Compliance Is Evaluated? Who are the regulated entities whose compliance should be evaluated? Should they be individual MNCs or all participants in the global chains? In the latter case, should internal business units, subsidiaries, and independent suppliers be treated alike? Compliance with transnational standards by the regulated entity bears on different dimensions. One looks inside the enterprise at the relationships between employees, management, and shareholders; this includes also wholly-and partially-owned subsidiaries. Another looks outside the leading enterprise at the contractual relationships between the enterprise and third parties, e.g. subcontractors, franchisees, licensees. A third dimension is associated with the sphere of influence or control of the lead enterprise over its supply chain when there are no direct contractual relationships between the MNC, second-or third-tier suppliers (Cafaggi, 2016). Increasingly, the tendency is to monitor the entire chain, although assessment tools measuring compliance still mainly focus on individual organizations. The GSC approach to compliance monitoring is justified when regulated entities are multinationals engaged with a large number of suppliers across the globe. For medium and small enterprises, even with a strong presence in international markets, the more conventional approach focusing on individual organizations generally remains adequate (WWF, 2016). The forms of the chain, whether vertically integrated, captive, or relational, matter for the design and implementation of compliance monitoring (Gereffi et al., 2005). Furthermore, shifting the focus to the chain—thereby defining compliance programmes and the boundaries of assessment and remediation in relation to the web of business
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 607 relationships—would certainly reflect the current models for organizing global trade (OECD and World Bank, 2015). This change would be especially useful when the effectiveness of the standard depends upon the collective behaviour of the firms in the chain (Ponte and Sturgeon, 2014). Whether first-tier suppliers comply influences what second and third tiers do. Interdependence is strategic because it affects expected behaviour. In other words, compliance is about collective action of participants along GSC. Interdependences among chain’s participants are both functional and cognitive. Interdependences of behaviour among enterprises vary depending on the industry and the subject-matter of transnational regulation. Some issues like corruption may have different relevance along the chain depending on the countries, or have relevance only in some chain segments, e.g. procurement. For this reason, compliance programmes impose, or recommend the use of indexes like the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, or the blacklist of FATF that provides specific information about the level of corruption in each industry and country. Hence corruption may trigger different types of strategic chain interdependence for product safety and for protection. Mapping the chain to define the scope of compliance programmes is a necessary step to ensuring effective compliance. It is a normative rather than a descriptive exercise. The distinction between internal and external parties to the MNC is rather clear even if legal systems differ on how the legal boundaries should be drawn (Callies and van Herder, 2012). However, how to engineer the chain governance or group the tiers of suppliers in relation to compliance objectives is a much more complex policy task. The universe of suppliers and distributors—which are not in a direct contractual relationship but under the sphere of influence of the chain leader—can be highly heterogeneous, making it hard to define common objectives using identical indicators. In the design of monitoring compliance, the degree of regulated entitity homogeneity is crucial. Even within a common framework, the suppliers may choose different strategies to monitor compliance depending on their physical location, on the degree of economic dependence on the chain leader, and on the requirements of local public mandatory regulation. Differences can also be based on suppliers’ capabilities. When the heterogeneity is high then a single uniform metric for measuring compliance and enforcing conventional sanctions may not be appropriate, requiring different combinations of sanctions and rewards with accurate differentiations of objectives associated with the initial set of capabilities that each enterprise holds. Differentiation is necessary to ensure that the burdens of compliance monitoring are fairly allocated along the chain (FAO, 2014). Even if the boundaries are clear the internal grouping within each category may be challenging especially when firms are located in multiple jurisdications. The answer to the ‘who’ question has an impact on the ‘how’ question. Instruments to monitor the compliance of internal units differ from those concerning external suppliers. A combination of labour and corporate law instruments for ‘internal’ compliance policies and for contracts for external policies should be devised. For example, the human rights principles defined by the UN Global Compact and the ISO 26000 standard are both an integral part of internal MNC policies and are incorporated into
608 Fabrizio Cafaggi the commercial contracts via a supplier’s code that references to these standards. These codes define standards but also make reference to risk management systems. By way of incorporation into commercial contracts, compliance mechanisms are contractualized and become the subject-matter of enforceable obligations (Cafaggi, 2013). From a legal perspective enforcing internal obligations within the main corporation and contractual obligations with external suppliers entails a different approach as to monitoring and enforcement.
34.5. How, and by Whom, Should Compliance Be Evaluated? This section focuses first on how to monitor. Does it make a difference to compliance monitoring if the violations occur inside or outside the MNC but within the chain? The second part concerns the choice of instruments in compliance monitoring.
34.5.1. Monitoring Internal Units and External Suppliers Compliance Assuming the entire global chain as the unit of transnational regulation does not imply the use of similar instruments all along it, monitoring instruments could differ for legal and economic reasons along the chain depending on size, costs, and the capabilities of the regulated entities. There is a strong tendency toward centralizing responsibility for designing compliance monitoring. The chain leader defines both policy and instruments to ensure human rights compliance across jurisdictions. Policy design is centralized whereas actual monitoring occurs locally, through decentralized tools. The primary focus of compliance programmes is usually on internal business units and subsidiaries; then principles are often transplanted to the contractual partners in the chain without meaningful adaptations. However, the legal regulation not only changes depending on whether transactions occur within or outside the organization, but also on whether the incentives to comply and the costs of exiting the relationship significantly differ (Cafaggi, 2013). When applied to independent contractors, compliance- monitoring mechanisms are based on suppliers’ codes, incorporated into commercial contracts by referencing compliance policies. The contracts incorporate the suppliers’ obligations to comply with international standards and define monitoring rights over the subcontractors, including on-site inspections, by the other contractual party or by delegated third parties (Cafaggi, 2013). First-tier suppliers are contractually bound to ensure compliance by second-tier suppliers, and so on along the entire chain. The incentives for suppliers to reveal information about compliance related to human rights violations, corruption, or bribery are very different from those of employees.
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 609 Hence, the modes of rewarding compliance by suppliers differ from those concerning management, employees and agents. To incentivize compliance, suppliers are usually given longer contracts, higher revenues, expertise transfers, market opportunities. To deter non-compliance, employees are punished with financial penalties and, in the most serious cases, with termination, while in case of compliance they are rewarded with bonuses and non-pecuniary benefits (like awards). In both instances, group or collective mechanisms to attribute rewards are important (Fehr and Falk, 2002). The combination of sanctions and rewards should differ depending on whether the issue is compliance within the chain leader organization or along the chain by independent contractors. Distinctions between internal and external compliance-monitoring instruments are currently not well defined. Often compliance programmes make generic reference to due diligence, leaving MNCs the task of designing performance contracts within the corporation and between the corporation and its business partners (Kornhauser and Mcleod, 2014). When the compliance programmes go beyond the single organization their governance becomes more complex. For example, in the case of corruption, the powers to detect and sanction corruption within the leading organization differ from those related to the suppliers in the chain. In theory, they are greater within than between organizations. In practice, especially when the size of the leader is large, monitoring and enforcement powers may be stronger with contractors than with internal units. New tools concerning the suppliers include an Integrity Kit developed by Transparency International (2013) with multinationals to ensure uniformity of practices along the chain. Performance contracts within organizations differ from performance contracts between separate legal entities and in particular independent suppliers (Kornhauser and McLeod, 2014). Transactions within chains are not the exclusive focus of compliance monitoring. The corporate governance of the regulated entity is also a key dimension of compliance with transnational standards. In individual organizations (MNCs), a chief compliance officer (CCO) is appointed and is directly accountable to the board of directors. The Chief Counsel Compliance usually manages three departments: Compliance Legal, Compliance Investigations, and Compliance Remediation and Risk Prevention. When there is a holding and many subsidiaries, the compliance monitoring is often referred to officers coordinated by the CCO. This coordination happens within compliance committees that can be either informal or formalized. When the business model is multidivisional (business units), compliance control tends to be more hierarchical. When violations occur, the remedial actions may not only concern the individuals, but also internal control procedures that showed fallacies in their design/implementation. Serious violations, as in the case of Siemens, have required radical modifications of internal compliance procedures (Sidhu, 2009). Inside the corporation, setting up a compliance unit with a CCO is the rule. The identification of a single CCO for the entire chain would however be much harder; the creation of committees with multiple representatives of supply chain segments may be a viable alternative option. This might not be true when third-party monitors are operating. A single monitoring entity is identified by the chain leader and performs
610 Fabrizio Cafaggi compliance monitoring for the entire chain. For third-party monitors, the power to impose or even recommend organizational changes is more limited for the chain leader and wider for independent suppliers.
34.5.2. Choice of Instruments in Compliance Monitoring How should compliance instruments be designed in global supply chains in light of the differences between internal and external monitoring? One objective is to minimize monitoring costs, including governance and transaction, while maximizing effectiveness of oversight and promoting improvement of regulatory performance. But how should objectives and costs be defined? The current stage of thinking reflects a notion of dynamic compliance that measures improvements of regulated entities over time according to objective yet flexible indicators whose relative weight can change depending on exogenous factors. Such indicators are often designed with long-term objectives whose attainment requires adaptations of targets and indicators by regulated entities over time, such as the human rights approach adopted by the UN global compact principles. The continuous improvement approach characterizes many new standards in the area of sustainability and environment, corruption, health, and safety at work. Improvements may concern both measurable targets and the quality of the governance, like the establishment and functioning of management schemes, risk management, and other tools capable of preventing and mitigating risks when they materialize (ISEAL, 2013, in particular Improvement and Relevance principles). Newer shifts within the continuous-improvement approach have modified the ‘Who is to be evaluated?’ question addressed above. On the one hand, the global chain has become the unit of analysis for compliance assessment, including independent suppliers, linked with the chain leader. On the other hand, it has become clear that compliance for large multinational enterprises should be evaluated differently from compliance for small and medium domestic enterprises. The ability to meet the standard differs depending on size and position along the chain. As a result, different degrees of strictness, with corresponding indicators, often apply to large enterprises, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and micro enterprises. This is even more important when the evaluation concerns the entire global supply chain, including both the business units of the MNC, the subsidiaries, and the independent suppliers that participate in the sourcing process. Once the compliance systems are in place, information is conveyed through reporting from the local compliance officers to the central compliance unit of the MNC, which can then take action to mitigate the consequences of pitfalls and violations. The chain leader is responsible for defining, via contracts, the oversight structure and distributing tasks to the lead suppliers, which, in turn, control the behaviour of their subcontractors. The oversight function is backed by liability regimes for failure to prevent and failure to remedy when violations occur. Countries like France and the UK have enacted
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 611 legislation making chain leaders responsible for the non-compliance of their suppliers located in different jurisdictions. Liability regimes for lack of oversight vary depending on whether the non-compliance can result in a criminal offence or (only) in civil liability. Civil remedies against the chain leader are actionable before national courts and private transnational dispute resolution bodies. National courts can order the chain leader to act in order to terminate non-compliance by subcontractors located in different jurisdictions. National domestic law uses international contractual relations to ensure compliance with human rights obligations. The form of the chain is not the only relevant variable affecting instruments’ choice for compliance monitoring. Designing an effective chain’s compliance policy also depends on the stability of the chain’s relationships. Unstable chains, characterized by the dominance of market transactions, are harder to coordinate than hierarchical and captive chains where there is dominant, centralized control by one or more chain leaders over independent suppliers (Gereffi et al., 2005; Sturgeon and Ponte, 2014). Effective compliance programmes need both sanctions and rewards to provide correct incentives. The objective is to induce behavioural changes of the different components inside the chain, including subsidiaries and independent suppliers. When scoreboards identify both mandatory and optional requirements that suppliers have to meet, it is likely that sanctions will be used for the former and rewards for the latter. See, for example, OXFAM’s Behind the Brands scorecard (which assesses the agricultural sourcing policies of the world’s ten largest food and beverage companies), or the palm oil buyers scorecard issued by WWF. Rewards are warranted upon compliance while sanctions are imposed upon violations. When rewards have to be administered, the focus of monitoring is on compliance. Rewards can at least compensate for costs of compliance. Sanctions, by contrast, penalize the non-compliant, but do not compensate those who comply. Costs of monitoring non-compliance are much higher than those which monitor compliance, where the burden of proof is on the compliers. Currently more compliance programmes are based on sanctions than rewards despite a general trend showing an increasing use of the latter. This is partially justified by the amount of resources needed to engineer a reward system even if, in the end, rewards may be more effective than sanctions. Contractualizing compliance monitoring has its shortcomings originated by the limits of the current contract law. Human rights standards represent a good illustration of the differences between internal and external mechanisms and the weaknesses of conventional contract remedies. Failure to meet a target related to human rights standards by a business unit should be sanctioned with measures different from those used in contracts with suppliers. A breach of a rule by an internal unit may not lead to damages or termination with exit from the chain, but it can entail penalties together with engagement with remediation. The unit unlike the individual cannot be removed from the organization. Enforcement of contracts with independent suppliers, including compliance with international standards, warrants damages to the non-breaching party and termination as a last resort. The supplier as an organization can be forced to exit the chain. The differences with independent contractual suppliers are striking, in theory. In practice, however, damages are seldom used. The chain leader seeks remediation through
612 Fabrizio Cafaggi action plans and uses contract termination as a last resort when non-compliance is serious and may severely affect reputation (Cafaggi, 2013).
34.6. Instrument Choice and Monitoring Strategies in Global Supply Chains The relevant design task of compliance programmes is the optimal combination of the different forms of control: direct hierarchical control, peer control by the group of regulated entities, and individually delegated control by each regulated entity. Each type of control entails costs, but of different kinds: some are governance costs; others are transactional costs (Hansmann, 2009). Both, however, are agency costs: the CCO can monitor compliance with the standard via corporate or contractual instruments. Compliance with the standard by a supply chain does not involve a single unit or even a single firm, but a multiplicity of agents whose coordination is one of the main objectives of the institutional design. Accordingly, compliance with transnational standards needs to solve a multi-agent incentives problem that address team coordination, free-riding, and collective action (Gibbons and Roberts, 2014). When multiple agents have to perform a common task (monitoring compliance with the standard), the objective is to solve the potential conflict between ex-ante efficient allocation of efforts and ex-post allocation of non-compliance costs. The different instruments have to allocate the burden of compliance, distributing the resources needed to comply efficiently and fairly among agents. When costs of compliance are allocated unevenly amongst the regulated, it is more likely that incentives will be reduced and rates of non-compliance will increase. Compliance programmes define common objectives and leave some discretion over how to achieve them. The freedom of instrument choice is constrained by coordination among the different modes of control, which we now briefly sketch.
34.6.1. Hierarchical Control Hierarchical compliance control is common in MNCs. However, the degree and type of hierarchy is correlated with the complexity of the organization and the business model. Hierarchy is consistent with delegation and does not coincide with centralization. Hierarchical control can decentralize to local units’ monitoring powers to minimize governance costs. The internal organizational principle is that of the segregation of duties. The same entity cannot carry out investigative powers, decide about non-compliance, and sanction
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 613 violations. The CCO is responsible for the organization of the compliance control with a separate body in charge of remedial measures and sanctioning when violations are detected. Control over independent suppliers often occurs with scoreboards. Scoreboards measure performances and improvement over time such as for example the Corporate Human Rights benchmark (2017) that is designed to measure human rights respect by corporations. Parties along the chain may have some degree of flexibility, but their discretion is limited since they have to coordinate monitoring policies with the indicators defined in scoreboards. For instance, in the case of Adidas, third parties are obliged to develop long-term plans outlining their strategies and actions to ensure compliance within the indirect supply chains. They are also subject to audit by the leader’s approved external monitors, who verify the outcomes of the compliance plans and activities (Adidas, 2017). The compliance programme applied to the independent suppliers distributes oversight power between the different participants. Excess centralization of decision- making may prove ineffective because it misses local specificities, raising monitoring costs without increasing effectiveness. Excess of delegation, on the other hand, can bring about coordination slacks and undermine the efficacy of responses when violations occur. The correct balance between centralized control and delegation should achieve cost effectiveness.
34.6.2. Peer Control and Self-Reporting Hierarchical control by the chain leader can be complemented by self-reporting and peer control by groups of suppliers or, within the main organization, by a group of subsidiaries. From the perspective of the global standard-setter, it might be cost-effective to delegate compliance control to the regulated entity as long as the control is exercised according to objectives, criteria, and indicators defined by the chain leader and/or the standard-setter. Peer review is generally used to compare and benchmark different compliance performances within the same regulatory system along the chain. Especially when the peer control occurs within the same industry among homogeneous enterprises, the comparison can become extremely meaningful. Peer review of transparency and anticorruption practices, for example, can lead to mutual learning and changes in the business models of each unit within the chain. In reality, peer control within a global supply chain is uncommon and, when used, it has not been particularly effective. Its potential, however, is relevant to individual corporations where it can be applied by heads of business units, and between independent contractors and suppliers during analyses of compliance policies when searching for the causes behind violations. Peer control, both within the corporation and among suppliers, may increase effectiveness. Improvements may occur both in the ex-ante impact
614 Fabrizio Cafaggi analysis and in the ex-post reviewing stage when different policies and practices are compared, and, possibly, benchmarked.
34.6.3. Control by Intermediaries The primary instruments of external control are intermediaries like certifiers. Intermediaries play a major role in supply chain governance (Ponte and Sturgeon, 2014; Abbott, Levi Faur, and Snidal, 2017). They include delegated and independent intermediaries. The former are actors, like certifiers, contractually linked to suppliers to monitor their activity based on a ‘delegation’ by the MNC. The latter are independent organizations, usually civil society organizations, which monitor compliance and report on non-compliance with laws and commitments made through codes of conduct and incorporated by reference into commercial contracts. Certification is one of the most diffused third- party monitoring instruments. Monitoring and sanctioning powers are based on contracts. Certifying bodies operate in different areas—from corruption to sustainability, from corporate social responsibility to product quality and safety. In the area of anti-corruption, an example is ISO 37001, whose compliance has to be certified by accredited bodies. Certifiers have strong monitoring powers over both the activity and the governance of supply chain partners based on contractual arrangements with the monitored. Monitoring occurs via conventional instruments like inspections and self-assessment tools. Non-compliance can be sanctioned directly by the certifying bodies or via contractual penalties by the counterparty based on an escalating system that includes warning, remediation, action plans, suspension of certification, and cancellation. Within anti-corruption, an illustration of contractual commitments monitored by a third party is the Integrity Pact signed between MNCs and suppliers, and monitored by a civil society organization. The Integrity Pact is a legally binding agreement where third parties monitor its correct implementation. All the applicants sign it at the bidding stage, and it remains binding for the winning bidder once the contract is assigned by the MNC. Whereas in the case of corruption, the interests of the (procurement officers of the) MNC and those of suppliers may be aligned, an external independent monitor becomes a key player to prevent and detect violations. Moreover, and in addition, intermediaries’ monitoring can also be independent and not contractually delegated. NGOs engage in monitoring without a contractual relationship to preserve their own independence and impartiality.
34.7. Conclusion Transnational private regulation is one modality of transnational administration that has been exemplified here by the examination of TPR compliance in global supply
Compliance in Transnational Regulation 615 chains. Compliance practices have witnessed recent transformations. There has been a shift in focus from rules to objectives, from a single organization to the supply chain, and from a static to a dynamic perspective based on continuous improvement. These changes have modified the relationship between compliance monitoring and enforcement (Gunningham, 2010). The link between the two remains strong when monitoring focuses on compliance with the rules and enforcement that should take place in cases of non-compliance. The link softens when compliance monitoring looks at the attainment of the objectives and the causes of failures, whereas enforcement focuses on the consequences of non compliance. By taking a GSC approach, one question that has not been addressed ‘is whether transnational regulatory schemes influence the policies of government of importing countries, by providing authoritative benchmarks that are eventually incorporated into domestic legislation’ (Koenig-Archibugi, 2017 p. 346). It is another consideration in the intricate multi- level and multi-actor nature of policy design in this regulatory field. Building complementarity between public and private forms of regulation remains a significant policy design challenge (Bair, 2017). This chapter has focused on various compliance mechanisms to enhance the effectiveness of transnational regulation. Multiple actors may be involved in monitoring and ensuring compliance of transnational standards in GSC: the global private and the domestic public regulators; the regulated entities and their business partners; third parties, independent from both the regulators and the regulated. This chapter centred the discussion on why and how global supply chains are becoming the unit of compliance programmes concerning transnational standards. Compliance programmes have to include internal business units, subsidiaries, and external suppliers and retailers. They require a complex architecture that considers the difference between inside and outside monitoring, setting the right incentives, and using different combinations between sanctions and rewards to induce compliance by managers, employees, and independent suppliers. Design differs around, and depends on, the degree of heterogeneity of the regulated entities, the length of the chain, and the allocation of regulatory power among the chain’s participants. Three forms of control in the supply chain can emerge to monitor compliance: hierarchical, peer, and delegated control. Supply chains use different combinations of these three modes depending on their form and composition. Within the large organization (chain leader), hierarchical monitoring prevails but its form depends on the business model structure. Third-party monitoring is rare. Peer monitoring can be used when there are many subsidiaries, especially those with institutional investors as minority shareholders. By contrast, in relation to contractual partners, hierarchical- monitoring is limited, third party monitoring is the rule, and peer monitoring is the exception. Often various modes of control are simultaneously deployed. When the MNC is composed of various subsidiaries, hierarchical control can be complemented by peer control. Peer review within the organization occurs in committees, where compliance officers, responsible for each unit or subsidiary, meet and discuss compliance problems within the organization.The MNC’s internal compliance control systems are usually
616 Fabrizio Cafaggi complemented by a third-party audit. The MNCs can delegate control of supply chain participants to third parties who certify compliance with the standard. The combination of these three modes of control create one facet of the regulatory complexity of the transnational administrative sphere.
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Chapter 35
Providing Fou ndat i ons Philanthropy, Global Policy, and Administration Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow
35.1. Introduction ‘Malignant’ (Parmar, 2002, p. 1), a constructor of hegemony (Roelofs, 2003), a co-producer of world order (Krige and Rausch, 2012), a colonial project (Lipman, 2015). These are just some of the overarching criticisms levelled at philanthropy and its role in policy and administration. With philanthropy emerging as a central component of contemporary networked governance (Jung and Harrow, 2015) and as an essential ingredient in the ‘private welfare state’ model (Boesso et al., 2014, p. 159), our chapter examines the different roles and expressions of global philanthropy. We specifically focus on the organizational expressions of philanthropy and philanthropic foundations. Not only have these been undergoing unprecedented global growth but, prominently equated to the organizational equivalent of ‘giraffes’, ill-equipped, aristocratic institutions (Nielsen, 1972), and to ‘600-pound gorillas’, whose mere presence at the policy table suffices to exert influence (O’Mara, 1997), it is foundations that have attracted most of the academic, political, and popular attention to date. Our chapter begins with critical reflections on prominent perspectives on philanthropy and foundations. We highlight the need to move beyond traditional definitions and emphasize the importance of taking the historic links and antecedents of contemporary philanthropy discourse into account to advance, rather than repeat or reinvent, thinking about the field. To examine philanthropy’s presence, parts, and practices in the policy agora—the sphere of interconnected, fluid, dynamic, and complex links across politics, markets, culture, and society that is emerging globally (Stone, 2008)—we then address foundations’ approaches to shaping policy and administration. Here, we point to three strategic and temporal clusters of philanthropic involvement in the global policy field. After discussing current data and expressions of global philanthropy, we consider the growing marketization, financialization, and emphasis on ‘effectiveness’ in
620 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow philanthropy. To date, visions and rhetoric appear to have trumped broader reflective engagement with, and robust evidence about, those developments. Arguing for the need to move from polarized towards more nuanced perspectives on philanthropy, we conclude with outlining the spectrum of research opportunities that the philanthropy field offers to global policy.
35.2. Philanthropy and Global Philanthropy: What Is in A Name? To begin, it is important to clarify the meaning of philanthropy and to point to its strong and long-standing relationship to policy and administration. Notwithstanding recent debates about philanthropy’s influence in national and international policy spheres and whether this is a cause for concern (e.g. Ball and Junemann, 2012; Stone, 2010), it is essential to recognize that philanthropy is inherently political and value-laden. While charity focuses on addressing the symptoms of a problem, philanthropy tries to address root causes and advocates for policy and social change (Hammack and Anheier, 2013). Philanthropy is thus a place for exercising and negotiating power (Cunningham, 2016). Its use as a strategic tool in the political rat race was recognized early by the Roman author and administrator, Pliny the Younger (von Reden, 2015), and resonates with contemporary discussions about the activities of foundations associated with political leaders: from Clinton (Roberts, 2016) to Trump (Abramson, 2017). Indeed, the use and abuse of philanthropy to foster personal interests and agendas, to secure family fortunes and well-being, to shape and maintain social and public structures, and to convey and enforce desirable behaviours are well documented (e.g. Berman, 1983; Cunningham, 2016; von Reden, 2015). As such, it is unsurprising that philanthropy remains a contested concept (Daly, 2012). Modern anglophone academic and policy discourse tends to cast philanthropy normatively, as ‘the love of humanity’, as ‘doing good’, or as ‘caring about’ (Sulek, 2010). Such ‘warm glow’ perspectives are of limited use. First, they fail to acknowledge the broad spectrum of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that can drive philanthropy— from altruism to personal gains and social control (Gordon et al., 2016; Pharoah, 2016). Second, they restrict critical engagement with the field (Rogers, 2015) by creating a romanticized vision of, and sentimental discourse on, philanthropy (Phillips and Jung, 2016). To overcome the limitations of traditional understandings of philanthropy, and to allow for the inclusion of diverse drivers, expressions, and the changing characteristics of philanthropy, it is useful to cast philanthropy in broader, more neutral terms as ‘the use of private resources—treasure, time and talent—for public purposes’ (Phillips and Jung, 2016, p. 7). In its expression as ‘global’ or ‘transboundary’ philanthropy (Schmid and Bar Nissim, 2016), this can refer to a number of different developments. It can
Providing Foundations 621 either mean the worldwide burgeoning of philanthropic institutions and individuals, or philanthropy’s growing involvement in addressing global issues (Plewes, 2008). Alternatively, it can point to the globalization of philanthropy (Leat, 2007), the means and processes by which philanthropic practices and infrastructures are spread, shared, and interact globally, using worldwide interconnectedness to promote, express, and develop particular norms and forms of international giving (e.g. WINGS, 2017).
35.3. Foundations, Fears, and Furore Philanthropy, especially in the form of foundations, has always been surrounded by furore, distrust, and suspicion. Perceived as ‘titans of the nonprofit world’ (Gaul and Borowski, 1993, p. 161), foundations are paradoxical creatures: (a) their wealth originates in self-interest, yet is to be used altruistically to help those less fortunate; (b) they have acquired great social, economic, and political power, yet this power is concentrated in the hands of a few, generally unelected, foundation leaders; (c) they address public issues, yet tend not to consult the public thereon; and (d) they try to add value to society, yet often fail to explore or comprehend any change created (Fleishman, 2007, pp. 48–9). In the absence of a strong theory of the foundation, with foundations’ own associations and umbrella bodies acknowledging that ‘the term foundation has no precise meaning’ (e.g. Association of Charitable Foundations, 2017), academic and non-academic discourse on foundations tends to lack nuance (Jung et al., 2018). For example, the enormous wealth held in the handful of mega-foundations—Gates (ca. 41 billion USD), Wellcome (ca. 27 billion USD), Ford (ca. 12 billion USD)—distorts popular perceptions about foundations’ resources. It fails to appreciate the very ‘long tail of philanthropy’: that is, a very small number of foundations with extremely large assets are followed by huge numbers of ever-smaller foundations (Pharoah et al., 2017). The private nature of foundations and their general discretion over philanthropic spending choices have further contributed to long-standing concerns about these organizations. One of the early foundation examples, Plato’s Academy, was closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian on the basis that it spread unorthodox, heretical, and pagan ideas (Whitaker, 1974). Within medieval England, the accumulation of wealth in ecclesiastical foundations, which eventually exceeded that of the Crown, irked the royals and contributed to their appropriation of foundation wealth (Kiger, 2000). Contemporary anxieties about foundations are reflected in numerous congressional investigations into foundations in the US, and in ongoing global attempts at controlling and curtailing foundations’ powers and purposes (e.g. Bishop and Green, 2012; Gaul and Borowski, 1993). In addition, high-profile cases of individual foundations being used and abused for non- charitable purposes—from tax-avoidance to legal misconduct and criminal acts—have often tainted the broader foundation field by association (Smith et al., 2016; Whitaker, 1974). Given the tensions that arise from these characteristics, practices, and perceptions, it is unsurprising that critiques of philanthropy and of foundations have come
622 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow from all parts of society and from across the whole political spectrum. On the one hand, they have been criticized for reinforcing inequalities and for promulgating neoliberalism and globalization (McGoey, 2015; Roelofs, 2003) and, on the other, for advocating and backing socialism and spreading communism (Abrahamson et al., 2013).
35.4. The Long-standing Links between Philanthropy, Global Policy, and Administration The historic role and relationship between philanthropy, policy, and administration warrants clarification. A popular portrayal is the idea of a ‘philanthropy-policy ping-pong’, whereby philanthropy is either cast as a provider of ‘first’ or of ‘last resort’, as a prelude or postscript to public policy initiatives. This needs to be challenged. The relationship between the two—whether discreet or explicit, collaborative or confrontational—has always been much more closely intertwined than commonly perceived. How far philanthropy and policy need each other to achieve ‘positive outcomes that neither could achieve alone’ (Macdonald and Szanto, 2007), or whether their links are predominantly facades (Almog-Bar and Zychlinski, 2012) or symbolic actions aimed at maintaining the status quo (Thümler, 2011) are matters in need of further research and exploration. Within the policy landscape, foundations tend to be subliminal players, a widely unrecognized socio-political undercurrent. Philanthropy’s hyper-agency—its diverse capacities and dispositions that allow for the production of specific social outcomes and the creation of the conditions and contexts within which agency is exercised (Schervish, 2013)—is vividly displayed by the worldwide activities of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (e.g. McGoey, 2015), or claimed by, and ascribed to, the global ambitions of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2017). In general, however, philanthropy tends to operate in more subtle ways: it shapes and influences by virtue of its selective, controlling, and normative moulding of knowledge, discourse, and practice (e.g. Ball and Junemann, 2012; Stone, 2010). This can be illustrated at primary, secondary, and higher education levels, across different continents, in relation to disciplines in the natural and social sciences, and through the examination of global networks and institutions (Jung and Harrow, 2016). In short, philanthropy has shaped the arenas of global policy and transnational administration for over a century through influencing developments at local, national, and international levels. Well before the notion of ‘development assistance’ was defined within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC), foundations were active in international work (Grimm et al., 2009). The extent of these foundation activities is illustrated in a statement by John D. Rockefeller, issued on Christmas Day 1919. Announcing additional funds of
Providing Foundations 623 50,000,000 USD to his foundation (that is approximately 730,000,000 USD in current value adjusted for inflation), Rockefeller highlighted that these extra resources would enable the Rockefeller Foundation to more adequately ‘meet the large demands of a world-wide programme which already reaches twenty-five countries’ (cited in Walsh, 1920, p. 608). In a comment on this development, his contemporaries concluded that, ‘There is not a country on the western hemisphere which is not subject to some of the Foundation’s activities, and there is scarcely a country in the world into which its direct influence has not been diffused’ (Walsh, 1920, p. 608). Historic examples, such as the Rockefeller one, frequently dwarf the resources provided by, and challenge the novelty of, more recent global foundation ambitions. For example, the NoVo Foundations’ announcement of its Radical Hope Fund ‘a four-year, $20 million commitment to support bold and transformative social justice work globally’ (NoVo Foundation, 2017) seems a mere trifle in comparison. Similarly, while former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Kofi Annan’s, call for a ‘uniquely African Green Revolution’ and foundations’ involvement in the resulting Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) might be seen as an exciting new global policy initiative (AGRA, 2017), it can also be seen as a resurfacing of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1941 Green Revolution initiative, aimed at improving crop yields and nutrition (Spero, 2010). On the global policy philanthropy scene, two other foundations have traditionally had similar prestige to Rockefeller: the Carnegie and Ford philanthropies. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century as harbingers of a new era, the age of big foundations (Cunningham, 2016), these foundations’ aims were equally ambitious and grand. The Charter of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913) declared its aim was ‘to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world’, the Ford Foundation (1936), the largest foundation in the world during the mid-twentieth century, focused on ‘scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare’, while one of Andrew Carnegie’s many foundations, the Carnegie Peace Fund, known as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), was established with the task of abolishing ‘international war between so-cald [sic.] civilized nations’ (Carnegie, 1910, p. 3). From a contemporary perspective, it is easy to criticize these institutions and initiatives. Indeed, scholars have repeatedly recited a common canon of concerns relating to foundations’ historic and contemporary involvement in the policy arena. This includes questions about the origins and size of foundation funds, foundations’ unelected and undemocratic nature, their elite composition and influence, and the cultural imperialism and dominance that have been associated with foundations’ activities (Arnove and Pinede, 2007; Berman, 1983; Krige and Rausch, 2012; Parmar, 2012; Roelofs, 2003). Rarely acknowledged is ‘the possibility that funding decisions may be less than sinister’, that foundation officers’ efforts ‘may be admirably thorough and even handed’ (Woods, 1999, p. 151), that, for all their faults, such organizations were usually driven by idealism, the potential for progress, and the actual hope of creating and maintaining political stability and ‘world peace’ (Rietzler, 2008; Witkowski and Bauerkämper, 2016).
624 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow Considered alongside the spectrum of roles that foundations working internationally can fulfil—acting as legitimizers, amplifiers, importers, and exporters of ideas, institution builders, coalition builders, and as representatives (Heydemann and Kinsey, 2010)—there is thus a danger of moving from critiques and criticisms of a select number of individual foundations or specific foundation initiatives to inappropriate generalizations across the entire foundation field. Furthermore, it is important to contextualize and compare the current landscape of philanthropy’s role(s) and influence to its prior expressions. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation’s early twentieth century initiatives can be argued to have had much greater impact on international health than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s current global health efforts: the former occurred at a time when the field was more open and in a global context defined by strong European and growing US imperialism; the latter occurs at a time of neoliberal globalization and fading US hegemony (Birn, 2014).
35.5. Foundations’ Approaches to Shaping Global Policy and Administration: Three Overarching Strategies, Three Temporal Clusters The Peace Palace in the Hague, home to the International Court of Justice, to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and to the Hague Academy of International Law, was financed by Andrew Carnegie in 1903. The institution he created for this purpose, the Carnegie Foundation, to this day continues to be the owner and in charge of the upkeep and maintenance of the building, its grounds and the Peace Palace Library (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2007). Such funding, that shapes and supports global policy and administration in various ways, is a recurring theme in philanthropy. Following the First and Second World Wars, for example, American foundations played a central role in casting and informing American cultural diplomacy (Witkowski and Bauerkämper, 2016); Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford philanthropies were essential in shaping, strengthening, and institutionalizing the areas of International Relations and of foreign area studies. The focus was on simultaneously shaping them as fields of research and to inform policy and practice (Guilhot, 2011). In the US, their involvement included the funding and fashioning of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as the Yale Institute of International Studies and the Princeton Public Opinion Studies Programme (Parmar, 2012). Foundations, in tandem with government, academia, and practitioners, thereby shaped the internal and external perception, portrayal and expression of America’s place on the global stage (Müller, 2012). These efforts went well beyond the American context. This is prominently illustrated in these foundations’ activities in Germany.
Providing Foundations 625 In the interwar period, American foundations funded the development of independent academic institutions, including the Foreign Policy Institute and the German Academy for Politics (the Institut für Auswärtige Politik and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik respectively). These were aimed at developing transnational academic collaborations on international relations (Rietzler, 2008). During the Cold War, American foundations again focused on strengthening German academia through encouraging pluralism and open discourse (Witkowski and Bauerkämper, 2016). While not often acknowledged, it is also important to bear in mind that such ‘world making’ activities have historically neither been restricted to American foundations nor limited to specific social or political perspectives. This is evident in the philanthropic activities in Africa that originated from both West and East Germany (Witkowski and Bauerkämper, 2016) or, more recently, the Qatar Foundation’s Reach Out to Asia (ROTA) initiative in Qatar (Al-Thani, 2016). Furthermore, as the ongoing support for the global spread of community philanthropy models, institutions, and movements as vehicles for local sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and citizen participation by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Charles Stewart Mott, the Ford, the King Baudouin, and the Open Society Foundations highlights, neither is this approach a thing of the past (see Global Fund for Community Foundations, 2017). Philanthropy is thus intricately woven through the very fabric of global policy and administration. While some of it has become more explicit in recent years, the key focus on funding for infrastructures, knowledge, and understanding, and on shaping discourse and practices is omnipresent. This has been evident in the Carnegie Corporation’s historic educational activities in Africa (Murphy, 1976), the Rockefeller Foundation’s long-standing involvement in the domains of agriculture, nutrition, and food security (Smith, 2009), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s work around health (Matthews and Ho, 2008), as well as these foundations’ combined activities in international development and global education more broadly (e.g. Martens and Seitz, 2015; Stone, 2010). While foundations are frequently included amongst the ‘new’ actors on the global policy landscape, they have thus tended to be forerunners in several global issues and developments that are undergoing a renaissance, rediscovery, or recasting. Foundations’ involvement in policy can be roughly divided into three temporal clusters: an era of gifting knowledge; a second period linking academia, policy, and practice; and a third phase that has emphasized taking charge of driving change (Dowie, 2002; Jung and Harrow, 2016). The first, covering the period up to the Second World War, was rooted in Carnegie’s notion of moving away from ‘indiscriminate giving’ towards achieving actual and lasting good (Carnegie, 1901). To this end, philanthropy was geared towards the support and application of systematic, scientific principles, towards fostering science, learning, and education. The second phase started around 1945. Its catalyst was the recognition that, despite progress in science and technology, inequality and social challenges persisted. Consequently, foundations moved their funding and activities towards emphasizing policy analysis, advocacy and linking academia, policy, and practice (Dowie, 2002). However, the difficulties of working with government, and growing chasms across the foundation world itself, quickly made foundations wonder if they
626 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow might be better off by taking matters in their own hands; either through taking action themselves, or through funding social movements and initiatives to achieve things on their behalf. While the logics and approaches of the preceding two phases continue, the latter established itself as the prevailing logic in the 1960s and still dominates the field (Dowie, 2002; Jung and Harrow, 2016). Hand-in-hand with these approaches goes a subtle but important shift in the perception of power. Power has been conceptualized in a multiplicity of ways. To understand philanthropy’s changing role on the global stage, the distinction between ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power over’ is helpful. The first refers to the ability to exercise power; the latter two emphasize the relational nature of power. Power ‘with’ emphasizes a collective and collaborative approach; power ‘over’ points to a power imbalance, where one actor is in a dominant position (Göhler, 2009). These perspectives roughly coincide with the three aforementioned temporal clusters of foundation approaches. Power to mirrors the early realization and ambition to achieve change; power with reflects the collaborative and collective approach illustrated in the second stage. Power over is becoming ever more clearly expressed in the size and numbers of foundations working at a global level.
35.6. Expressions of Global Philanthropy Data on global philanthropy is patchy and incomplete; there is a potential to over- represent some donors and under-represent others. As foundations can channel their global giving through the funding of domestic intermediary non-profits which in turn operate internationally, it is difficult to identify and follow foundation resources (Schmid and Bar Nissim, 2016). Furthermore, due to differences in reporting standards, requirements, and cycles, data on foundations, even where available, is often dated. International information thus tends to be unsystematic and not directly comparable. However, indicative insights from the international development field over the last decade point to around half of all European foundations being involved in international activities, with international development representing around 9 per cent of all UK grant-making foundations’ spending, while around 27 per cent of American foundations’ grants go to international activities (Marten and Witte, 2008; Martens and Seitz, 2015; Pharoah and Bryant, 2012). Within this context, the Gates Foundation stands out. It is roughly double the size of the second largest American foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and almost five times as large as the third, the Ford Foundation. Its spending power, dominating logics, and influence are well documented and widely discussed (e.g. Matthews and Ho, 2008; McGoey, 2015). More broadly, however, the size of philanthropy’s role might be smaller than popularly assumed. Recent findings indicate that of all private contributions by G20 countries to developing countries, philanthropy only seems to be around 64 USD billion of the total of 513 billion
Providing Foundations 627 USD, that is, just below 12 per cent (Hudson Institute, 2016). This queries the extent to which foundations are uniformly ‘outbidding’ or outrunning more established intergovernmental institutions (e.g. Donaldson and Rutter, 2017). Furthermore, philanthropic developments across the Asian and African contexts might be, albeit very slowly, starting to challenge the influence of international philanthropy. Rather than satisfying external foundations’ norms and needs, there is a growing recognition and emphasis on horizontality, ‘a systematic and grounded approach to organizational reform that takes the indigenous as the point of departure’ (Fowler, 2016, p. 166). Given the various critiques levelled at philanthropy outlined so far—from questions about democracy, accountability, and transparency in foundation activities, to concerns about philanthropy’s driving and skewing of particular social agendas whilst ignoring others—why does philanthropy get a seat at the policy table? Here, the actual extent of philanthropic resources only appears to be one factor. The very characteristics of philanthropy that are widely criticized also make it very appealing to, and useful in, the global policy landscape: a general resource independence, control over strategic direction and redirection, claims to recognize and respond to specific social needs and niches, essentially private—albeit nationally regulated—decision-making, and the ability to operate over flexible and long timescales and with a diversity of actors. In addition, foundations offer the opportunity and ability to access and operate in contexts where more traditional global policy players cannot, or cannot be seen to, be involved. Not only does this offer the chance to provide governments with indirect support, but it is also an opportunity that has repeatedly been used by international intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations alike to channel funds, and to set foot, in different areas of the world (Smith et al., 2016; Whitaker, 1974). The relationship among policy, administration, and philanthropy covers a spectrum of expressions. It can be complementary, supplementary, or adversarial (Young, 2000). Of these, the first two expressions have received most research attention, highlighting a number of issues. For example, some findings point to interactions where, despite a ceremonial collaborative veneer, policy and philanthropy partners try to exert control and further goals and ambitions that are not in the interest of the other party. This raises the topic of whether such collaborations are a desirable or effective way of promoting different sectors’ interests and aims (Almog-Bar and Zychlinski, 2012). Furthermore, given that philanthropy’s ultimate success would be its own abolition—in other words, it being no longer required—researchers have wondered if the coming together of philanthropy and policy predominantly focuses on legitimization. Whether or not these partnerships achieve positive change is irrelevant: the mere working together generates and mobilizes ‘ascriptions of moral legitimacy for the organisations involved by virtue of their claim to improve the performance of the system’ (Thümler, 2011, p. 1111). The third, adversarial, aspect is highlighted in the notion of ‘the angry gift’ (Silber, 2012). Identified in the context of diaspora and cross-national giving, this refers to philanthropy as the expression of ‘bitter criticism and intensely negative feelings’ against policy makers; through angry gifts, philanthropy critiques and criticizes governmental incompetence, indifference, and inefficiency (Silber, 2012, p. 325). The latter resonates
628 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow with philanthropy’s own historic critiques of the charity field and, in turn, with recent calls for philanthropy itself to be reinvented as discussed in the next section.
35.7. Pilanthropoids, Philanthropenese, and Philanthrocapitalism Perceived as having wasted ‘billions of drops in millions of buckets’ (Goldberg, 2009), the last few years have seen increasing calls for philanthropy to reinvent itself, to move from ‘doing good’ to ‘doing best’ (Friedman, 2013, p. 7). This is driven by the background of contemporary philanthropoids, those who determine which enterprises of benevolence or scholarship will be nourished with foundation money (Macdonald, 1956). Coming from successful entrepreneurial backgrounds, they are keen to apply their business experience to the venture of giving money away. As such, a replication of New Public Management (NPM) in the form of ‘new’ philanthropy management is noticeable. NPM denied the special nature of the public sector and, instead, is built on values, concepts, and experiences drawn from the private sector; its institutional centrepiece was the replication of the private firm with legitimacy arising from substantive performance and cost efficiency (Olsen, 2004). Essentially, advocates of philanthrocapitalism are trying to replicate this approach in philanthropy (Bishop and Green, 2008; Friedman, 2013; Salamon, 2014). While their emphasis on quantification is novel, the focus on business models and impact is anything but. Contemporary discussions on ‘effective’ philanthropy can be traced back to the notion of ‘scientific philanthropy’, a critique of the unsatisfactory workings of public and private relief organizations during the 1873–78 depression (Bremner, 1956). Taken up by Carnegie and Rockefeller, this developed into the vision that a more professional approach, based on impact assessment and informed by business and corporate principles, was needed. Recently embraced and developed by ‘Carnegie’s Children’ or ‘philanthrocapitalists’, who approach philanthropy in the way they have succeeded in business (Bishop and Green, 2008), this idea has spawned a whole dictionary of philanthropenese, ‘the lingua franca of the foundation world’ (Macdonald, 1956, p. 99). Examples include ‘entrepreneurial philanthropy’ (Gordon et al., 2016), ‘creative philanthropy’ (Anheier and Leat, 2006), ‘venture philanthropy’ (John, 2006), ‘catalytic philanthropy’ (Kramer, 2009) and ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Salamon, 2014), as well as accompanying concepts such as ‘effective altruism’ (Singer, 2015). Notwithstanding some subtle nuances between these terms, they boil down to the idea of taking ‘a high engagement and long-term approach to generating societal impact’ using three core practices: tailored financing; organisational support; and impact measurement and management (Balbo et al., 2016, pp. 18–19). In their current
Providing Foundations 629 expression, they entrench two developments: the marketization of philanthropy, that is, the transfer and use of the principles and methods of the market (Nickel and Eikenberry, 2009), and the financialization of philanthropy, that is, the growing importance and use of financial concepts, markets, actors and institutions in philanthropy (Thümler, 2016). Despite populist rhetoric about how these ‘new frontiers’ of philanthropy can reshape and improve philanthropy’s global expressions (Salamon, 2014), there have been various criticisms: philanthrocapitalism appears to be a breakthrough in labelling rather than in practice (Frumkin, 2003). Its actual achievements are disputable (Edwards, 2008) and its surrounding spectacle equates to a ‘fantasy machine’ that allows for ‘a disavowed enjoyment of global inequality’ (Wilson, 2014, p. 1144). There are also concerns about its political roles and influence (McGoey, 2015). Such critical engagement with the area and how it is promoting and promulgating neoliberal ideas and ideals across the global policy spectrum under the veil of philanthropy have, however, tended to be peripheral (Thümler, 2016). Broader questions about how the accompanying change in discourse and perspective is altering philanthropy and restraining its potential as risk taker remain. The extent to which the tools and techniques of philanthrocapitalism provide meaningful and relevant insights, and the degree to which they replicate rather than challenge neoliberalism and its accompanying socio-cultural, economic, and political impacts, need wider and more reflective research and discussion. These issues need to be discussed in the context of philanthropy’s social and political roles more broadly, as well as in relation to their impact on the evolution of global policy and on the forms and styles of transnational administration. For example, philanthrocapitalism’s infatuation with business models and quantification can be seen as leading towards risk aversion and an emphasis on fast results. By contrast, the importance of structural and political aspects in developments—such as weak public systems—tends to be consistently underestimated (Seitz and Martens, 2017). Alongside debates about foundations’ own egos and competition in the global policy arena, as well as questions that equally apply to other private actors, such as matters of authority, voice, and choice (e.g. Graham, 2017), the foundation field provides another important aspect for consideration: foundations’ transience. Unlike national governments and prominent inter-governmental institutions, a still small, albeit growing, number of foundations is pursuing a limited-life or spend out approach. In other words, after a certain date, the foundation simply ceases to exist. At that point, all of a foundation’s resources will have had to be given away or used up. Of special interest to the global policy field is that one of these is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Established as a foundation for the twenty-first century, the entirety of its endowment will have to be spent within twenty years of the death of Bill and Melinda (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2017). As such, current concerns about its role and influence in global policy might be dwarfed by questions as to what happens at that point. While, in the case of the Gates Foundation, the sheer amount of resources that need to be used up in a relatively short timeframe will prove interesting, the limited-life approach presents wider
630 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow challenges at all levels of policy, including issues of accountability, responsibility, and liability by, and to, such foundations beyond their cessation.
35.8. Philanthropy and Policy: Beyond Pleasantries and Paranoia Philanthropy in policy is a polarizing issue, a pendulum swinging between pleasantries and paranoia: another grateful acknowledgement of foundations’ contribution versus another grave attack on their undue influence. Transnational developments and perspectives, however, point to the diverse expressions and expectations of philanthropy. It can be seen as ‘stop-gap’, ‘stakeholder’, ‘standard-bearer’, ‘starry-eyed problem solver’ and ‘stooge’ in the policy process (Harrow and Jung, 2011). While there is no doubt that a simplistic ‘enchantment with philanthropy’, a preference for idealism over realism can pervade policy discourse (Harrow and Jung, 2011, p. 1055), governments are not necessarily ‘rolling over’ for philanthropy (see Phillips and Smith, 2016). Indeed, the changing global regulatory landscape for philanthropy, partly aimed at clamping down on terrorism and tax evasion, increasingly curtails the global activities of a large part of the philanthropy field, leading to remarks about the essential role of government in maintaining the vibrancy of philanthropy (Farouky, 2015, p. 47). With wider debates about philanthropy’s philosophical underpinnings and role— whether philanthropy is or can be effective or efficient, whether philanthropy is mundane and pedestrian, and whether philanthropy is patronizing, dehumanizing, self-indulgent and ideologically-driven (Davies, 2015)—there is an ongoing need for better understanding and theorizing of the area. The call for social scientists to ‘take philanthropy seriously’ (Rogers, 2015) so that the area can move ‘beyond simplistic celebratory, or indeed fatalistic, rhetoric’ (Harrow and Jung, 2011, p. 1049) is a long-standing one. While it has been made repeatedly, its urgency remains and is likely to take new meaning and exhibit new dynamics as the global policy agora evolves. Studies have tended to focus on ‘the big three’, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and, more recently, on the philanthropic activities of Gates, Soros, and Zuckerberg. Given these philanthropies’ prominence in, and dominance of, an otherwise more hidden field, these choices are unsurprising. However, expressions and activities of philanthropy and their relationship to, and role in, the policy process should be looked at in more depth, especially from non-North American perspectives and within non-North American contexts. This would enable policy, practice, and academia to move away from the tendency to compare apples with pears when examining and discussing philanthropic foundations, and their forms, contexts, and activities (Jung et al., 2016). Differences in the legal forms and frameworks, governance, and accountability requirements, as well as the expressions and approaches to philanthropy mean that the overemphasis on, and use and transfer of, US-based and informed conceptualizations is inappropriate: it severely
Providing Foundations 631 limits the growth and development of the field of philanthropy study. Thus, while some foundations’ policy influencing opportunities might be extensive, hidden, and detrimental to society, it is important to separate these from the wider field of foundation activities: foundations will vary as to whether they want to make, develop, change, absorb, or simply support the policies of either their donor or recipient countries. Second, while critical engagement with foundations’ roles in policy at all levels and at all steps of the process is important, this needs to be reflective and nuanced; it needs to move beyond the well-trodden paths of common critiques of foundations and philanthropy more generally. To this end, it is important to bear in mind that foundation fatigue works both ways. On the one hand, it relates to valid questions about foundations’ activities in the policy arena and the need to explore how far some foundation roles could be more appropriately addressed by other means; whether there are more appropriate approaches to achieving equality, balancing needs, and distributing resources than philanthropy. On the other hand, foundation fatigue can also relate to foundations’ bemoaning and their becoming fed-up with having the burden and expectation of ‘fixing society’s ills’ placed on their shoulders, ‘effectively relieving governments of their share of the responsibility to citizens’ (Farouky, 2015, pp. 47–8). Different arguments pertain to intergovernmental organizations’ burden-sharing, where foundations’ ability to earmark funds is not open to member governments, so that the weight of some ‘burdens’ may in fact be heightened or redistributed. A plethora of research opportunities thus exist. At the most basic level more, better, and more timely data are needed: if the levels, forms, and flows of giving are unclear, it is neither possible to identify the gaps and tensions that need addressing nor to spot overemphasis on causes and contexts that warrant rebalancing. This relates to specific areas, such as philanthropy and development (Sanna and Mc Donnell, 2017), but also to philanthropy in global policy and transnational administration more broadly. Alongside the need for an integrative theory of foundations as an organizational form (Jung et al., 2018), the role and relationships of individuals within foundations need examination. How do these differences relate to foundations’ policy activities? What differences exist between younger foundations set up by entrepreneurs and more established family foundations? How do gender and age characteristics of foundations shape their activities? What is the role of trustees and professional staff in policy activities and between those at foundation headquarters or in the field? There are also the different philanthropic structures beyond foundations that influence policy and need attention. This includes corporate philanthropy by multi- national corporations and business- philanthropy- policy collaborations as well as philanthropic platforms such as the SDG Philanthropy Platform aimed at ‘getting the philanthropic scene right’ through learning from other countries’ experiences and helping foundations and philanthropists to develop effective and appropriate collaborations with governments and actors in a set of pilot countries, comprising Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Indonesia, and Colombia (OECD Development Centre, 2016; SDG Philanthropy Platform, 2017). Likewise, the role of international foundation networks, such as the Arab Foundations Forum or WINGS—the World Initiatives for Grantmaker
632 Tobias Jung and Jenny Harrow Support—as well as bottom-up philanthropic initiatives shaping policy at national and international levels, illustrated by different foundation forms’ activity and inactivity in fostering democratic reform in the Middle East (e.g. Herrold, 2012), are symptomatic of diverse organizational structures in the philanthropic community. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to policy makers and administrators in governments but also in international organizations. How do they approach, harness, and engage with philanthropy? Does philanthropy offer them the potential for ‘having the cake and eating it’ policy making by acting as a shield from democratic scrutiny or public accountability? Are international organizations and governments in their channelling and working with philanthropy themselves being exploitative of, and parasitic on, philanthropy? And, depending on whether philanthropy is ‘private’ or ‘public’ money, should this or should this not be the case? These are questions that apply as much at regional and global levels of policy and administration as they do within the nation state.
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Chapter 36
Gl obal Sum mi t ry as Sites of Tran snat i ona l Techno crat i c Managem ent a nd P ol i c y C ontestat i on Andrew F. Cooper
36.1. Introduction Global summitry has taken on a hybrid form in terms of its organizational character. In terms of the ‘human condition’ what jumps out at the surface level is the role of leaders (Alexandroff and Brean, 2015, p. 2). All of the major summit processes—both the older Group of 7 (G7) and the newer Group of Twenty (G20)—along with the concerts of powers in past eras, embody a leader-driven process. This role of leaders as a ‘spectacle’ is magnified by contemporary summitry, in which leaders are crisis managers in an expanded policy domain. While accepting that leaders are different than other state officials (English, Thakur and Cooper, 2005), attention only to this ‘top of the iceberg’ element misses how the process of summitry has been transformed. In the realpolitik post-war environments, leaders cut deals with their peers on ad hoc bases. Today, however, the nature of global summitry in an age of global governance is more complex. The salience of summits is embellished not diminished by the extension of analysis beyond leaders to the more functional components of administration and management of global and cross-national policy problems (Stone and Ladi, 2015; Luckhurst, 2016). This chapter captures the innovative quality of the G20 transnational management style. Acknowledging the importance of the layers below the summit leaders is not new. In many ways the decentred dynamic located in the G20 reproduces the model created by the G7 from the 1970s on. Yet, as this chapter elaborates, the G20 stretches the
Global Summitry 639 G7 model in a number of ways. Typically, the G7 role of the sherpas, along with finance ministry officials and central bankers were predicated on a culture of like-mindedness, with a high level of common coordinative discourse. Whatever the differences on specific policy objectives and outcomes, sherpas were permanent representatives of the leaders. The G20 is different. It features an expanded transnational policy community consisting of actors from the old G7 establishment but also those from the global South. While the intensity of the global financial crisis (GFC) helped mould the G20 as a crisis committee, tensions remained not only on matters of substance but on style. The G20 needed to adapt by cultivating a culture of flexibility and equibrium that allowed joint ownership. It also had to navigate the relationship between policy insiders and a host of other policy-oriented actors and networks oriented towards influencing the G20 agenda. This chapter supplements the analysis of the summit ‘iceberg’, and in particular, shares the sherpa process and its interaction with key technocrats. This includes snapshots of the manner by which a decentring process has recalibrated the civil society engagement within the G20. More generally, this chapter is about a shift towards informal institutions in the global area (see Vabulas, this volume). Lacking the legal authority of formal international organizations (IOs), the G20 faces considerable challenges in achieving global policy outcomes. Without the legitimacy provided by a legally mandated author, no G20 output is obligatory and relies instead on the notion that cooperation is valuable in terms of instrumental efficiency. This challenge relates not only to the policy output itself but to the wider process of coordination, as the G20 may also delegate policy responsibility to other IOs. This form of transnational management has taken hold as an innovative albeit uneven repertoire of policy coordination via the G20.
36.2. Global Summitry of the G20 Anne-Marie Slaughter captures the below-the-surface realities and interactions of the modern summit process—what Alexandroff calls the Iceberg Theory of Summits (Alexandroff, 2011). Slaughter notes that G summitry is ‘as much a network of Finance Ministers as of heads of state’ (Slaughter, 2004, p. 2). In particular, the layers below the leader—with the potential for straddling and ultimately erasing the domestic/international divide—went well beyond the ministerial level to a deeper array of advisors and officials (Slaughter, 2004, pp. 6–7). One fundamental component of this global policy and transnational administrative apparatus revolves around the role of finance officials and the sherpa team. Sherpas are the summitry term for the often well-connected representatives of political leaders—heads of state—at the summits. It is used by analogy with the porters that support climbers in the Himalayas. Sherpas do the ‘heavy lifting’ and prepare for summits, along with a small team of sous-or under-sherpas. It is important to underscore that although these actors possess some similarities with their counterparts in the United Nation’s secretariat or officials from the Bretton Woods institutions,
640 Andrew F. Cooper these finance officials and the sherpas are quite different. They do not operate as a global civil service as in formal institutions such as the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization (WTO). They do not share an institutional headquarters or common office space as in the case of other exclusive self-selective clubs like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Nor is there even an established organizational chart, as the G20 lacks a permanent secretariat. The transnational policy networks animated across the spectrum of summits are in many aspects quintessentially informal. There are no set procedures, or rules about decision-making. Rather the process has evolved in an improvised fashion albeit with a trajectory featuring at key moments considerable speed when under intense political and public pressure. As Slaughter illuminates, while a summit ‘can be no more than a talking shop and a photo opportunity . . . in times of crisis it provides a vehicle for prompt and decisive action (Slaughter, 2004, p. 37). In the case of the initial G7 summits, the impetus was the oil shocks and stagflation crisis of the 1970s. In the case of the G20, the catalyst was the massive financial crisis, or great recession, of 2008, which provided impetus for the first Leaders’ Summit. Because of the informal structure of the summits, tracing their processes is not easy since the detailed operational activity often occurs without much transparency and is submerged from view. Notwithstanding the limitations imposed by the closed nature of this model, highlighting the contribution of finance officials and the sherpas to economic policy making is vital to understand the contribution of the G20 in its elevated ‘hub’ status vis-à-vis global economic governance. Each G20 summit has its own specific policy narrative even if the G20 has explicitly embraced the role of a crisis committee. In addition, the process has sought a balance between privileging the priorities of the country (and leader) acting as the president, or host of a specific G20 summit, with the development of a flexible culture designed to allow some measure of sustained coordination. To some extent this culture was facilitated by the formulation of specific operational rules designed to facilitate continuity, such as the establishment of the so-called troika system (allowing the past, present and future hosts to work together). Indeed, it is this process that provides the vital glue to the G20 process ‘transferring knowledge’ between the different summits (Stone, 2013). But the network dynamics around the many meetings in themselves reinforced the process of coordination. Officials continued to have ‘red lines’ in terms of policy, which they did not cross. Within these limits, though, the ‘interpersonnel’ component associated with close ongoing interaction has amplified coordinative dynamics. Through an examination of the G20 as an institution of global governance, this chapter highlights two transformations associated with the G20—its emergence as a hub mechanism of global governance in response to the GFC, and its subsequent shift away from centralization toward that of fragmentation. That is, away from its apex concert like function to the role of networked focal point. This form of ‘functional fragmentation’ (Angeloni and Pisani-Ferry, 2012; Cooper and Pouliot, 2015) works in tandem
Global Summitry 641 with a technical bias that prioritized the skill sets of financial officials and sherpas. A number of other ingredients helped refine the operational code of the G20 in practice. One component was the shift away from the orthodoxy of the ‘Washington Consensus’ as the centrepiece of policy diffusion. Although the delegation of activities to other more formalized institutions was inevitable given the G20’s loose and flexible style, this meant that the policy agenda was not dominated by the G7 countries. Indeed, as part of the process of decentring, greater equilibrium was achieved between those actors representing the G7 and the non-West. At the same time, flexibility did not mean openness. Initially, the G20 put a premium on confidentiality. While producing communiqués like the G7, the G20 gave little room for transparency. In large part this was due to the informal nature of the G20 and its lack of legally-binding commitments. It was reinforced by incentives to build internal consensus among unlike-minded countries. Furthermore, several non-Western members of the G20, in particular China, Russia, India and Brazil, were highly sensitive to breaches of confidentiality. Nevertheless, over time, the process of decentring expanded. Although most of the activities of sherpas, finance officials, and central bankers continued in closed settings, the G20 summits opened itself to greater access by non-state groups. (Cooper, 2013; Hajnal, 2007). While some of this non-state actor engagement reproduced the uneven and summit-specific traits of the state-level summits, structured patterns took shape. In the G7 context, the sherpas held a dominant position as the permanent representatives of leaders. However, this hierarchy was recalibrated within the G20 as finance and central bank officials gained leverage. With the G20 initially concentrating its activities as a crisis committee, the expertise and specialized knowledge of its technocratic actors was not only vital but more amenable to building transnational policy communities. The skills of many of the sherpas were by contrast more diffuse and reflective of the different political cultures of the individual G20 member states. A similar trajectory took place among involved non-state actors. Given the closed culture of the G20, and the sensitivity of certain non-West countries to involvement by non-state actors, space for civil society access was initially curtailed. Groups that had a record of engagement with the G7, most notably the big international NGOs, such as Oxfam, were kept at a distance. Under such conditions it was the groups that promoted resistance and disruption that came to the fore, most notably, the ‘black bloc’ (groups of protesters who wear black clothing, scarves, and masks to conceal their identity) at the 2010 Toronto G20. Over time, however, the decentring of the G20 created considerable space for non-state actors. Moreover, these actors were structured by the G20 into discrete networks, including the Civil20, the Business20, the Women20, and the Youth20. Mirroring the state-leader G20 meetings, a recalibration of the hierarchy among the non-state actors has occurred with the Business20 gaining prominence over its counterparts.
642 Andrew F. Cooper
36.3. The G20 at the Core of the ‘Management’ of Global Problems The general pattern of transnational policy making in the summit process predates the G20, with the G20’s iceberg model replicating the G7. Although, at the outset, the G7 summit was designed to be a restricted meeting of the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies—with the bureaucrats ‘kept out of the process entirely’, this model proved impossible to sustain. As Nicholas Bayne puts it: Even before the first summit of all, at Rambouillet 1975, it was clear that this vision was out of reach. The subject-matter of international economics was too complex for the heads to reach decisions without some preparation. So they reconciled themselves to playing roles at the summit which had been written for them by others, especially their personal representatives or ‘sherpas’. This was the first stage in institutionalizing the summits (Bayne, 2001, p. 3).
Many of the core attributes of the G20 simply reproduce the process pioneered by the G7 (Cooper, 2010; Cooper and Thakur, 2012; Kirton, 2013). In terms of remit, it was the G7 that pioneered the template for addressing cross-border policy problems and transnational management practices in the context of complex interdependence. In doing so, the G7 pioneered utilizing sherpas to do the heavy policy lifting. As the personal representative of the leader, sherpas maintained a close relationship with him or her, working on the text (i.e. the talks before the talks) and sitting close to the leader at the summit itself. Some sherpas in the G7 process maintained their status over a long period of time. Others used this role as a stepping-stone to other careers. Whatever their trajectory, the main role of the sherpa was to act as a conduit between their national leaders and the wider policy community. The extension of these core ingredients to the G20 should not be seen as minimizing the G20’s adaptive capacity. The G7’s small membership allowed it a measure of coherence. But this advantage came with a deep legitimacy gap. The global South, generally, and major countries such as China, India, and Brazil resented the manner by which the G7 imposed its priorities on other actors, including international organizations. Nor did the attempts by the G7 to engage with non-member states ease their sense of resentment. While Russia was brought into the G7 to make it the G8 (in 1998), Russia was left out of the G7 group of Finance and Central Bank officials. The creation of the G20 did not completely end the debate over legitimacy. Some degree of equilibrium was achieved by the inclusion within the G20, on an equal status with G7 countries, not only major non-Western countries (China, India, Brazil, South Africa, as well as Russia). However, a wider array of members (Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina)—an entire span of mid- size or smaller countries—were left out (Cooper, 2012; Cooper and Momani, 2014).
Global Summitry 643 This feature become even more sensitive when the G20 targeted alleged tax havens as part of its policy agenda. Nonetheless, the legitimacy debate was tempered by the crisis conditions under which the Head of State G20 took shape. For one thing, the G20’s informality did not necessarily push aside legally mandated international organizations simply because the UN proved incapable of responding to the GFC. While the IMF was challenged by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in terms of managing key policy issues, both institutions, along with the World Bank and the OECD, were delegated key tasks as part of the G20’s crisis committee activities. Whereas the G7 agenda involved a strong element of mission creep, with an expansion of the agenda to a wide array of geo-security and social issues, the G20’s early agenda remained concentrated on the GFC. This focus facilitated trust among un-likeminded members as G20 members had a stake in the stability of the global financial system. Although some outside the traditional G7 establishment criticised US and/or Western policies as the cause of the GFC, none sought to impose conditions on their membership or role in the G20. The differences in the agenda between the G7 and the G20 was mirrored by the hierarchy among state officials. In both cases, the summit process originally privileged the finance track, which in fact predated the leaders’ meetings. In the G7, this initial stage was relatively short lived, as the ‘Library group’ (because they first met informally in 1974 in the White House Library) quickly morphed into a leaders’ summit. This also included a separate annual meeting of G7 Finance Ministers. By way of contrast, the meetings of the finance and central bank officials at the G20 were far more protracted. Initiated in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997/9, this technocratic transnational network was an extension of practices from an earlier era that privileged informal ‘rules of the game’ (Helleiner, 2013 pp. 161–2). The added significance to such activities was that—unlike the G7—the G20 finance track included officials from the global South. Although the creation of this body was placed firmly in the hands of key actors in the North (especially Larry Summers as the US Treasury Secretary and Paul Martin as the Canadian Finance Minister), in performance it constituted a sharp break from the past. The inclusion of key actors beyond the old G7 establishment, including Pedro Sampaio Malan (who acted as both President of the Brazilian Central Bank and Finance Minister before moving to the IMF); Xiang Huaicheng (as China’s Vice Minister and Minister of Finance); Yashwant Sinha (who served as India’s Finance Minister before becoming Foreign Minister); and Trevor Manuel (the long-serving South African Finance Minister) facilitated the build-up of trust crucial to the operation of the elevated Heads of State G20 after the GFC. While the operations of the G20 finance prior to 2008 consolidated the principle of equilibrium between G7 and non-Western members, it also reinforced the non- transparent nature of the G20. Throughout this earlier period, little attention was given to public communication about the official attendance at meetings below the ministerial and central bank governors’ level.
644 Andrew F. Cooper The expanded agenda of the G7 reinforced the position of the sherpas over the finance and central bank officials, as the sherpas possessed the generalist skills (and personal relationship to leaders) to dominate activities relating to geo-security or social issues. The G20’s concentrated agenda related to the GFC reduced the space for this type of generalist, consolidating the position of finance and central bank officials with their technical backgrounds. Although the iceberg theory still held up in terms of a lack of transparency about the substantive component of the G20’s finance track, the upgrading of this ‘submerged’ component was apparent. A key element was the creation of a number of technical- oriented Working Groups (WG). At its first November 2008 summit, the G20 established four working groups to encourage financial regulatory reform: WG1 Enhancing Sound Regulation and Strengthening Transparency; WG2 Reinforcing International Co-operation and Promoting Integrity in Financial Markets; WG3 Reforming the IMF; and, WG4 The World Bank and Other Multilateral Development Banks. As the G20 moved toward the London summit in April 2009, a fifth WG was added on employment. The concentrated focus of working groups provided the G20 with its policy leverage. No one who is serious about coordinating a global monetary and fiscal response to the deepest recession since World War II thinks that this is something that the G7 can engineer. Whether the task is developing ideas, reaching consensus on their desirability, or moving from ideas to implementation, the G20 with working groups active in all these areas is where the action is. (Eichengreen, 2009, p. 1)
In terms of global policy and transnational administration, the ambition of these working groups can be grasped by WG1’s agenda to provide ‘an integrated vision of financial regulations around the world’ in order to ‘guard against excess risk-taking, to avoid regulatory gaps, and to prevent the type of escalating credit growth’ that fed the current crisis. At the core of WG1’s twenty-five recommendations were efforts to ‘increase confidence and stability in the financial systems of individual nations and worldwide’ (Finance Canada, 2009). The high-level membership of WG1 underscores the technical orientation of the G20 finance track. One of the co-Chairs was Tiff Macklem, the Associate Deputy Minister at the Canadian Department of Finance. The other co-Chair was Rakesh Mohan who had earlier been Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2002 to 2004 and again from 2005 to 2009. The rest of the membership reinforced this technocratic impression. The Chinese representative was Han Mingzhi, Director-General of the International Department of China Banking Regulatory Commission from 2003 to 2010. Others included Hervé De Villeroché, a senior official at the French Treasury, Dietrich Lingenthal, a senior official at the German Ministry of Finance, and Patrick Parkinson, a long-serving official with the US Federal Reserve Board. Despite the primacy of the finance track, G20 sherpas maintained some leverage in the process. Some sherpas had technical expertise of their own, facilitating this process. Jens Weidmann, the German sherpa, had been at the Bundesbank where he was the
Global Summitry 645 head of the Monetary Policy and Monetary Analysis group, before moving in 2006 to the Federal Chancellery as an advisor to Angela Merkel. In a similar fashion, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Indian sherpa, served as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission from 2004 onward, prior to becoming a key advisor to the United Progressive Alliance government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And Jonathan Cunliffe, Gordon Brown’s sherpa for the London G20, was a long-serving senior finance official with sophisticated expertise about the G20 agenda. Other sherpas maintained leverage with other forms of competence. This included competence in the law, trade, and foreign affairs. For example, Daniel Price, the US sherpa, was both a former US Trade Representative official and a partner with a major law company, Sidley Austin LLP, before becoming Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs for President George W. Bush. Lourdes Aranda, the Mexican sherpa, had acted as Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs in December 2003, responsible for bilateral relations between Mexico and Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Len Edwards, the Canadian sherpa, had a long career that included appointments as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (2001–2004), as well as being a former Ambassador to Japan and Korea. He Yafei, the Chinese sherpa, was the experienced Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. And Jean-David Levitte, the influential French sherpa, was a former Ambassador to the United States. The G20 working groups as venues of transnational administration provided a site for G7 and non-western actors to engage on a sustained basis. In the case of the Framework Working Group, to give just one example, Canada and India served as co-chairs through a number of G20 summits hosted by different countries. In a number of ways, this form of technocratic management often led to successful policy delivery. One example came in 2009 when Zhou Xiaochuan, the Central Bank Governor of China, proposed the expanded use of Special Drawing Rights (which are the IMF’s ‘currency’). This was agreed by many officials and pushed forward at the London summit. Another illustration was the Mutual Assessment Process (MAP) created by the G20 (with technical support from the IMF) to analyse national economic policies. The aim is to formulate state-specific adjustment commitments following several meetings a year of mid-to high-ranking officials from finance ministries and central banks of the G20 countries in the Framework Working Group Yet, as an informal institution, the G20 lacks an enforcement mechanism and has little in the way of transparency or accountability. Furthermore, as in the case of the G7, pressure built up for the G20 to engage an expanded agenda. Finance officials pushed back with concerns that the ‘purity’ of the G20 be maintained, that is, to continue to play the role of a crisis committee. The sherpas—often at the encouragement of those leaders who felt more comfortable with a less technical agenda—advocated an opening up of the G20 along the lines of a G7-like steering role function. If implemented, the G20 would engage with issues beyond the financial crisis. A former G20 sherpa put this debate into sharp relief: ‘[the G20] is the best forum for deliberating on global economic issues [but] in many delegations there is a dis-function between Sherpas and finance Sherpas’
646 Andrew F. Cooper (O’Neill and Terzi, 2014). In other words, the technocratic officials were opposed to ‘agenda creep’ while the G20 sherpas were open to an expanded policy mandate. In terms of bureaucratic style, improvisation was a frequent feature of Leaders Summits. At the outset, meetings were held in an ad hoc fashion. In the preparation for the Washington summit (2008), meetings were conducted by phone, an awkward procedure (Kirton, 2013, p. 276). Even the preparatory meeting for the London April 2009 summit meeting was done at short notice with ‘everybody crammed into a long, thin room’ at Lancaster House (Kirton, 2013, p. 276). Over time, some semblance of order took shape, due largely to the dominant agenda position of the finance track. In organizational terms, the finance officials had an established culture from earlier G20 Minister of Finance meetings. By way of contrast, none of the G20 sherpas—or for that matter their leaders—had sat around a table of this type. Indeed, only Gordon Brown, as the Chair of the IMF’s Monetary and Financial Committee had sustained experience in global financial governance. At both the Washington and London Summits, the sherpas of the host country (Daniel Price, the US sherpa in the Bush administration, and Jonathan Cunliffe, UK sherpa for the Brown administration) were instrumental in putting the logistics of the summits together. At this early stage, with the agenda dominated by the question of ‘how to fix the banks’ and the state of the financial sector more generally, the technocrats in the finance track moved to the top of the hierarchy. In Washington, the work of drafting the summit communiqué was given to the finance deputies, although the document was reviewed by the sherpas. Throughout the process the sherpas took a supportive role, closely following the work of the four WGs, with their presence at the meetings of the finance deputies designed to facilitate coordination. However, the dominance of the finance track was buttressed by the drive to deliver a big stimulus package and a reformed regulatory process at the April 2009 London summit. While the sherpas retained an importance in linking their heads of state with the IMF, WTO, and OECD, many lacked the technical expertise to drive the 2008 G20 summit process. The finance track was thus very much in charge. This pattern continued at the Pittsburgh September 2009 summit, where the US sherpa, Michael Froman, prepared a number of papers but left it to ‘the finance officials to draft most of the text on all technical matters [including] financial regulations, IFI reform, and macroeconomic policy [with the sherpas focusing] on the economy, the overview text for the draft communiqué, and non-finance items including trade’ (Kirton, 2013, p. 302). Adapting to their secondary role, the sherpas applied their diplomatic skills to broader institutional questions. An early sign of this focus was a meeting of the sherpas from the US, UK, China, Germany, and France—in a highly untransparent manner—at the headquarters of the European Bank in Frankfurt in August 2009 to discuss the implications of the G20’s elevation to wider questions of global governance (He, 2015, pp. 6–7). Follow-up meetings focused on G20 membership questions, and the role to be played by other ministries (including foreign affairs) as well as compelling issues beyond finance/economics such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Global Summitry 647 After a decade, G20’s operational culture revealed an impressive degree of coherence. As witnessed by the Chinese summit in 2016, and Germany in 2017, the hosts of the G20 are ready to lead once a country ascends to the G20 presidency. China for example held finance/central bank meetings as early as September 2015, a year before the Hangzhou summit. Others followed, including meetings in November 2015 and February 2016 in China, and another one in Washington during the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings. Although the first meeting of the sherpa track was not held until January 2016, this was still an advance over prior improvised procedures. Moreover, whatever this process lacked in speed, the sherpa process made up in terms of scale, with over 400 delegates attending the January 2016 meeting. Although China and Germany may have stellar organizational skills, the decentred culture of the G20 adds momentum to the expanded style of the G20. Not only have a wide variety of bureaucratic components at the state level become involved, so have an array of non-state actors.
36.4. The Shifting Domain for Global Policy Cooperation The G20 collective response to the 2008 GFC affirms that policy can no longer be viewed only in the context of an insulated domain of national entities. To be sure, the need for a ratcheting up of ‘transnational administration’ was recognized not only by the old G7 establishment but also by rising non-West powers, who were often strong defenders of sovereignty. The rationale for a crisis committee was captured by the remarks of Guido Mantega, Finance Minister of Brazil and Chairman of the Finance G20, in October 2008: there is no agile structure prepared to deal with emergency economic problems. That is what we have seen at this time . . . We have to turn this G-20 into a forum or a tool of some kind that can provide answers to immediate problems and coordinate its actions better amongst many countries. We are facing the most serious financial crisis perhaps since the crisis of 1929, and as this crisis is getting more serious it demands quick answers, immediate answers. It must be monitored day by day, hour by hour, so that the necessary measures can be taken to handle the problems that arise. So, there must be very agile instruments available for that to happen. (Mantega, 2008, p. 1)
Even if bent, the hold of sovereignty was not broken. For all the collective action mobilized by the global financial crisis, this form of behaviour took the G20 into contentious territory. Clear red lines took shape for many of the G20 members about what they would not agree to in terms of transnational administration. Just to give the most prominent example, China from the first summit resisted any mention of ‘imbalances’ in the communiqué. China was also adamant that the issue of climate change should not be discussed, with any negotiations left to the UN. And, at least initially, China would not
648 Andrew F. Cooper allow currency exchange rates to be part of the G20 agenda, although over time this positioned loosened. At the September 2009 Pittsburgh G20, the US went around the sherpa process with a long document on the eve of the summit, although what was put forward was not highly problematic except for an initiative on climate finance. Again, China led the resistance. Germany pushed for a chart of principles about economic behaviour that did not receive wider endorsement. A wide number of countries also unilaterally defected from G20 commitments. Australia broke away from the push for monetary stimulus by repeatedly raising interest rates. France and Britain supported the curtailment of bankers’ bonuses. One of the more accurate criticisms of the G20 process (Helleiner, 2014, p. 26) is not that there was a lack of technical leadership but that its leadership centred on the pursuit of national priorities. Major countries were accorded a right of veto on contentious issues. As one former official put it: ‘the chairs of the G20 need to show a certain deference to the concerns of the most influential G20 members, the United States, the European Union, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and China’ (Bradlow, 2016, p. 143). In parallel fashion, it became recognized that the host country taking on the presidency (together with to some extent the other members of the troika), must be given lattitude to shape the agenda of summits in accordance with national priorities. These constraints do not suggest, however, that the G20 lacked capability in terms of mobilizing collective action on core issues, albeit most commonly this role was advanced via a form of indirect leadership in tandem with a delegative process vis-à-vis other institutions. A good illustration of this dynamic came out in the agreements on forms of macro-prudential financial regulation such as the Basel III Accords (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, 2010; Baker, 2013) which moved beyond self-regulation. The importance of the interplay between the G20 and the Bank of International Settlements on the Basel Accords (designed to improve the banking sector’s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic stress) were acknowledged. On one side, the leaders of the G20 with technical knowledge from the finance officials and central banker track emphasized the importance of implementing the Basel III Accords to ensure adequate macro-prudential or system-wide financial regulation. At the 2011 Cannes summit the leaders stated: We are committed to improve banks' resilience to financial and economic shocks. Building on progress made to date, we call on jurisdictions to meet their commitment to implement fully and consistently the . . . Basel III capital and liquidity standards, while respecting observation periods and review clauses, starting in 2013 and completing full implementation by 1 January 2019. (Bank for International Settlements, 2012, p. 23)
On the other side, the Basel Committee put pressure on the G20 summit to ensure that member countries met their promise to implement the Basel III commitments fully and consistently. Particular emphasis was placed on the laggards that included Argentina,
Global Summitry 649 Indonesia, Korea, Russia, Turkey, as well as the US. Again, the approach to achieving a successful result was flexibility and patience. As the Canadian Finance Minister is quoted as saying in 2010 at a meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in South Korea: ‘Implementation is a variable. Some would like a shorter period, some would like a longer period. I think that can be worked out over time. There can be a compromise on that’ (Elliott. 2010 1). The preceding discussion helps to dispel the notion that the G20 became immobilized because of the push back on grounds of sovereignty—and resistance within the financial sector. As Luckhurst carefully puts it: It is important to analyze the role of the G20 as a hub of the new community of practice on macroprudential financial regulation, in this modified international finance regime. The G20, especially the Finance [track], was a crucial context for macroprudential advocates to contest and reconstitute the norms of financial regulation. It was not inevitable that norm advocacy would result in an ideational shift; it depended on the strategic, political, and cognitive authority and influence of institutional and individual norm entrepreneurs. (Luckhurst, 2016, p. 152)
Nor is the need for patience and flexibility restricted to a particular component of the G20’s agenda. Notwithstanding the pressure to shift its priority from crisis orientation towards a more comprehensive agenda, the G20 has retained its ability to act as a networked focal point on an issue-specific basis relating to its core agenda. A significant case in point was the G20’s initiative on global tax governance, a process that delegated much responsibility to the OECD. The 2013 Saint Petersburg summit proposed action on a new set of international tax rules, asking the OECD to make fifteen action plans to deal with tax evasion. By the 2014 Brisbane summit the G20 indicated significant progress on the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plan to modernize international tax rules and pushed the OECD to complete this work. By the 2016 Antalya summit in Turkey, the G20 leaders endorsed the BEPS strategy and asked the OECD to develop a framework for implementation (Zhu, 2016).
36.5. Stretching the Boundaries of Global Policy and Transnational Administration An assumption of this Handbook is that although governments and their public servants remain core actors in the evolution of global policy and transnational administration, space will open up for new entrants. In terms of the G20 this available space was severely restricted in the initial stages due to its crisis-committee orientation in the wake of the global financial crisis. In this environment, the emphasis was on getting the functional
650 Andrew F. Cooper operations of G20 up and running and not consultation with non-state actors. The big international NGOs were present from the initial summit in Washington, DC, but with no contact with policy makers. In this closed environment, space opened up for groups that explicitly rejected the G20’s technocratic culture. A major source of resistance was the Black Bloc associated with earlier protests at the G7, In terms of stylistic performance these activities featured the wearing of black clothing, scarves, ski masks, and balaclavas. The goal was to be as disruptive as possible. Other resistance-oriented groups included ATTAC—an activist organization originally created with a predominately European membership for promoting the establishment of a tax on financial transactions. Over time, however, the non-state actors with a policy focus made considerable inroads into the summit process. While the international NGOs played a significant role in this transition, the G20 also opened other fronts with access available on a differentiated scale to the business community (the B20), women (W20), and youth (Y20). This shift, in part, reflected a recognition by the G20 that it needed to be seen as more inclusive. As the G20 members are quoted as stating in 2012, the aspiration for this form of outreach to non-state actors was based on the need to strengthen its capacity ‘to build and sustain the political consensus’. It also reflected a logical extension of the decentred dynamic of the G20, with ‘some degree of instrumental purpose in that some elements of civil society possessed considerable technical skills’ (Slaughter, 2016, p. 172). While the role of non-state actors was not on an equal basis with state officials, civil society representatives gained some measure of access to G20 process at the Seoul, Cannes, and Los Cabos summits. A breakthrough meeting between civil society and the G20 sherpas featuring diverse representatives from civil society took place at the 2010 Seoul summit. Approximately 150 representatives from civil society met at a Civil20 in Incheon, Korea. Civil society groups positioned themselves not only as the champions of an expanded development agenda (with an emphasis on financing for development/ Millennium Development Goals and a rights-based approach for development); but also as champions of the perceived gaps of inclusion in the G20. Furthermore, the meeting constituted a procedural breakthrough due to the presence and active participation of so many sherpas and sous-sherpas, including those from India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa (but not China or Brazil). Oxfam International was represented at the Civil20 by a large team, with an emphasis on pushing forward with the Seoul development consensus (pushed forward at the November Korean G20 summit), along with representatives from groups such as Make Poverty History, Caritas, Heinrich Böll Foundation, Interaction, Save the Children, and Social Watch. French President Nicolas Sarkozy personally met civil society representatives prior to the 2011 Cannes summit. Big international NGOs such as World Vision were given privileged access. This rise of status was replicated at the 2012 Los Cabos summit. Civil society not only had ample access to the media centre but was consulted in an unprecedented fashion with daily briefings by the Mexican sherpa office (Stevens, 2012).
Global Summitry 651 The ascendancy of non-state actors was even more visible across the business dimension. In the forefront of this dynamic was the policy entrepreneur, Bill Gates, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates possessed the reputation and organizational resources to promote a comprehensive engagement with the G20 summit process, tapping into both its functions as crisis committee (proffering detailed proposals for a financial transaction tax) and later as a steering committee (on development and health issues (Wroughton, 2012; Gates, 2012). This influence reached a peak at the 2011 Cannes summit with the Gates Foundation becoming embedded at the core of the summit process complete with a de facto sherpa (Geoff Lamb, a former senior official with the World Bank), and Bill Gates being commissioned by Sarkozy to write a report on innovative financing for development. While Gates never repeated this role in subsequent summits, the engagement of the wider business community reveals that the trend towards decentring the G20, with the object of greater inclusiveness, has reached a point of no return. The B20 meeting held just prior to the Chinese 2016 Hangzhou summit was unprecedented in terms of scale, including representatives of 142 companies on the Fortune 500 list and 103 among China’s top 500. As part of this preparation, Li Baodong, the Chinese G20 sherpa and Vice Foreign Minister, met with the Chairs and co-Chairs of B20 working groups in March 2016.
36.6. Conclusion: The Pull and Push Back of Transnational Technocratic Management The case of the G20 is in many ways the classic case highlighting the momentum towards transnational technocratic management. With its complex agenda and extended membership beyond the established G7—as well as pressure to deliver results—the G20 has required notable administrative skills on a global basis. Some leaders possessed the technical orientation to take part and even to dictate this process, as illustrated by the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s, performance at the April 2009 London G20. But most leaders lacked the personal capacity to take an active role in shaping a comprehensive response to the global financial crisis. Instead, they mobilized the effort in a pivotal informal site of administrative practice from the top, but in a manner that privileged the below-surface functional component at the technical level. In this approach, the role of the traditional supportive agents of summit diplomacy— sherpas—was significant but not sufficient. Although the skill set of the sherpas meshed with many parts of the culture of the G20, the technocratic orientation of the G20 stretched their competency. The balance between the finance and sherpa track was
652 Andrew F. Cooper gradually recalibrated as the G20 moved into areas beyond finance, such as the political- and development-oriented non-financial issues, but during the high intensity initial stages of the Head of State G20 as a crisis committee, it was the work of the finance track that took priority. Through the development of this repertoire, in keeping with the image of an ‘iceberg’ (Alexandroff, 2011), it is the hidden component of the G20 that is most substantive as opposed to the visible tip of the leaders’ performances. While it is the theatre of the leaders’ meetings that grab the attention, it is the ongoing engagement of officials and above all the officials dealing with financial regulation, financial inclusion, international taxation, and infrastructure investment that are the most salient ingredient. In addition to the autonomous efforts within the G20 club on issues such as global financial safety nets, it is the network of connected institutions that must also be considered. This is true not only of the IMF but also of the Financial Stability Board on global systemically important financial institutions, and the OECD on global tax governance. Such a technically oriented agenda made it very difficult for non-state actors to gain access to the G20 in the early stages. It was only when the G20 moved from being an exclusive crisis committee to having a steering committee role on development, global partnership for financial inclusion, energy sustainability, anti-corruption, and employment that civil society could become entrenched as part of the G20’s transnational network. Through this process, the G20 risked being caught between two different types of contestation. From one perspective the G20 was deemed to be a new concert of power, overly powerful and even dangerous (Åslund, 2009). From another perspective, however, gaining consensus on the intricate technical details imparted a messy and slow image to the G20 that fell short of popular expectations (Bremmer and Roubini, 2011). Overall, viewed through a more nuanced lens with an eye to how new modes of administrative practice in transnational spheres actually operate, the ability of the G20 to leave the ‘Westphalian conceptual stage’ (Stone, 2008, p. 19) should not be overestimated. The G20 was restricted by state-centric concerns in each of the member countries, a dilemma that became more acute as crisis conditions became more varied on a country-specific basis. The binding quality of policy application on a transnational basis was severely limited, with little or no coordination of implementation. The G20’s power and capacity ultimately rests on its capacity to consult and cultivate, not command and control. As Chancellor Angela Merkel put it bluntly, at a G20-sponsored meeting of business leaders: ‘We are 20 different countries, with 20 different political systems, with 20 different development levels. Everything must be unanimously approved. This is no simple task . . . The sherpa process, as you could imagine, is quite a challenge. It is like herding cats’ (Reuters, 2017). Yet, the fundamental innovative quality of the G20 cannot be ignored. With the privileging of the G20, the global component of policy making can no longer be dismissed as irrelevant. National policies are globalized, and the workload and assumptions of key state officials are altered by their involvement in the G20. Being participants in a networked focal point, along with trust-building and an element of peer pressure, in
Global Summitry 653 an environment of informality and exclusivity, facilitates a concerted engagement about economic policy performance and the parameters of international consistency. For all of its limitations, the G20 is pivotal to the design and management of transnational policies.
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Chapter 37
He ads of Internat i ona l Organiz at i ons Politicians, Diplomats, Managers Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-c hong
37.1. Introduction Heads of international organizations (IOs) personify their organization. Presidents of the World Bank, managing directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Directors-General (DGs) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and World Trade Organization (WTO) are often the only public figures from their organizations who are widely recognized. Some leaders have been public figures in the international community before they get to the position while others emerge from within the organization. Some are elected by member states based on the principle of one state, one vote; some through an elaborate election process; others are chosen by a closed group or even by an individual. Some take on the job with visions for the organization to change; others prefer to continue doing what the organization has always been doing. Leaders matter. They make a difference to the operation of IOs and sometimes to world politics. In domestic politics, individual leaders can shape political outcomes either because of their moral standing, their unique skills, their personal capacities, or the institutional support they have (Foley, 2013; Rhodes and ‘tHart, 2013). Leaders of IOs need these capacities and more, because of the ambivalence of their position. When Michael Moore, a former Prime Minister who became Director-General of the WTO, grumbled: ‘you’re not a director nor are you a general’ (VanGrasstek, 2013, p. 518), his complaint was not original: the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, famously welcomed his successor to ‘the most impossible job on this earth’ (Tharoor, 2007).
656 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong The position of the heads of IOs gives them an international standing. They mingle with heads of state at international gatherings. When they visit capitals, they often meet national leaders, whether presidents, prime ministers, or ministers. Their position, however, differs significantly from that of national leaders. As individuals, IO leaders share with national leaders the need to work within structural constraints and to manage expectations. They too have to develop the capacity to persuade, the ability to present visions, or at least strategies, for the future. However, institutionally they are not provided with the authority to impose decisions on member states or to announce unilaterally what they will do in the way domestic leaders can (Neustadt, 1999; Brown, 2013; Burns, 1978). Once (s)elected, they are never granted the prerogatives of leadership or the scope for decisive actions that national leaders have. Their political masters are member states, and they are no more, as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan saw it, than the IOs’ ‘diplomatic and political agent(s)’ (Annan 2007, p. xi). They must constantly negotiate their position with multiple masters, respond to state representatives who oversee their every action, and listen to the demands and complaints of often middle-ranking bureaucrats who serve as state representatives. Even in those areas where their authority is explicit—over the secretariats that they appoint and direct—their authority may be limited. IO leaders are (s)elected for specific terms; their staff are mostly tenured, career professionals who can wait out the years until a new leader arrives. It is a different form of leadership, too often ignored in international relations literature (Chesterman, 2007), which depends on the application of negotiating skills, the utilization of independent international standing, the powers of persuasion and strategic positioning to advance the agenda of the IO to which they are committed. The discussion of IO leadership in this chapter intertwines three themes: • how the heads of IOs can maintain legitimacy in the eyes of both member states and the secretariat; • how the heads of IOs can respond to the demands of accountability to their state masters while retaining the ability to lead; • how the heads of IOs can muster the necessary capacity, both politically and technically, to influence the agenda, understand the problems, and develop ways forward for the institutions they lead. The term ‘director-general’ (DG) is used generically to refer to the president of the World Bank, the managing director of the IMF, and DGs in the other United Nations (UN) agencies. The discussion also centres on traditional treaty-based intergovernmental organizations rather than the growing ranks of informal IOs such as that discussed by Felicity Vabulas in this Handbook. The heads of IOs walk a tightrope: to lead but not to command, to consult but not to hector, to inform but not to lecture, to encourage but not to nag. Skilful leaders are able to shape their organizations. It was certainly easier in former days when the number of interested member states was fewer and leaders’ tenure was not term limited, the more so in the peripheral IOs where national interest was even more marginal and where long terms entrenched leaders.
Heads of International Organizations 657 Yet, even now leadership is possible. To be the head of an IO provides opportunities to shape the course of actions of the organization, influence its agenda, set its broad narratives, and alter the environment. Some manage to succeed while others fail as leaders. Robert Cox in 1969 argued that the ‘quality of leadership may prove to be the most critical single determinant of the growth in the scope and authority of international organizations’ (1969, p. 205). To explain whether and how this may be the case, this chapter explores the DGs’ capacity to steer and shape their organizations, by focusing on their relationships with the member states and with the secretariats they head.1 The first section examines the qualities that a potential DG might require, outlines the way that they reach their positions, and evaluates the implications those (s)electoral procedures have on those who are (s)elected to a position as IO leaders. The second section analyses three roles that all heads of IOs play. They are managers of diverse multilateral organizations that are sometimes scattered around the globe. Bureaucracies need to be led; they are not machines or instruments that work on cue. These international bureaucracies may be large or small, centralized or decentralized, well-funded or resource poor. They all consist of people from diverse intellectual, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. To be able to manage such an international bureaucracy, according to some state representatives, is the most difficult challenge for DGs. IO leaders are diplomats. They are international figures who represent their organizations in international arenas and ‘sell’ their agendas to the international community and heads of governments. Their pronouncements are given attention and weight because they are not accountable to a single person or state but speak on behalf of the IO. It is their responsibility to promote and advance the collective interests of the organization to the international community and its member states. IO leaders are politicians. Their first priority is to work with member states in the organization. They must be able to manage the relationship with member states (whether large or small, rich or poor, powerful or weak), and among member states themselves (working as individual states or in groups). Of course, if member states do not wish to act, the head of an IO has little independent authority. The ability to ‘lead from behind’, to nudge without being seen to be pushing, to master while being a servant of member states, are the necessary qualities for a successful DG. The chapter concludes that how heads of IOs balance these three roles often shapes the outcomes of their organizations. Their skills and capacity are important in the way IOs are able to pursue collective actions and resolve common problems. They nonetheless operate within constraints. The nature of IO leadership must be contingent, depending on agency and opportunity.
37.2. (S)electing IO Leaders The treaties or articles of agreements that created IOs often say little about (a) the quality of candidates in IO leader positions, (b) their job description, and (c) the specific
658 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong (s)election processes of IO leaders. All three elements have evolved over decades of practice. Concerning ‘quality’ and calibre, there is a wide variation of expectations placed on candidates seeking the top position in IOs. Should IO leaders be insiders or outsiders of the organization? Should candidates for these positions have international standing? Should they bring vision to the job? Should they be technical experts in the organizations they are about the lead? There is no one right or wrong answer. Indeed, member states hold very different expectations on IO leaders that makes their (s)elections often difficult. There are however some minimum qualities candidates must have. First and foremost, they must be able to transfer their national identity to an international one. They must lead the organizations in pursuing collective interests rather than those of their country of origin. They are watched by member states that jealously guard their sovereignty and autonomy. Their legitimacy and reputation consequently lie very much in how ‘international’ they can be, whether they are seen to be committed to the mission of the organization and representing the interests of all states, rather than those of the country where they are from. Some IO leaders have had no difficulties in assuming the international identity whether dealing with member states or international civil servants. Notwithstanding the criticisms some might have had about James Wolfensohn (World Bank 1995–2005), Pascal Lamy (WTO 2005–13), Francis Gurry (WIPO 2008–) or Margaret Chan (WHO 2006–17), no one ever questioned their loyalty to the organization and multilateralism. In contrast, some leaders brought their national identity or even their domestic partisan ties right into the organization. Paul Wolfowitz (World Bank 2005–07) was widely regarded as an extension of the US State Department after he took over as the president at the World Bank. By bringing compatriots into key positions, he immediately generated suspicion and indeed undermined his own credibility in dealing with the Board and in managing the staff. Some never seem to make the transition, certainly not to everyone’s satisfaction. At FAO, Jacques Diouf (1994–2011), and at WIPO, Kamil Idris (1997–2008), were both seen as more committed to causes of developing countries than to the broader interests of their organizations. Second is the prospective leader’s vision for the IO. At the heart of the process of selecting leaders of IOs there is a basic anomaly. On the one hand, member states insist that they, and they alone, determine the agenda of the organizations, and leaders are their servants. Yet, at the same time, they ask candidates who seek to lead the IOs what their vision is for the future of the organizations. They declare that they want to appoint on merit, to have substantive leaders with the capacity to shape the agenda but assume that those futures will be tailored to the aspirations of member states. Some leaders have their ‘visions’ for the organization and are able to push in that direction. James Wolfensohn had an established commitment to development. Gro Harlem Brundtland wanted to revitalise the WHO and place health on the global agenda with serious financial commitment. Dominique Strauss-Kahn wanted to ‘ try to “revamp” the IMF.’ In contrast, others brought on board less ambitious and less clear vision. At the WHO, Dr Chan had a six-point agenda, nothing very new but focused on the organization; her own priorities were health in Africa and for women. There was always a need to
Heads of International Organizations 659 reconcile their own initiatives with what the member states have agreed to in the five- year plan. Chan generally came in with an agenda for continuity. Third, expertise may be seen as an essential capacity for leadership. Expertise often refers to technical knowledge as many IOs are technical organizations. For example, whether they have practised as doctors or not, all DGs of the WHO so far have had medical qualifications. All DGs at WIPO have worked in the field of intellectual property rights (IPs). Technical expertise is not by itself enough. Knowledge of running the organization is often seen as a plus. It can empower DGs. Francis Gurry had twenty- five years of experience in the agency before he was elected to lead WIPO; Margaret Chan, well-known for handling the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, had been an Assistant Director-General (ADG) within the WHO, as had her predecessor. By contrast, in its short history, WTO usually emphasized political skills more than knowledge of the organization until quite recently. Its predecessor, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), was managed by three inside technocrats. Peter Sutherland, who oversaw the final conclusion of the Uruguay Round and the creation of WTO in 1995, set a new precedent as a former minister of Ireland. He was followed by four former ministers or prime ministers. The question when selecting Pascal Lamy’s successor in 2013 was how to balance knowledge of trade and the organization, and the known political skills of the candidates. Where leaders are not elected by member states, they often come from outside the transnational professional networks that are connected by interest in, for instance, development economics, intellectual property, or public health, as in the case of the World Bank. None of its presidents (with the exception of Eugene Black) had worked within the organizations and in some cases they had had little or nothing to do with the organizations they were chosen to lead. They were bankers, managing large financial institutions, or former politicians, as in the case of Robert McNamara, a former Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz from the State Department, and Robert Zoellick a former US Trade Representative. When the government contacted Kim Jim (the exception as he was a health practitioner and academic) about becoming Bank President, he confessed ‘he had only the foggiest notion of how development finance works’ (Rice, 2016). None had experience in development. In the IMF, European Finance Ministers and central bankers were often selected; they had experience and connections across the key countries, but not of the world of IOs. Detailed knowledge of the organization was not an apparent criterion for the top job at either the World Bank or IMF. Ironically, while those IO leaders who were successful through an election, as in WIPO, WHO, and FAO, had to have expertise in the precise field, the very process of their election militated against too open a use of that expertise. While conscious that IO leaders are elected and thereby have their legitimacy, member states continue to appeal to their sovereign rights and are less likely to give them the authority to speak out. DGs are constantly reminded that member states are the masters of the organization and DGs must serve their interests, even though they seldom agree on anything. For IO leaders, the qualities needed are highly contingent: a need to balance expertise with political sensitivity, an ability to chart a direction, but one that is consistent with
660 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong the inchoate aspirations of the membership, while always maintaining the trust of the different participants inside and outside the organization. Juggling these different demands is a complex skill. Their legitimacy is shaped in part by the processes though which the IO leaders reached their position and the debts that they incurred on the way. There have been a number of reviews of leadership (s)election processes that raise questions about how they may be done better, but with little apparent impact (Kahler, 2001; Paretz, 2007; Weitz, 1997; Urquhart and Childers, 1990; Andresen, 2002). According to the formal rules, IO leaders are ‘appointed’ by the governing body. The same word ‘appoint’ underpins different practices across IOs. At the IMF and the World Bank, the Board still ‘appoints’ the head of the organization, but they are actually chosen elsewhere. In other cases, such as FAO, member states actually ‘elect’ DGs based on the one-state-one-vote principle. The range of ‘electorates’ falls into three groups. First are those where IO leaders are effectively ‘selected’, whether it is the World Bank or the IMF. Second is the managed consensus election at the WTO. Third is the open election, whether at a restricted committee (WHO’s Executive Board with thirty-seven members or WIPO’s Coordination Committee with eighty-three), or at an open ballot as at the FAO where each member has one vote—consequently, a tiny Pacific island has the equivalent vote to China (with the largest population) or the USA (with the largest economy). The monopoly of the US president in appointing the president of the World Bank and the EU in negotiating the appointment of the IMF Managing Director, though a long-accepted practice, has been challenged in the past decade. In 2011, the World Bank adopted a new procedure for appointing the next president with open nomination of candidates by their governments. In 2012, Nigeria and Columbia proposed candidates. At the last minute, Columbia withdrew its candidate, but Nigeria did not. While the US Treasury insisted that the United States continue its leadership role in the World Bank, President Obama nominated, as the World Bank president, Jim Kim, a Korean- American who had worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas, to fend off challenges from some developing countries, but also a few developed ones. In 2011, similar challenges took place at the IMF when Mexico and South Africa nominated candidates. Australia and Canada supported the former head of the Mexican central bank for the position, not with any expectation he would win, but to make a point. That alternative candidates can be nominated by member states at both institutions not only challenges the American and European monopoly over the positions, but also raises the issues of accountability for their future leaders. The WTO processes provide an example of the complex processes that can apply. Consensus is the working principle in nearly all activities at the WTO, hence the preference for the ‘selection’, rather than an election, of its DGs. After the WTO was created in 1995, member states took a more active role in selecting the DG. With the ‘very painful experience’, or as some ambassadors call it ‘the trauma’, of a deadlock over the selection of DG in 1999, member states developed a managed consensus ‘election’ procedure, the troika system. The system was tested in 2013 when there had been a longsimmering discussion among ambassadors to the WTO in Geneva demanding that, on
Heads of International Organizations 661 grounds of equity, the next DG should come from either Africa or Latin America. Nine candidates emerged—three from Asia Pacific, three from Central and Latin America, two from Africa and one from the Middle East. The troika (made up of the chairs of the General Council, Dispute Settlement Body and the Trade Policy Review Body) started the facilitating process in January 2013. Three ‘tests’ for candidates were accepted by the General Council. First, did candidates have a simple majority of member states; second, did they have the majority support of countries weighted by their share of world trade; third, did they have a spread of support from all geographical areas? Two procedural principles were agreed: there would be two rounds of elimination, and members would be asked for their choices, first five (out of the nine) and then two (out of the five). Members were not asked for, or permitted to provide, reasons for their choices. Further no negative votes or vetoes would be accepted. The troika could not enforce their recommendations; they had to rely on goodwill. After nominations, the details of the candidates were circulated and candidates all had the same opportunities to address the General Council. To ensure absolute fairness, presentations were timed to the minute and the opportunity for members to ask questions was determined by lot. The same rule was applied to the press conference candidates faced. Strict rules were implemented to ensure fairness. The troika then, always acting as a group and never individually, met all the 159 members, and asked each ambassador to nominate their first five choices. Where members did not have delegates in Geneva, they arranged phone calls with their capital cities. Delegates handed in their selections but had no further conversation. This was approval voting, noting whom they supported without having to choose between them at this stage. On the basis of those consultations, the troika proposed that four candidates should drop out (fortunately, they all did). A further round of consultations reduced the numbers to two: from Mexico and Brazil. The members were asked for a third time which candidate they preferred. Although the US and other developed countries supported the Mexican, they also revealed that they had no objections to the Brazilian if he won support. The selection committee finally recommended the Brazilian, Roberto Azevedo. This brief outline does not convey the reality of the campaigning. Candidates had meetings with the ambassadors at the General Council in Geneva. They criss-crossed the globe to visit countries. The president of Brazil took the Brazilian candidate with her to Durban for the 2013 BRICS summit to try to swing support for him from the other leaders. Since governments nominate the candidates, they finance their campaigns too. That concerned ambassadors from the smaller countries who pointed out there was a clear correlation between national GDPs and the order of elimination; only big countries, an ambassador argued, could afford the campaigns needed to win the selection— the same issue was hotly debated in other IOs where their DGs are openly ‘elected’. Once governments nominate their candidates for DG positions, they have to organize campaigns on behalf of the candidates in both Geneva and in capital cities. It is no small task for small countries whose entire mission in Geneva often consists of no more than half a dozen employees. During the campaign, candidates make promises, not different
662 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong from domestic politics, about their future actions in IOs. What distinguishes the campaign for DG positions at IOs from domestic election is the literal ‘vote buying’. A group of countries approached one candidate and asked: ‘What can you do for us as your rival candidate has already promised to build an electricity grid for our cities?’ The candidate continued, ‘I said, “Nothing. I cannot even get my government to pay for my airfares, let alone give you an electricity grid”.’ There are no formal rules against the ‘dowry’ that candidates bring to the job and ‘some governments spend a lot of money backing up their candidates.’ Finally, it is not uncommon to trade votes across IOs—we support your candidate in this IO and in return you would support mine in another. In IOs where ‘open election’ is held, the final votes can be quite tight. Dr Lee won the appointment by the WHO Executive Board with a 17–15 split. Francis Gurry won with 41–40 at WIPO Coordination Committee. José Graziano da Silva won the FAO election in 2011 with a vote of 92–88 in a ballot where each member, regardless of size, had a single vote. In the last two cases the vote was interpreted, whether accurately or not, as a split between developed and developing members. When a DG is elected with a very small margin, he/she faces serious challenges in gaining a broader legitimacy among member states and, sometimes, among its staff too. DGs have both debts to those who elected them and often a need to be concerned about their re-election. The range of commitments and promises made by candidates can permeate much of what they will have to do, from promising to open country offices to financing an agricultural museum. This analysis of leadership selection processes suggests one counter-intuitive consequence. The more open the electoral system and the broader the electorate, the more restricted the pool of candidates is likely to be. Those nominated will usually be members of an existing technocratic network grouped around the subjects. They can more easily illustrate that they have the technical expertise and they will know the country experts, whether in the capital cities or in the local national missions. By contrast, when IO leaders are ‘selected’, they are usually chosen for their experience and record in other environments in the hope that their success elsewhere can be replicated in the IO. Thus, when the process is restricted, insiders never win; when it is open, outsiders rarely do.
37.3. Heads of IOs in Action To understand the potential influence IO leaders may have on the organization as well as member states, we need to appreciate how they interpret their mandates and approach their responsibilities. They must live in a world of nuance, ambiguity, and opportunity. As Pascal Lamy put it, ‘There is no job description for this job’ (quoted in Xu and Weller, 2018, p. 80). Nonetheless, there are several roles DGs must fulfil: • They must manage diverse multilateral organizations that are often dispersed round the globe and with staff drawn from different cultures and traditions.
Heads of International Organizations 663 • They must represent the IO in diplomatic forums, interact with heads of government and ‘sell’ the mission of their organization to the international community. • They must work with member states, whether through representatives in national capitals or ambassadors and delegates to the IOs. These roles are not distinct. Leaders are conscious of each of them all the time. However, the categorization does allow us to consider each role and explore how the leaders work, what options and strategies they can use and how their roles vary from organization to organization. Managing role: IO leaders tend to head sometimes large, and often bureaucratic, organizations that have their own history, culture, codes of expectations, and criteria of appropriateness (March and Olsen, 1989). These bureaucracies can enable and assist the leaders (Xu and Weller, 2004, 2009, 2015); they can also thwart and undermine through their dysfunctional bureaucratic cultures (Barnett and Finnemore, 1999, 2005). The staff of IOs can be a great asset: dedicated, creative, experienced; or they be a dead weight, disinclined to do more than a minimum. Leaders need to know how to encourage the staff, work with them and maintain their support, both active and passive. Leaders cannot do everything; they have to mobilize those officials who have the skills, the institutional knowledge, and the local connections. They must learn who to trust, and who not to alienate. An ambassador to WTO stressed how important it was: ‘If [the DG] can’t manage the staff then demoralisation sets in. Motivation levels go down, infighting starts, so the DG is very important in terms of staff.’ The degrees of interest in management vary. One experienced Executive Director (ED) at the IMF argued that ‘Lagarde was one of the first interested in how this place was managed.’ She was the first to ask questions at the IMF about who was the client, what could we bring to the party, and other managerial probing questions. She appointed a deputy with similar priorities. Dr Brundtland came to the WHO after serving as Prime Minister of Norway. She was ‘Norway’s own “iron” lady, an energetic blend of doctor, manager, politician and international activist’ (Andresen, 2002, p. 15). She wanted a more cohesive team but found the conditions very different when she tried to develop any concept of collective responsibility. One of the first things she did was to ask for, and receive, the resignations of all her Assistant DGs. To abolish the practice whereby the five permanent members of the Security Council all had their deputies at the WHO, she symbolically changed the title of Assistant DGs to executive directors to break the nexus with the UN representation. Building on her experience as a prime minister in Norway, she tried to integrate her executive directors into a cabinet system, but it never seemed to work. An observer noted: As head of government, you can exert discipline among your cabinet colleagues and your ministries and you can provide reasonably consistent political messages through the organization of government. You suddenly realise this place is a loose coalition of NGOs and national interests.
664 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong In comparison with the WHO, the WTO is a much smaller, centralized, and coherent organization. It does not make management easier as the secretariat is highly qualified and professional with the protection of tenured positions. ‘This is a horribly difficult place to manage: Look, if you have a hotel that everyone checks into and doesn’t check out of, you have therefore a lot of problems handling professional development, motivation etcetera.’ With his experience of government in Paris and Brussels, Lamy was accustomed to a style of management that relied on his own cabinet, so requests used to come through his cabinet, and particularly through his chef du cabinet. Many of his directors found it frustrating when direct discussions with the DG were rare and instructions came from his chef du cabinet. Some became even resentful as they often did not get a response. The hot-tempered Wolfensohn had serious problems managing the World Bank as an organization in his first 2–3 years as he could burst into rage, demanding his managing directors or vice presidents resign on the spot. Management improved when he appointed Shengman Zhang, essentially as his chief operating officer, who dealt with the day-to-day issues, recommended promotions, and withstood his boss’s occasional volcanic temper. Delegating the responsibility of managing the organization also allowed Wolfensohn to engage in external representation activities that he personally enjoyed. By contrast, Robert Zoellick might often have been absent from the Board meetings, but he would meet his senior team every morning at 8.30. It provided a good opportunity for them to talk to one another (which they were otherwise often too busy to do), but that did not necessarily translate into easy individual access to the President. DGs may direct staff, but that by itself can no more ensure positive support in an IO than in any national bureaucracy. DGs need to persuade the staff to follow them. History shows that formal powers alone are not enough to mobilize that support. There is a record of IO staff openly opposing their leaders. Country directors of the World Bank signed a petition against Wolfowitz’s continued tenure and DC-based staff mounted a ‘blue ribbon’ campaign, wearing them to signify their opposition. FAO staff walked out of an annual meeting as a response to Graziano’s reduction in their conditions and the WIPO staff association is known to have complained about Gurry’s leadership to the member states. The ability to manage a diverse international staff is one of the key qualities of DGs and indeed many member states also appreciate those DGs who are able to manage the staff effectively. Diplomatic role: IO leaders are expected not only to lead but also to represent the institutions. There are four distinct functions. They have to: • persuade national leaders of their case, as a means of getting the necessary political support. That includes attending international summits and gaining support from key states; • attract the attention of international and economic communities to generate both the legitimacy needed for their cause and the financial resources to carry them out. Increasingly the latter are supplemented by private foundations or through dedicated donor ‘trust funds’ (see the chapter by Alesani, this volume);
Heads of International Organizations 665 • work with peers in other IOs and in the UN; • work with broader community. Many IO leaders are international personalities, formerly senior politicians or diplomats who do know the leaders. They may have ready political access. Peter Sutherland was brought in to conclude the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. When a CEO of a large American company threatened to undermine the negotiations, Sutherland rang President Clinton to deflect the criticism; Clinton returned the call. Lamy had worked with European leaders when at the EU. Zoellick had been the Special Trade Representative for the USA. These IO leaders were not bluffing; they could contact national leaders. There is always the dilemma. One DG, when asked whether he talked to national capitals, answered: ‘Of course I do, but they [some state representatives] hate it.’ IO leaders need to approach national leaders for political support. They can do so when attending meetings of the G8 and G20 where they have access to the world leaders and are expected to advance ‘noble’ causes that countries often support but are reluctant to fund. One of the greatest contributions Dr Brundtland made as the WHO DG was to take health issues to the global stage, going from capital to capital, across multiple forums to convince world leaders, private as well as public, of the importance and urgency of financing health issues. However, the attention from national leaders, at the G20 or on the end of the phone on issues troubling an IO, is likely to be limited. National leaders sign off on declarations and make promises to push items through domestically. Their attention nonetheless is often fleeting; there are usually more pressing demands on their time. Persistent persuasion without being seen as pushing is one of the core diplomatic skills IO leaders need to have. One WTO official commented, Ruggerio ‘had one thing right, which is you can’t back the US into a corner, you’ve got to keep the US onside’. Discreet diplomacy is part of the game of multilateral cooperation. Heads of IOs may tread the world stage with national leaders, commune with ministers, and speak on behalf of their organization and its interests. Occasionally, those connections may turn out to be crucial in shaping an agreement. It is not uncommon for member states to ask IO leaders to mediate their differences with other states over thorny issues. For the regular activities of IOs—the IMF’s surveillance, the World Bank’s projects, WIPO’s treaties, the WHO’s management in epidemics—the bulk of the work is undertaken by the staff. Effective diplomacy can strengthen any DG’s hand; it is a necessary, but not by itself a sufficient, condition for success in achieving an IO’s ambitions. Political role: After the glare of a global summit, IO leaders have to return to the routine interaction with the executive directors and national ambassadors, back to the constant process of negotiation with representatives of member states, who are, within their own political systems, middle-ranking diplomats but who, within the IOs, regard themselves as the master of the IO and its leaders. Whatever form state representation may take in an IO—via group representation at an Executive Board, direct representation by ambassadors to the WTO or, as at most IOs, through a combination of generalist diplomats attached to the local embassy and responsible for activities across several IOs, and technical experts who fly in from capital cities—member states increasingly assert they
666 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong are the masters of IOs. The member states may be large or small, working as individual states or in groups, and supporters or opponents of multilateral causes. They all want IOs to be ‘member-driven’, even while asking DGs to design a member-driven strategy (without, it seems, being conscious of the irony of such a request). They want to have close control over what IO leaders do while being unable or unwilling to commit political capital to key issues IOs have to manage. The famous grumble by Ruggiero, the WTO DG, reflects this political reality: When I go to Paris or I go to Washington I see Prime Ministers and Presidents. When I’m in Geneva I have to ask permission to go to the toilet, and the members say, ‘Yes, but only two minutes!’ (VanGrasstek, 2013, p. 506)
He was not alone. A senior adviser to several DGs at WTO recalled: Ruggiero, Lamy and Supachai all say: ‘I’m the DG of the WTO, when I travel I meet Presidents, I meet Prime Ministers. Do I have to deal with these guys?’ We used to say to them, ‘you may not like these ambassadors, you may think they’re just playing around half the time, but these are the guys who are writing the telegrams on a daily basis back to their capitals, and whether you like it or not, the capitals will look at you through the eyes of these ambassadors so you’d better get on side with them and start kind of using the network. But they didn’t like it.
This was the same advice Wolfensohn’s deputy Shengman Zhang gave to him: ‘The Board may not help you accomplish anything, but it can make it impossible for you to achieve anything’ (Zhang, 2006, p. 27). It needed to be adequately managed. Managing state representatives is never easy as there is always a level of suspicion. Faced with a perverse motion in the World Health Assembly, Margaret Chan burst out in frustration; ‘I have ten seat belts on me and I can’t move an inch; the bottom line is that the membership does not trust the secretariat.’ (A Brazilian delegate sang back a tune from Evita: ‘You know we have always loved you’) (Xu and Weller, 2015, p. 1). However, the tensions were clear. Leaders of IOs are in constant negotiations with member states that officially decide what the IO will do. Yet unlike in domestic politics, the IO leader must answer to 180 or more ‘masters’ (rather than a single minister) of unequal power and size, with varying interests and commitment to multilateral cooperation, and often with very different opinions about what the IO should do. Member states may be organized into a series of blocs, sometimes with overlapping memberships. The constellations of support for IO actions may change from topic to topic. At worst, it can lead to constant gridlock; at best the situation requires a skilled mediator to identify the common ground and to assist the members to reach it. In this sense the leader of an IO must be a politician, a builder of coalitions, a conciliator and a counsellor. While working in a non-hierarchical system, DGs must be able to rally members behind their policies and strategies. This requires them to have the political skills to work with those who share their ambitions and ideological beliefs as well as those with different political objectives and from different cultural backgrounds. They have to work
Heads of International Organizations 667 within the existing arrangements, often a political architecture that corresponded to an economic reality of the 1950s and 1960s rather than now. Despite the difficulties and potential gridlocks, IO leaders can achieve a fair amount: ‘as a DG, you have to have a sense when it is my opportunity to actually do something’. ‘This is a job of influence; it sometimes lends you an authority to influence while making it clear it is on lease, not given’, commented one DG.
37.4. Conclusion: Maintaining Trust and Legitimacy Leaders of IOs are the link between the member states, whether in IOs or back in capitals, and the secretariat who are the IO’s continuing presence and who of necessity deliver the programmes or services for which the IO is responsible. IOs cannot be regarded as a single unit, a simple cog which works on demand. It is important to understand what drives them and how they can be improved. DGs thus must be understood as a separate influence. They often personify the organization. They, more than any individual, as Cox noted almost fifty years ago, may be ‘the most critical single determinant’ in determining that future. Understanding how they can influence, or undermine, the mission and working of any IO must be central to any analysis. The determinants of the influence of IO leaders may depend on a combination of factors: where they come from (geographical origin as well as profession); how they become heads of IOs (selected, elected, or appointed) and the enduring impact of these methods; their career paths, their ‘ambition and ambition’s limits’ (Mallaby, 2004, p. 100), and the qualities regarded as necessary for successful tenure, which include: expertise, legitimacy, and trust. These can shape what leverage (formal and informal) they have, and how effectively they are able to fulfil their obligations. If IO leaders have little formal power except over their staff, they still have a melange of mechanisms through which they can exert influence as long as they retain the trust of members and staff and a degree of legitimacy that permits them to use the levers they have. They have their power through chairing meetings, their ability to apply the knowledge the secretariats can generate, their ability to mobilize networks, the capacity to negotiate, the application of expertise—these assets have a chance of working only where leaders can combine both trust and legitimacy. The leaders have varying degrees of independence, from the WTO at one end of the spectrum to the IMF at the other. That influence depends on the levels of participation of member-state representatives in day-to-day activities and the extent to which proposals require the consent of members. These situations can change when the IO is transformed. As political, rather than primarily technical, imperatives have begun to dominate the WHO, the DG has had less room to initiate and needs to spend more time
668 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong in generating widespread support. In the FAO, the gap between members and DGs has been distinct for some time. If member states trust their leaders to work on behalf of the IO as a whole and not any single state, they may be prepared, within limits, to give them some scope for initiative; but only on lease. If that trust breaks down, stalemate tends to follow. Indeed, IOs will often wallow in the doldrums when the principal members distrust the leaders but do not have the ability or the desire to actually remove them. Both the FAO and WIPO suffered when developed countries became disillusioned with the organization’s leadership and chose to ensure that nothing was done; more active opposition to leaders who had support from developing member states would have been too confrontational. As elected officials, DGs have constituencies to nurse. In comparison to the early days of these IOs, more member states have sought to become active, but they are not all committed to the same vision of what the IOs should achieve. The more diverse the membership, the greater the participation; the more organized the electoral groupings, the harder the balancing acts become. Interests become more differentiated. Almost all IOs appeal to the notion of being member driven. Many have tried to restrict the capacity of IO leaders to take independent action. The freedom IO leaders once had, when they could serve several terms, occurred in another century. IO leaders need skills to maintain diverse relationships in the modern political environment. Modern communications have ensured that everything they say is readily accessed and open to (mis)interpretation. One DG was surprised how carefully anything he said in public was analysed, ‘because what I say doesn’t matter; ultimately it is what the member states decide’. That is a little disingenuous. DGs help shape that agenda, particularly in those IOs with limited oversight and a lack of interest from member states. The task is hard, but it is far from hopeless. It is possible to construct support for initiatives, but only by understanding the complexities of the organizations they serve. Wolfensohn successfully gained support for his Strategic Compact when anti-globalization protests were in full swing in the second half of the 1990s. When member states refused to move an inch in Doha trade negotiations, WIPO managed to sign the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published work for the visually impaired. We leave the final word on IO leadership to the world’s longest serving international negotiator. The Uruguayan diplomat and politician, Julio Lacarte, was involved in the foundation of the GATT in 1947. After an active sixty-five years in IOs, he concluded in 2013: In the real world the DG carves out his role according to his charisma, professional strengths, ability to interpret governmental trends and interests, and personal relationship with the accredited ambassadors. (vanGrasstek 2013, p. 518)
In sum, DGs have, perhaps remarkably, been given little attention in the analysis of IOs. The emphasis is primarily on member states and their capacity to determine what IOs
Heads of International Organizations 669 do and how their wishes can be enforced. DGs and secretariats are combined as the ‘agent’ who implements, or obstructs, the instructions of the member states. To incorporate the DGs into a single unit, as much principal-agent analysis does, underplays their influence and the opportunities they have to influence the agenda and the direction of the organizations they head. Future studies need to treat the DGs both as leaders with some autonomy and as managers who are, in their turn, principals seeking to ensure that their agents, the secretariat, carry out their wishes. DGs who have the capacity to lead can mould the ideas of member states. The influence is by no means unidirectional. Where there is a lack of interest among member states, DGs may be the principal innovator. A more open approach to identifying the sources of ideas, the differential role of DGs and secretariats, and indeed a greater appreciation of the variations within secretariats, might provide a novel explanation of IOs because it starts from a different set of assumptions from those analysts that see IO activities only through the eyes of member states, and those who see any initiative from staff as a sign of a dysfunctional organization. When IO leaders are taken as independent variables in IO analyses, the vast literature on leadership can help—their ideas, their initiatives, their capacities, and the environment in which they operate, all matter. Their capacity can be a function of their institutional foundations and their ability to seize opportunities when members are divided, when masters are multiple, where information is scarce and where expertise is restricted. Such studies may provide unexpected insights into the way leaders of IOs lead and the way these organizations work.
Note 1. The chapter is based in part on approximately 200 interviews undertaken across six international organizations over the last decade. Where quotations are included without specific references, they are drawn from the interviews that can be cited but not attributed (see Xu and Weller, 2004, 2009, 2015).
References Andresen, Steiner. 2002. Leadership Change in the World Health Organization: Potential for Increased Effectiveness? Lysaker: The Fridtjof Nansen Institute. Annan, Kofi. 2007. ‘Forward’. In Simon Chesterman (ed.). Secretary or General? New York: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, Michael and Finnemore, Martha. 1999. ‘The Politics, Power and Pathologies of International Organizations’. International Organization, 54 (4): 699–732. Barnett, Michael and Finnemore, Martha. 2005. Rules for the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brown, Archie. 2013. The Myth of the Strong Leader. New York: Basic Books. Burns, James. 1978. Leadership. New York: HarperCollins. Chesterman, Simon. 2007 (ed.). Secretary or General? New York: Cambridge University Press.
670 Patrick Weller and Xu Yi-chong Cox, Robert. 1969. ‘The Executive Head’. International Organization, 23 (2): 205–30. Foley, M. 2013. Political Leadership: Themes, Contexts and Critiques. New York: Oxford University Press. Kahler, Miles. 2001. Leadership Selection in the Major Multinationals. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions. New York: Free Press. Mallaby, Sebastian. 2004. The World’s Banker. New York: Penguin Books. Neustadt, Richard. 1999. Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. New York: Free Press. Paretz, David. 2007. ‘The Process for Selecting and Appointing the Managing Director and First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF’. Backgrounder, IEO, IMF, BP/07/01. Rhodes, R.A.W. and ‘tHart, P. (eds). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership. New York: Oxford University Press. Rice, Andrew. 2016. ‘Is Jim Kim Destroying the World Bank –or Saving It from Itself ’. Foreign Policy, 27 April. Tharoor, Shashi. 2007. ‘ “The Most Impossible Job” Description’. In Simon Chesterman (ed.). Secretary or General? New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–46. Urquhart, Brian and Childers, Robert Erskine. 1990. A World in Need of Leadership: Tomorrow’s United Nations. Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. vanGrasstek, Craig. 2013. The History and Future of the World Trade Organization. Geneva: WTO. Weitz, Charles H. 1997. Who Speaks for the Hungry? How FAO Elects its Leader. Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. Xu, Yi-chong and Weller, Patrick. 2004. The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants and the GATT/WTO. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Xu, Yi-chong and Weller, Patrick. 2009. Inside the World Bank. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Xu, Yi-chong and Weller, Patrick (eds). 2015. The Politics of International Organizations: Views from Inside. New York: Routledge. Xu, Yi-chong and Weller, Patrick. 2018. The Working World of International Organizations: Authority, Capacity, Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhang, Shengman. 2006. One Step at a Time. Shanghai: Wenhui Press (in Chinese).
Chapter 38
Internationa l C i v i l Se rvant M anag e me nt A Personnel-Influenced Research Agenda Kim Moloney
38.1. Introduction If it is true that ‘international bureaucrats matter’ (Eckhard and Ege, 2016, p. 722), then international organization (IO) studies are incomplete if we overlook the international civil servants (ICS) interacting with member states to create and influence global public policy and the transnational administration. Employees of international organizations help manage global or regional public issues and interact with state-level national and local civil servants, their policies, and their citizens. An IO’s decision about how to recruit, whom to hire, which promotions to provide, matter. Each influences broader concerns about representation, legitimacy, and accountability and international civil servants impact on IO policies and programmes. This chapter begins by highlighting available ICS data before reflecting upon key personnel management differences between state and global transnational administrative spaces. The chapter showcases the most frequently explored public personnel management topics by international civil servant studies (recruitment and representation, secondment, contractual labour, organizational culture, and legal/adjudicative rights) before discussing where there is limited public personnel research (unions/associations, compensation, performance appraisal, and visa status). The conclusion suggests that IO public personnel management studies build upon frequently non-comparative and dated literatures with limited depth. The literature often focuses on just three institutions: the United Nations, the European Commission, and the World Bank. This oversight creates opportunities to deepen our understanding of IO public personnel management.
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38.2. International Civil Servant Data According to the Union of International Associations, there are 803 regional and international governmental organizations (Union of International Associations, 2013). Each organization employs international civil servants who liaise with member-state governments, create policies, encourage discussion, and implement global agreements. And yet—and perhaps this is a manifestation of limited attention given to civil servants and their management—there is incomplete data on the number of full-time, part-time, and consulting individuals employed by international organizations. Among the 411 IOs (or 51.1 per cent of the 803 IOs) for which the Yearbook of International Associations (2013) reports staff data, there are 264,298 civil servants. If we include IOs in which staff numbers are unavailable and short-term consultants, the numbers are undoubtedly much higher. The largest ten IOs (by staff) employ 122,231 staff (46.2 per cent of the reported 411 IOs). Eight of the ten are UN peacekeeping or stabilization missions. Two non-peacekeeping IOs in the top ten are the World Food Programme with 12,000 staff and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (part of the World Bank) with 6,800 staff. If one adds the other four IO members of the World Bank Group, its staff total is more than 10,000. IOs near the mean staff number (643) include the European Court of Human Rights (323 permanent; 326 temporary), Interpol (645 staff), and the World Trade Organization (629 staff) (Union of International Associations, 2013). At the regional level, EU institutions are perhaps the largest with about 46,000 staff of which about 24,400 work at the European Commission (Huggins, 2016). It may appear as if a quarter of a million international civil servants is a significant number but in comparison to the national level, the figures are sobering. In 2016, the United States employed 2,819,000 federal employees. Another 14,425,000 work at the state and local levels (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016; U.S. Census Bureau, 2017) with an untold number working as contractors. The workforce extends still further. An additional ‘blended’ federal workforce combines government contractors (3.7 million), grant employees (1.6 million), active duty military (1.3 million), and Postal Service personnel (its 500,000 do not receive congressional appropriations). This equates to one civil servant per 13.55 Americans or per 18.37 Americans, if we exclude the 6.6 million ‘blended’ workforce (author calculations using Davidson, 2017). In contrast, there is one EU civil servant per 11,089 EU citizens and one IO international civil servant (for the 411 IOs only) per 66,828 people, worldwide. It is safe to suggest that the number of national, state, and local civil servants (along with contractors and military personnel) in the world’s states grossly outnumber those working with IOs. Citizens may never directly interact with an international civil servant; the opposite is true with a country’s civil servants. This state of affairs—in terms of both data unavailability and scholarly preferences to study the state and its civil servants—may partially explain the lacklustre attention
International Civil Servant Management 673 to the public personnel management issues common to international organizations. Given IO expansion and institutionalization over the last century, this research oversight is unsustainable. International civil servants do matter. However, as noted in the next section, key differences exist between public personnel management at the state and transnational levels. The implications affect how we study international civil servant management and where to focus research questions.
38.3. Personnel Management in Transnational Spaces Public personnel management (or human resource management) is the ‘decisions affecting the relationship between the individual and the organization’ (Berman et al., 2013, p. 2) within a public organization. These human resources are the organization’s civil servants and its civil service. Similar definitions apply at the global level. This chapter defines public personnel management within international organizations as the decisions affecting the relationship between an international civil servant and his or her international organization. Even with a similar definition of state-level research, four features of the relationship between international civil servants and their IO differ from sovereign-level understandings. Each difference requires unique IO-specific reconsiderations of typical domestically focused personnel management literatures.
38.3.1. No Singular International Civil Service International civil servants interact with an organization’s member states, create policies that affect sovereign states, influence global public policy making, and work to limit global collective action problems. Unlike sovereign-level civil servants who work within a federal or state-level civil service bound by constitutional parameters, international civil servants are part of disaggregated and multiple international civil services bound by no singular constitution. Each IO has its own international civil service but there is no singular service across all international organizations. Each international civil service ‘comprises the permanent and temporary employees of international institutions who are expected, throughout their employment, to place the interests of the institutions by which they are employed above all else, refusing to take instructions from any other authority, even that of their national State’ (Green, 1954, p. 147). Each organization creates unique human resource management policies and practices that influence its policy outputs and outcomes. In this environment, lesson-drawing and theoretical positioning is, by necessity, more difficult than in domestic arenas.
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38.3.2. No Global Constitution, Separation of Powers or Branches of Government Unlike a sovereign state, there is no globally organized legislative mechanism. With the exception of the world’s first transnational and democratically elected transnational parliament (the European Parliament), ‘representation’ simply means each member state having a voice, even if this voice is weighted according to budgetary or other shares within an IO. Member-state ‘representatives’ are Ambassadors who are appointed, not elected. IO assemblies do not have similar budgetary, revenue-raising, or law-making powers as their domestic legislative counterparts. This may either limit direct personnel management oversight from member states (e.g. World Bank), or in the case of the United Nations, require direct General Assembly participation within, and in oversight of, the personnel management processes. The ‘hands-off ’ approach of the former may empower the IO’s bureaucracy and create potential accountability gaps while the latter may so mire the organization within Assembly mandates that its personnel management practices become politicized and/or blur executive and Assembly functions. The implications of no state-like legislative mechanism require the alteration of personnel management concepts to reflect transnational administrative spaces. Ideas like meritocracy, promotion guidelines, and other personnel matters may differ across IOs. Nor can we assume uniformity in how member states influence IO personnel management practices. This includes disagreement over what is an international civil servant or international public servant. In some countries, the ‘public servant’ phrase is predominant and stresses an allegiance to the ‘public’, whereas in other countries, ‘civil servant’ denotes allegiance to the ‘throne’, to the state, or other central authority. Within international organizations, the phrase ‘international civil servant’ is far more common. This may reflect an international civil servant’s requirement to be loyal to the IO and not to its home state. Less utilized is the broader, more service-oriented ‘international public servant’ term. This reflects insufficient agreement about how to define the global public and its citizens.
38.3.3. Paradox Inapplicability There are two commonly understood domestic-level paradoxes within public personnel studies: paradox of democracy and a paradox of needs. The paradox of democracy suggests that citizens may have rights in their public affairs but ‘few such rights in organizations’. The paradox of needs suggests, ‘. . . individuals and organizations need one another, but human happiness and organizational rationality are as likely to conflict as they are to coincide’ (Berman et al., 2013, p. 3). The former encourages individualism, participatory methods, and a propensity to constrain power while the latter encourages
International Civil Servant Management 675 uniformity, and submission to an organizational authority (Berman et al., 2013). Thus, the needs of individuals and organizations both coincide and conflict. Any direct application of the ‘paradox of democracy’ to IOs reveals that the global arena has no direct participatory method; there are disagreements about the value of individualism (often indistinguishable from differing political, socio-economic, cultural, and religious models); there is often gross inequality among and within states; and there are tensions over when state sovereignty trumps global governance concerns. This leads to a greater potential for conflict between the international civil servant and the international organization. Conflict may create extra-territorial and sovereignty- reducing international civil servant actions, discourage international civil servants from highlighting internal organizational accountability concerns and, not without contradiction, limit international civil servant abilities to access justice (see Bowman, West, and Moloney, this volume). Additional complications include differing opinions on what is ‘human happiness’ and whether organizational rationality is itself a politically (and economically) contestable idea. Both may be specific to Western administrative models (Moloney, 2018) and differ from Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic models. If sovereign-level personnel management paradoxes also struggle to find applicability outside of Western democratic states, then their contextual relevance may be limited at the global level and/or is altered by international civil servants whose values reflect non-Western administrative approaches.
38.3.4. Independence and Immunities Unlike a state-level civil servant, the international civil servant is presumed to be internationalist in their outlook, independent, and represent neither their home state nor any state or group of states (see UN Charter, Article 100, paras 1–2). The international civil servant is required to place loyalty to the IO above loyalty to a nation state (UN Oath of Office, 2017). This is unique to the international arena. In a typical sovereign state, the civil servant is a servant of the public and the state, not their organization, agency, ministry, or government. In a global arena with no global state, loyalty is to the IO even if there are ‘competing demands for primary allegiance’: By definition, the role is one requiring a readiness to transcend national loyalty, in the interest of an overarching organization. Yet the ideology of the nation-state, which still dominates the international system, conceives of national loyalty as the highest obligation . . . (Gould and Kelman, 1970, p. 250)
This international civil servant independence and loyalty to the institution has ‘acquired the force of a major tenet of international law. Whether in actual practice it is given full respect is, of course, open to discussion’ (Reymond and Mailick, 1986, p. 137).
676 Kim Moloney ICS politicization concerns are relatively common. This politicization is not via political parties or particular leaders, but via member-state influence. Historically, this has included prior US requirements that its nationals hold a US discussion over whether its citizens should hold a security clearance before international civil service employment, or Soviet beliefs that ‘loyalty to the socialist state took precedence over international allegiance’ (Udom, 2003, p. 109). This Soviet perspective reflected Premier Khrushchev’s view that, ‘while there are neutral countries, there can be no neutral men’ and that the ‘political celibacy’ of the British tradition had no place in international affairs (Haynes, 2009, pp. 179–80, citing Hammarskjold (1961)). To encourage organizational independence, top IO officials hold diplomatic immunity. For staff without diplomatic immunity but requiring immunity to carry out their task, they may be granted functional or ‘official capacity’ immunity to cover their official duties (Scott, 1954). Both immunities are ‘entirely distinct’ from traditional diplomatic immunity. Diplomatic envoys are ‘granted immunities in the receiving country in order that they may be able fearlessly to pursue the interests of the country they represent while the former [diplomatic and official immunities for international civil servants] enjoy privileges in order that they may fearlessly represent the interests of the international organization they serve’ (Honig, 1954, pp. 179–180, my emphasis). In sum, without a singular international civil service, with dissimilar structural and legal environments, limited paradox application, and IO-specific discussions of independence and immunity issues, public personnel management of our transnational administrative spaces has the potential to expand domestic-level public personnel analyses and to expand theoretical and conceptual development. The next section canvasses five public personnel management features of international civil services. Three of the five (recruitment and representation; secondment; contractual labour) have broad domestic and international civil service literatures. The last two are infrequently discussed in concert with domestic personnel management literatures (organizational culture), or differ significantly from the sovereign-level literatures (legal and adjudicative rights).
38.4. Personnel Management Analyses within International Civil Service Studies An oft-studied topic in the international civil servant literatures is recruitment and, by extension, the representativeness of an IO’s international civil servants. Without exception, these literatures have largely delinked their analysis from the similar representative bureaucracy literatures common to public administration (as has been reported elsewhere, Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012; Moloney and Gulrajani, 2010). The following five topics address this issue.
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38.4.1. Recruitment and Representation In the period between the League of Nations’ end and the United Nations’ start, one analyst suggested that ‘recruitment is the most important, of the functions falling to the internal administration of an international authority’ (Purves, 1945, p. 6). Alternatively, and as noted in the eventual Article 101 (3) of the UN Charter (1946), ‘The paramount consideration in the employment of the staff and in the determination of the conditions of service shall be the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity. Due regard shall be paid to the importance of recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible’ (my emphasis). Recruitment importance and the subsequent politicization of this task has made recruitment, and by extension, representation, secondment and, to a lesser extent, contractual labour, among the most studied IO personnel management topics. While a 1956 opinion by the UN’s Legal Counsel suggested that ‘under both the Charter and Staff Regulation 4.2 the principle of geographical distribution is obviously subordinate to the necessity for securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity’ (Meron, 1976, p. 667), such early emphases on ‘higher standards’ were not always actualized. Despite Article 101 (3), there is no clear guideline on how to balance representation against expertise. The implication is that ‘the ‘superior’ candidate is often made not on a global basis as it should be, but from among candidates from one national group or from a few national groups’ (Meron, 1976, pp. 667–8). Article 100 suggests that the UN Secretary-General and his or her staff must remember the ‘international character’ of its organization and must not receive instruction from, or be influenced by, its member states. This de facto primacy of geographic origin within recruitment has two purposes. The first is to ensure that IOs reflect their state members. The second is to have decision-making ‘profit from the advantages of a heterogeneous staff ’ (Weiss, 1982, p. 293). Nonetheless, states have ‘openly resisted’ Articles 100 and 101 while attempting to make the international civil service ‘hostage to politics’ (Jordan, 1991, p. 354). As formerly colonized states gained independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, the newly expanded UN General Assembly passed Resolution 1852 to encourage recruitment via geographic representation (Young, 1970). The resulting ‘desirable range’ for post allocation reflects a formula unchanged since 1988. The formula includes a member state’s assessed contributions (55 per cent), its membership (40 per cent), and its population (5 per cent). A range of 15 per cent above and below the calculated midpoint determines which states are preferred due to under-representation and which are not (Bulkeley, 1990; Fall and Zhang, 2012). At the European Commission, its national quota system symbolizes ‘the unresolved power dispute between the “centre and the territories” and, unparalleled in most Western nation states, may legitimize more particularistic concerns among Commission officials than among their national counterparts’ (Egberg, 1996, p. 722). In practice, however, ‘an informal quota roughly matches the size of national contingents with budgetary contributions by member states’ (Michelmann,
678 Kim Moloney 1978, p. 479). At present, there is insufficient comparative research to determine whether informal or formal quotas are most common among IOs. Today the UN-specific International Civil Service Commission’s recruitment-related statements focus on how to recruit technocratic experts, whether or not to administer written tests during recruitment, special measures around recruitment of women, discussion of work/family issues, spousal employment, use of information technology in improving recruitment, succession planning, and internal versus external candidacies (United Nations, 2016). This expansion of recruitment concerns need not imply that the geography versus technocratic skill debate has gone away. As noted in a 2011 statement by the Chief Executives Board of the UN, ‘diversity is more than geographic distribution alone . . . [a budgetary] weighting contribution as the most important factor skews the balance towards the richer countries’ (United Nations, 2016). In other words, technocratic skills may be more common within an IO’s developed country member states than its other member states. This challenges representative principles and may require recruiters to put ‘geographical considerations ahead of the principle of merit’ (Bulkeley, 1990, p. 761). Risks with this geography-first approach include potential limits on the promotion of qualified personnel who are not from the right geographical category, an encouragement of ‘hereditary’ positions, and even the creation of IOs that become ‘an instrument of foreign governments rather than as a supranational institution’ (Bulkeley, 1990, p. 767; Honig, 1954). The UN recently noted that they will be ‘broadening the scope of review for diversity to also include topics such as gender, disability in the workplace, promoting inclusiveness and safe working environments’ (United Nations, 2016), but the practice may differ. Unintentional barriers to employment may exist. Each may bias the institutions and its policies. For instance, official UN communication occurs via five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese); however, English is its most common working language and has ‘detracted from geographic diversification’ (Cohn, 1975, p. 54). Other examples include the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation with its three official languages (Arabic, English, French), despite member-state language diversity greater than three languages. Similar divides exist at the Asian Development Bank in which its working language is English. For an eligible hire with language skills outside official languages, the attainment of an official language may ease hiring processes. It may also unintentionally preference the (economic) elites who can purchase language training. This representation debate also emphasizes a view that representation, even if passive, does matter. In a recent study which enumerated geographic ‘representation’ within the UN Secretariat, the authors found that between 1947 and 2007 (and among the eighty most senior positions), eleven countries held position shares greater than 2 percent, on average, in all years (Novosad and Werker, 2014). Several of these countries, most notably, the Nordic countries along with countries like Jamaica, were ‘over-represented’ among senior UN positions when compared to their home state’s population as a percentage of the world population. Perhaps unintentionally, the study also highlighted disconnects between IO and public administration literatures. Although not explicitly mentioned, Novosad and Werker (2014)
International Civil Servant Management 679 were exploring the passive representation of geographic traits among UN employees. Both passive (and active) representation studies have substantial intellectual histories within public administration literature. Using gender as an example, passive representation occurs when the number of female civil servants mirrors the ratio of employment-age women within society. Active representation occurs when, for example, female civil servants use their position to affect policy options favourable to women (e.g. Hindera, 1993). Actively and passively represented traits may include ethnicity, religion, age, disability, language, or even rural–urban differences (for a start, see Dolan and Rosenbloom, 2003). This oversight of the public administration literature extends to constructivist scholars within International Relations: one example is a study focused on how the intellectual heritage of the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice Presidency may influence available policy options (Dethier, 2007). Another discusses an internal debate within the Bank about which lessons to draw from the East Asian development experience. The conclusion was a report that did little to shift the Bank’s agenda because the report’s underlying intellectual sentiment ran counter to the United States’ perspective of how to develop Bank financial and lending incentives, and, importantly for this chapter’s discussion of representative bureaucracy, counter to the views of the Bank’s Anglo-American-trained economists (Wade, 1996, emphasis added). IO recruitment and representation studies should also consider supranationalism, a value perhaps uncommon to national-level studies. EU supranationalism ‘partially redirects the role perceptions of the staff ’ and may ‘to some extent reflect pre-socialization outside the Commission, if such actors who “volunteer” to enter the Commission may champion supranational orientations in advance’ (Trondal, 2005, p. 1112). In other words, and using the representative bureaucracy concept, supranationalism may be a trait activated by IO socialization. This trait may also be activated by strategic emphases whereby top officials may ‘sustain Commission norms when national experiences motivate them to do so—when national political socialization predisposes them to embrace supranationalism, or when supranationalism appears to benefit their country’ (Hooghe, 2005, p. 861). This active representation has theoretical importance even if ‘national profiles tend to become modified and watered down as length of service increases. The validity of this proposition, however, depends on the extent to which socialization means internalizing ‘Euro-cultural’ values, or whether it means sustaining ‘national belongings’ (Egberg, 1996, p. 726). The recruitment and representation challenge is how to assure international civil servant independence, while acknowledging the difficulty of being fully ‘independent’ of one’s passive traits. This is an opportunity for comparative IO personnel management analyses.
38.4.2. Secondment The secondment of national level civil servants to short-term employment within an IO is an interesting aspect of international civil service management. Just as the number of international civil servants employed by our 800+ international and regional
680 Kim Moloney organizations have not been precisely calculated, our estimates of seconded officials’ numbers outside the European Commission (with one in ten civil servants seconded from their home government in 2007) are limited. The secondment purpose, at least within the European Commission, was to create a ‘community of functional specialists with a distinct interest in maintaining the system’ (Lindberg, 1965, p. 71). Seconded officials increase IO survival via alliance making with its member states. If not managed well, or if there exist too many non-fixed term contracts, secondment may also lead to organizational inefficiency. Inefficiency may occur if too few fixed-term experienced bureaucrats are available to operate the bureaucracy (Kay, 1966). Unlike international civil servants, seconded personnel owe a dual allegiance to their home state (who generally pays their salary) and to the IO. The seconded individual is neither a formal representative of their home country (as they are not diplomats) nor allowed, in the Commission’s case, to enter the Commission into any legal or policy commitment (Trondal, et al., 2008). More specifically, ‘to avoid any conflict of interests’, the seconded official ‘should ensure that they carry out their duties solely in the interests of the Commission’ (European Commission, 2008, p. 3). The World Bank, in contrast, has less specific guidelines: the seconded official’s salary is paid by their home country. The Bank does not address loyalty concerns other than to suggest that the official ‘may not hold positions that would be deemed managerial or policy making roles’ (World Bank, 2017). For both the World Bank and the United Nations, the seconded government official may apply to become a fixed-term international civil servant upon completion of their secondment. Dual loyalty realities may be complex. Some seconded personnel will highlight home government concerns while others will not. Some will benefit from a home government with specific strategies for its officials while at an IO. Dual loyalty concerns are heightened by sub-loyalties in the departmental, sub-regional, and community of professionals’ arenas (Trondal, Van Den Berg, et al., 2008). There may even be an ‘out of sight out of mind’ mentality whereby the seconded civil servants are not asked by their home governments for Commission advice after secondment or where officials struggle to have their seconded experience be understood or for them to serve as promotional advantages.
38.4.3. Contractual Labour The UN has historically struggled to manage relations between hiring with geographic distributions and the allocation between short-term and fixed-term appointments (Jordan, 1991; Macy, 1970; Reymond, 1967). The original UN intention was a career civil service that would ‘possess professional ability, independence from nation-influence, reasonable employment security, and prospects for individual growth’ (Macy, 1970, p. 260). Global politics influenced this calculation. As early as the 1960s, Western states desired a UN civil service populated by fixed-term contracts. For the United States, ‘it was
International Civil Servant Management 681 a vitally serious matter, as it could eventually destroy the career international staff, which must be the backbone of an effective United Nations’ (Kay, 1966, p. 64). As the 1960s and early 1970s progressed and the number of UN member states expanded within a post- independence era, the new developing nations wanted a greater emphasis on short-term appointments as a waystation to greater fixed-term civil servant geographical representation (Kay, 1966). In contrast, the former Soviet Union worried that fixed-term contracts filled by Western-aligned international civil servants may bias the institution and instead, believed that IOs should encourage more seconded officials to work within its offices (Kay, 1966). In 1961, the Soviets suggested that contract employees might allow ‘constant contact and interplay between the Secretariat and States Members of the United Nations’ and, thus, limit ‘clearly improper, one- sided’ recruitment from non- Soviet states (Reymond, 1967, p. 761 citing A/4776 of 1961, para. 4748). It was also hoped that career appointments may be less likely than fixed-term or short-term contracts to show ‘far greater consideration for the views and the interests of their governments, whose goodwill they might need either for the possible extension of their fixed-term contracts’ (Meron, 1976, p. 690). This is because short-term employees may face a ‘more severe test in situations where national interests are at stake’ (Egberg, 1996, p. 725) or, as noted by Bowman, West, and Moloney (this volume), short-term employees may face different calculations on whether or not to blow a whistle or report alleged abuses. Moreover, in many democratic countries with highly developed personnel management laws and procedures, there are precedents that establish whether a civil servant is a de facto employee. However, and regardless of such laws, they need not apply to an IO headquartered in that same country. If, in an IO headquarter country, a government contractor who moves from one twelve-month contract to another is considered de facto a full-time employee, this need not apply to the IO in that country. Adjudication around such issues is just beginning. Beginning in the late 1980s, and as pressure increased for IOs to improve their managerial and output efficiencies, many IOs have used short-term contracts to manage uncertain fiscal issues. In tight budgetary environments or at least in environments where powerful states question an IO’s prowess, such contracts may limit an IO’s exposure to long-term liabilities while encouraging productivity in an era of contracting out, downsizing, and New Public Management.
38.4.4. Organizational Culture The importance of IO organizational culture is addressed by international relations’ constructivist scholars (Vetterlein, 2007). Others asked if international norms influence IO culture (Park, 2006), or whether powerful member states influence culture (Nielson and Tierney, 2003). In Sarfaty’s (2005) study of the Bank’s incorporation of indigenous- rights norms, he found that ‘processes of norm emergence and internalization are more
682 Kim Moloney nuanced than has been suggested in contemporary normative theories’ (p. 1973). Once the Bank felt pressure to reform, there were observable internal battles about the extent and pace of norm incorporation (Sarfaty, 2005). In Catherine Weaver’s 2008 book, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform, she observed a Bank that was insufficiently responsive to external calls for reform. That is, the Bank’s reform talk did not always match its subsequent actions. Weaver observed two organized hypocrisy types: (1) the ‘outright violation of organizational mandates and policies’ and (2) the ‘mainstreaming gaps’, whereby the Bank ‘proclaims its commitment to sustainable development, gender equality, and good governance, but does not commit the human and financial resources or enforce the rules necessary to integrate these values into organizational practices. The result is a separation or even an overt contradiction between proclaimed priorities and goals and the reality of the Bank’s activity’ (Weaver, 2008, p. 20). Weaver acknowledged that external reform pressures might pose ‘inconsistent expectations’ because the Bank was a dependent international organization with ‘multiple masters’. The Bank preferred ‘avoidance’ behaviour when external reform pressures were unmatched by an internal agreement for reforms (Weaver, 2008, pp. 27–8). This ‘decoupling’ between ‘internal goals and institutional pressures compels organizations to develop dual roles as ‘political’ and ‘action’ organizations’ (pp. 28–9). Decoupling leads organizations to create a seemingly responsive organizational shell while continuing to abide by internal norms, agreements, and rules. This leads to an institution that will reform slowly (if at all) and one that may prefer ‘rhetorical shifts’ to substantive change (Weaver, 2008, p. 178). Organizational culture explained why the Bank acted as it did. Such explorations from an ‘organized hypocrisy’ frame will differ from typical personnel management approaches. While public personnel management literature explores personnel systems, laws, and procedures, it is also focuses on the individual civil servant and their needs. As noted by the democracy and needs paradoxes, civil servants are more than a ‘culture’ and that culture is an often-imprecise concept with movable boundaries. In the public administration literature, organizational culture is the ‘shared values, beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, norms, artifacts, and patterns of behavior’ (Ott, 1989, p. 487). In the public personnel management literature, organizational culture relates to job motivations, job satisfaction, managerial values, knowledge sharing, and commitment to the organization, leadership styles, and even training methods. Constructivist scholars, in exchange for broader conceptualizations of culture, overlook links between organizational culture and personnel management. This is an opportunity for scholars to expand their inquiries into IOs and to encourage interdisciplinary conversations.
38.4.5. Legal and Adjudicative Rights With no unified international civil service, civil servant rules and procedures are separately determined at each IO. Each organization creates its own recruitment,
International Civil Servant Management 683 hiring, promotion, and dismissal procedures. This disaggregated arena also influences legal and adjudicative rights, since not all international and regional organizations have administrative tribunals capable of mediating disagreements either between an employee and his employer or to consider allegations of broader misdoing or whistleblowing. Research on administrative tribunal creation and effectiveness is both limited and, where it exists, is dominated by legal scholars (e.g. Feld, 1963; Jefferson, 2010). International administrative tribunals are a category within broader international adjudicative body literatures. The Tribunals ‘settle disputes between international organizations and employees on employment matters’ (Amerasinghe, 2014, p. 318). They allow civil servants, as employees of an IO created by treaties and, thus, as products of international public law, to seek independent adjudication of their disputes with their employer. This is especially important given institutional immunities accorded to such IOs by their founding Articles of Agreement and the near impossibility of seeking national-level redress for claims occurring in the international civil servant space. There are at least thirty international administrative tribunals specific to an IO with the United Nations, European Union, and World Bank tribunals ranked as the most ‘legitimate’ using factors that include the structure of the internal justice system, applicable law and its clarity, and its first and second instances of litigation. Within this group of thirty, the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization is unique in that sixty-two separate IOs have given this Tribunal jurisdiction over its affairs (Bretton Woods Law, 2017; International Administrative Law Centre of Excellence, 2016). Several issues face international civil servants seeking adjudication and redress. The first is the inequality of resources between the international civil servant and the IO. In contrast to an IO’s General Counsel, who is paid to defend the organization against employee claims, there is limited-to-no employee legal aid, redress via financial reward is not guaranteed, cases may drag out for years, and there are often attempts to ‘starve him or her [the complainant] out of the litigation process’ (Bretton Woods Law, 2017). This leads to a situation where ‘90% of the employment disputes are settled internally and without resource to a judicial court’ (Jefferson, 2010, p. 179). A second issue is that international human rights standards (in particular, standards involving employment) are often an insufficient ‘check’ on the lawyers employed by IOs to defend their organization. This practice may contradict an Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that suggested that international law binds the IOs via the legal agreement under which the organization was constituted (Bretton Woods Law, 2017). Other issues include the over-use of confidentiality within Tribunals to protect the IO and not the complainant, the benchmarking of tribunal decisions against other tribunal efforts, the inability of staff associations to stand and to be heard before the tribunal and/or to defend their members, and conflicts of interest. The latter includes a practice whereby ‘the executive head of the organizations will be the eventual decision-maker on
684 Kim Moloney whether the board of appeal has jurisdiction to hear the complaint against him and, if it does, whether his decision is lawful or not’ (Bretton Woods Law, 2017). This creates an imbalance between the ‘rules and procedures to govern employees and few, if any, rules to control the discretionary power of executives’ (Jefferson, 2010, p. 165). This violation of the notion of equality before the law and the equality between the employee and the employer is largely unaddressed within tribunals. However, and in the majority of IOs without tribunals, such concerns are amplified.
38.5. Limited Public Personnel Management and International Civil Servant Intersectionality This section highlights four overlooked ICS topics common to sovereign-level public personnel management and human resource management studies: unions/staff associations, compensation, performance appraisal, and visa status. Each is an opportunity for further research.
38.5.1. Unions/Staff Associations Unlike many national-level civil services, there is no international civil servant labour union. The UN’s International Civil Service Commission interacts with the UN’s Fifth Committee and the Chief Executive Board to coordinate and regulate the salaries of UN Common System civil servants. With fifteen members appointed based on professional competence and geographic representation concerns, Article 9 of its Statute states that the Commission aims to create a ‘single unified international civil service through the application of common personnel Standards, methods and arrangements’ (International Civil Service Commission, 1987). In contrast, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund delegate their human resources function from the Executive Board to each IO’s human resources offices. The European Parliament also has little influence over human resource management issues within the European Commission. Independent of the Commissions are multiple UN staff associations. The Associations operate less as a union than a gathering place for staff, to interact with management and to liaise where necessary (and as allowed by the specific IO) with the IO’s human resource, appointment, promotion, grievance, and administrative tribunal mechanisms. Mirroring the uncoordinated interaction of the various international civil services is a still-nascent effort by the Federation of International Civil Servant Associations (FICSA). With twenty-nine international civil servant association members, eighteen members with associated status, twenty- three- member federations with observer
International Civil Servant Management 685 status, and fifteen member associations with consultative status, FICSA is the world’s largest association of international civil servants.
38.5.2. Compensation Member-state contributions to an IO’s budget, along with direct ‘executive’/IO interaction, may influence compensation discussions. There is incomplete knowledge about how such relationships influence compensation, and how comparator industry salaries may influence an international civil servant’s salaries and benefits. Where IOs have publicly undertaken such analyses, there are limited connections to established compensation or public finance literatures. One example is a UN Staff Survey in which respondents shared mixed views on the adequacy of salary and compensation packages when compared to external comparators (United Nations, 2013). Other analyses have focused on the so-called ‘de Merode principle’ (Gorman, 2010) from the World Bank. This principle states that employment letters are only one way to contractualize employment terms and that other unwritten practices may also legally bind the Bank. In addition, no specific formula for tax reimbursement and salary adjustments can be dictated to the Bank other than to suggest that it encourage relative fairness among equally qualified and located staff. This gives the Bank flexibility in creating contractual terms with its employees and where, when, and how the Bank could alter terms. However, and as noted in para. 45 of a Tribunal decision, ‘discretionary power is not absolute power’ (Gorman, 2010, p. 21, citing de Merode and others v. World Bank (1981))—thus, administrative power must create space for independent and fair hearings along with due process guarantees.
38.5.3. Performance Appraisal Each IO is left to decide whether and how meritocracy shall or shall not be incorporated into its personnel management practices. IO promotion, like recruitment, has struggled to balance merit and geographic representation. Early research suggested that ‘representatives of interested states approach key members of staff to urge the promotion of their nationals’, a practice strengthened via General Assembly resolutions that ‘insist on a regional distribution of senior posts’ (Meron, 1976, p. 671). If true, this suggests promotions may not follow traditional meritocratic procedures. Or as stated bluntly elsewhere: ‘. . . when I fire someone, I am not firing him but a nationality, I am not firing a civil servant but an Italian’ (Michelmann, 1978, p. 489). Where performance appraisal research has been undertaken, it has largely focused on the European Commission. One 1979 Report highlighted how ‘good connections to senior managements and nationality continues to carry more weight than individual performance with regard to promotions’ (Balint, Bauer, et al., 2008, p. 683;
686 Kim Moloney Michelmann, 1978). This includes allegations of ‘devious procedures’ or ‘rigged competitions’ (Spierenburg, 1979, p. 36) hampering recruitment and promotions. More recent shifts within the Commission have simplified the job grades to allow for merit- based differentiation and a respect for seniority (Balint et al., 2008). It is less discussed whether such shifts have actually led to a meritocracy-focused performance appraisal. Later reforms, such as the Kinnock reforms (2000), aimed to align Commission staff with the ‘priority-setting, programming and coordination approach’ of the overall Commissioner and its politically oriented Commissioners (Bauer, 2009, p. 464). The reforms encouraged Unit Heads to ‘manage’ and focus less on ‘innovating policy’ (p. 464). The result was new rules and point systems for promotions that have led senior managers to consider personnel management as a task which has ‘become painstaking and instructions from superiors appear barely transparent’ (p. 465).
38.5.4. Visa Status Most international civil servants are not citizens of the IO headquarters country. To employ a geographically representative sample of employees, the IO must secure work visas for non-citizens of the IO’s headquarter country. Research has focused on the United States’ G4 visa and asks whether ‘visa dependence’ alters ICS behaviour. Credited with first identifying a ‘G-4 Syndrome’, Moisés Naím (1994) argued it ‘creates a critical dependency on the Bank [or any IO] and significantly shapes its internal culture’. If a Bank employee with a G-4 visa loses their job, they have only a few weeks to pack and leave the United States. With more than half of Bank staffs reliant on a G-4 visa, this syndrome raises the aversion of individuals to taking risks, and increases the resistance to organizational change . . . together with the significant autonomy the Bank enjoys vis- à-vis its clients, the Bank’s culture makes promotion and job stability much more dependent on the person’s internal reputation than on the opinions of those around the organization. (Naím, 1994)
This phenomenon influences an IO’s internal culture. Such visas may encourage qualified employees to work within IOs for more than the professional opportunity but rather to broaden horizons or provide better opportunities for their families. Questions about whether ‘visa-seeking’ attracts the best candidates or those who just want to migrate are unexplored. Other uncharted scholarly territory includes issues about the democracy and needs paradoxes common to domestic-level personnel literature: whether international civil servants with certain national cultures are more or less likely to press internal accountability concerns regardless of their visa status; or if international civil servants with different employment statuses or different salaries will encourage organizational accountability.
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38.6. Conclusion and Paths Forward In the last hundred years, the number of international and regional organizations has proliferated. While state and local civil servant numbers are much higher than the number of international civil servants, international civil servants matter. They affect global public policy agendas, alter stakeholder networks, and encourage implementation of ideas that influence citizens around the world. The structural environment in which international civil servants and IOs operate has unique traits that will alter traditional domestic-level public personnel management understandings. This includes the non-existence of a unified international public service, structural and balance of power issues vis-à-vis the state, the potential incomplete applicability of the democracy and needs paradoxes common to domestic literatures, and the unique role played by civil servant independence and immunity. The literature is largely preoccupied with the politics of personnel management: recruitment and representation, secondment, and labour contracts. The organizational culture literature of IR scholars focuses on the balance between international civil servant autonomy and expertise against an organization’s member-state wishes. Both literatures are written with little direct connection to the related personnel management literatures in domestic spaces and, thus, there are opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning. The emergent legal and adjudicative literature suggests that international civil servants may not have the full rights and protections accorded to their domestic-level counterparts. Each topic, along with those less discussed (such as promotion, performance appraisal, and visas) is an opportunity for further research. The frequent focus on three organizations (United Nations, European Commission, World Bank) highlights the need for comparative research to determine patterns, to learn operational styles, and, as importantly, to understand how international civil servants influence global public policy debates.
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Chapter 39
The U nited Nat i ons , Peacekeepe rs , a nd Ac c ounta bi l i t y Muna Ndulo
39.1. Introduction The 2016 reports of sexual abuse by United Nations (UN) peacekeepers, and the 2015 Haiti cholera epidemic, have brought renewed attention to the debate on the accountability of the United Nations, officials, and peacekeepers for abuses and injuries caused to civilians in host states. Working within the traditional approach of enforcing accountability, the legal process faces numerous obstacles when the defendant is the United Nations or a United Nations official. The United Nations and its integral components is immune from legal process and suit absent an express waiver, pursuant to the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. The privileges and doctrine of immunity granted to the UN bars victims of abuses committed by the UN, officials, and peacekeepers from pursuing claims against the United Nations, and its officials in domestic courts. This has been considered necessary for the effective functioning of the UN system. The immunity doctrine is fundamental in the law regulating international organizations. It is also a major hindrance to efforts aimed at litigating against the UN in domestic courts. The most recent example of litigation is the case of Georges v. United Nations (2016) arising out of the Haiti cholera epidemic. In this case, lawyers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti organized for 5,000 cholera victims and their families to seek redress from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The District Court ruled in favour of the United Nations on the grounds of immunity and dismissed the case. The decision was appealed to the United States Federal Appeals Court (Second Circuit). The Court upheld the decision of the District Court and determined that the United Nations cannot be sued in American
692 Muna Ndulo courts. The United States State Department filed a brief with the court defending the United Nations immunity claims. The lawyers for the State Department argued that the immunity was absolute, and it encompasses immunity from service of process and that any attempted service on the United Nations was ineffective. In its decision, the court further upheld the immunity claim and stated that the United Nations did not lose its legal immunity even if it failed to give the plaintiffs a chance to seek a settlement. This was in response to the plaintiff ’s allegation that the UN in failing to establish a standing claims commission to address third-party claims of individuals injured by the cholera epidemic, in violation of the agreement between the UN and the Government of Haiti in the Status of Forces Agreement, had lost its immunity. On its part, the UN has developed internal systems to address disputes between itself and its employees. These systems, however, do not provide non-employees with a forum for suing the UN for wrongs or violations committed or legally attributable to the UN. Thus, there is a need to explore other mechanisms for addressing violations and wrongs committed by peacekeepers and UN officials against non-UN employees. This chapter examines the accountability of the UN under international law and domestic law and the doctrine of immunity. It is divided into three broad sections. Section 2 will explore the legal status of international organizations (IOs)—particularly the UN. Section 3 will look at the privileges and immunities of the UN and their legal basis and Section 4 examines ways in which the accountability of the UN and its officials can be improved in the light of the doctrine of immunity.
39.2. The Legal Status of International Organizations The International Court of Justice (ICJ, 1949, p. 174) in the Reparations Case had to decide whether the UN could sue a member state for damages, if that state was responsible for causing injury to UN staff members while they were performing their UN duties. Key to this question was whether the UN had legal personality—as this was required for the UN to be able to sue. The ICJ held that the UN had legal personality via the UN’s rights and duties as specified in the UN Charter. The ICJ also looked at several other factors in making this determination, including: (1) the makeup of the UN—its several organs, each of which had different tasks; (2) the UN Charter’s requirement that member states assist the UN in its actions; (3) the Charter’s requirement that member states implement the decisions of the Security Council; (4) the UN’s possession of privileges and immunities in the territories of its member states; (5) the UN’s ability to make agreements with member states; and (6) the UN’s responsibility for political tasks, including ‘main[taining] international peace and security and develop[ing] friendly relations among nations’. The Court concluded that, the Organization was intended to exercise and enjoy powers that can only be exercised based on the possession of a large measure
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 693 of legal personality and the capacity to operate upon an international plane. Notably, and since this ICJ decision, the constitutive treaties of most modern IOs declare that they have legal personality. Legal personality means that the entity is a subject of international law and capable of possessing international rights and duties, and that it has capacity to maintain its rights by bringing international claims. As observed in the Reparations case (ICJ, 1949), while a state possesses the totality of international rights and duties recognized by international law, the rights and duties of an entity such as the UN depend upon its purposes and functions as specified or implied in its constituent documents and developed in practice. Article 6 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1986) states that, ‘the capacity of an international organisation to conclude treaties is governed by the rules of that organisation’. The Convention—not yet in force—sought to fill the gap in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) which focused merely on states as parties to treaties. International organizations with legal personality cannot conclude treaties unless their constitutive instruments expressly or impliedly grant them this power (Brownlie, 2008). For example, the UN Charter contains provisions that expressly allow it to make treaties as stated in the Reparations Case (ICJ, 1949, n. 8, p. 179). The UN can make treaties to have trusteeship over certain territories, to maintain international peace and security, and to protect its privileges and immunities.
39.3. Accountability of the UN and Associated Persons and the Doctrine of Immunity 39.3.1. Privileges and Immunities The presence or absence of ‘international legal personality’ or ‘treaty-making’ capacity under international law with respect to any given international organization does not necessarily determine legal capacity or status with respect to legal suits of an international organization under the domestic law of member or non-member states. Often, international organizations enjoy immunity from legal suits under both international and domestic law. Thus, one must look to the provisions of the domestic law of the state in question, including the domestic legislative effect of international agreements to which the given state is a party. For example, articles 104 and 105 in the UN Charter deal with the legal capacity, privileges, and immunities of the UN and its officials within the territories of its member states. Pursuant to these articles, the UN adopted the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations 1946. Article 105 of the UN Charter provides that ‘the Organisation shall enjoy in the territory of each of its members such privileges and immunities as are necessary for the fulfillment of its
694 Muna Ndulo purposes’. Over time, member states have passed legislation to implement articles 104 and 105 and the Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations in their domestic legal systems. For instance, the US has enacted the International Organization Immunities Act 1945, which, among other things, implements the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. Although the privileges and immunities of international organizations are often analogized to the privileges and immunities of diplomats, there are differences (Brownlie, 2008; Bowett, 1982). Unlike IOs, diplomats have privileges and immunities for official acts only and are still subject to their home state’s jurisdiction (Bowett, 1982). By contrast, the Courts have generally regarded the immunity of the UN and other IOs as absolute. The US State Department and US Courts have agreed with this view (Brzak v. United Nations [2010]). The rationale has included customary international law and the text of the constitutive treaty even if not all states agree on what the exact privileges and immunities of international organizations are (Brownlie, 2008). National courts have also not agreed on the method for determining what the privileges and immunities of international organizations are. The privileges and immunities of IOs include immunity from jurisdiction or legal process, immunity from service of process, immunity from enforcement of judgements, inviolability of premises and archives, currency and fiscal privileges, and freedom of communication (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015; Bowett, 1982; UN, 1975, arts 23–25, 27, 30, 33–35). In the following pages, this chapter will discuss the impact of the doctrine of immunity from jurisdiction or legal process on the ability to use domestic courts to promote the accountability of UN and its officials for wrongdoing against the civilian population in member countries of the United Nations.
39.3.2. Legal Basis The legal basis of privileges and immunities for IOs is contested. They include customary international law, the text of the constitutive treaties, and the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character. Some argue that the legal basis of the privileges and immunities of international organizations stems from customary international law. One problem with this theory is that it may be missing the essential element of opinio iuris (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015). Existence of a treaty or treaties granting immunity is not sufficient evidence of opinio iuris. This is because it remains unclear whether states are granting privileges and immunities to IOs out of an obligation imposed by customary law or merely applying the provisions of a treaty or treaties granting immunity. The decisions of national courts tend to show that the courts prefer the latter. That is, they look to the constitutive treaty to determine an IO’s privileges and immunities. For example, UK and Austrian courts have rejected the argument that the privileges and immunities of international organizations are rooted in customary international law (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015). In Mendaro v. World Bank (1983), the question was
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 695 whether an employee seeking redress for employment-related grievances could sue the World Bank in the United States. The US Court of Appeals of the DC Circuit, relying on the immunity granted to the World Bank under the US International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945, held that the World Bank was immune from legal process in US courts. The court further stated that ‘courts of several nationalities have traditionally recognized this immunity, and it is now an accepted doctrine of customary law’. Dutch courts also seem to affirm immunity based on customary international law. This contrasts with other national courts such as the Italian, Belgian, French, German, and Swiss courts that express ambivalence on this question.
39.3.3. Immunity from Jurisdiction or Legal Process Revelations about abuses committed by UN peacekeepers and the cholera epidemic in Haiti have raised questions as to whether the UN and its officials have immunity from jurisdiction or legal process in all cases regardless of whether the conduct in question was in the course of duty or not (Blokker and Schrijver, 2015). States generally accept that ‘officials of international organizations are immune from legal process in respect of all acts performed in their official capacity’ when sued in national courts (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015; Brownlie, 2008). Although national courts have disagreed over whether IOs have absolute or functional immunity, there is no recorded case where a national court has entertained a suit against the UN or an official of the UN based on functional immunity (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015). A functional immunity approach would raise questions as to who decides when the act is within the course of duty or not. Were the host state to decide whether or not a UN employee was acting in course of duty it would mean that the availability of immunity would depend entirely on the judgement of the host state and would be contrary to the notion that the immunity belongs to the UN. The United States State Department in its submission in Georges v. United Nations (2016), the Haiti cholera case, argued that the United Nations Charter, the General Convention on Immunities (article 18(a)) and the Vienna Convention provides absolute immunity from legal process and suit for the UN and its officials in all cases except where the UN has expressly waived immunity. In addition, it argued that article V, section 19 of the General Convention specifically provides that ‘the Secretary General and all Assistant Generals shall be accorded the privileges and immunities accorded to the diplomatic envoys, in accordance with international law’. In all instances where attempts have been made to sue the UN or its officials in the United States and other countries, the immunity of the UN and that of its officials has prevailed. It has been consistently held that domestic courts lack the jurisdiction to hear cases against the UN and its officials due to the broad immunity granted to the UN via the UN Charter and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN 1946. National courts have attempted to apply functional immunity in different ways. Some have imported the distinction made in sovereign immunity between sovereign acts and private acts, holding that international organizations have immunity for sovereign
696 Muna Ndulo acts, but not private acts (Virzo and Ingravallo, 2015). Others have weighed the interests of the affected parties against the interests of immunity for the international organization. Instructive here is the case of Waite and Kennedy v. Germany (1999) where the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) considered whether refusal to hear a case by national courts on the grounds of immunity violated Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights’ right to a fair hearing. The ECHR held that immunity is essential to ‘enabling international organizations to perform their functions effectively, but [also] determined whether denying applicants’ access to the courts in this case was proportional to the effective functioning of organizations (Waite and Kennedy v. Germany [1999], paras 63–65). A key factor was whether applicants had alternate means to pursue their case against the international organization. The Court held that immunity outweighed the applicants’ interest in this case because the applicants could easily seek redress from the organization itself in the dispute settlement mechanism established under the staff regulations of ESA [European Space Agency] as opposed to seeking redress through the court process (Waite and Kennedy v. Germany [1999], paras 69–70, 73). The Supreme Court of the Netherlands, in the case of Mothers of Srebrenica and Others v. The Netherlands and United Nations (2010, paras 4.1.1, 4.3.1), found that the approach taken by the ECHR in Waite and Kennedy v. Germany (1999) should not apply to the United Nations because the UN differs from other international organizations. The Mothers of Srebrenica—a case that hinged on Dutch Civil law—accused the UN and Dutch troops of failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica. It was argued that the UN and the State of the Netherlands failed to abide by the agreement which had been concluded with the inhabitants of the Srebrenica enclave under which the UN and the Netherlands committed to provide protection and made Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ in exchange for disarmament of the forces that belonged to the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Supreme Court opined, ‘the UN occupies a special position among international organizations’ because ‘[t]he immunity granted to the UN is directly connected to the general interest served by the maintenance of peace and security in the world’. To support its reasoning, the Court referred to the cases of Behrami and Behrami v. France (2007) and Saramati v. France, Germany, and Norway (2007, paras 2–4), both of which involved the creation of institutions by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to oversee the transition in Kosovo. The Supreme Court then held that the UN’s immunity is absolute and member states must respect it in accordance with the UN Charter. It dismissed the appeal brought by the Mothers of Srebrenica. In other words, even the question of genocide as an ius cogens norm could not overcome the immunity of the UN. In the second Stitching Mothers of Srebrenica and others v. Netherlands case (2013, s. 3, 65542/12), the ECHR refused to entertain a claim based on Dutch civil law brought against the Netherlands by relatives of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. The court relied on the immunity of the UN to reject the application as manifestly ill founded. The ECHR upheld the Supreme Court of the Netherlands’ decision in Mothers of Srebrenica
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 697 and others v. Netherlands (2013) affirming the immunity of IOs from jurisdiction because not to do so would hinder the UN’s role in maintaining international peace and security, especially when an action taken by the UNSC were involved. In its decision, the ECHR relied in part on the ICJ’s decision in Germany v. Italy (2012). It also clarified that its decisions in Waite and Kennedy (1999) (and also Beer and Regan v. Germany (2001)) should not ‘be interpreted in such absolute terms’. It explained that affirming the immunity from an IO’s jurisdiction when there is no other remedy does not violate one’s right to access the courts. Similarly, the US Court of Appeals in Mendaro v. Work Bank (1983) affirmed the fundamental importance of these immunities to the growing efforts to achieve coordinated international action through multinational organizations with specific missions. The court held that the very structure of an international organization, created by the joint action of several states, requires that the organization remain independent from national policies of its individual members. In response to disputes between the organization and its employees, the UN has attempted to develop alternative means to litigation before domestic courts. It is to these alternative means that we turn our attention.
39.3.4. The UN Internal Dispute Settlement System In 1950, the General Assembly created the UN Administrative Tribunal (UNAT) to resolve employment contract disputes between UN Secretariat Staff and the UN (UNGA, 1949). Along with UNAT, the Joint Appeals Boards and Joint Disciplinary Committees constituted the UN internal justice system until 2009 (Hwang, 2009). The Joint Appeals Board made non-binding recommendations to the Secretary-General in appeals against administrative decisions (Hwang, 2009). The Joint Disciplinary Committee advised the Secretary-General on the disciplinary measures to be taken in cases where a staff member violated the UN Charter, Staff Rules, Staff Regulations, and other administrative rules (Hwang, 2009; UN Secretariat, 1991, paras 2, 10). In 2009, the General Assembly abolished UNAT and the Joint Appeals Boards and Disciplinary Committees (UNGA, 2009, arts 38, 43). It replaced them with the UN Dispute Tribunal (UNDT), which has the power: (1) to resolve employment contract disputes, (2) to hear appeals from ‘an administrative decision imposing a disciplinary measure’ and (3) to enforce mediation agreements made according to its statutes (UNGA, 1949, art. 2(1); 2009, arts 26–27, 38, 43). UNDT judgements can only: (a) order ‘rescission of the contested administrative decision or specific performance’ or (b) award compensation up to two years of the applicant staff member’s net base salary (UNGA, 1949, n. 65 at art. 10(5)). As an alternative to the UNDT, a staff member in an employment dispute with the UN may agree to use Ombudsman and Mediation Services (UN Office of the Administration of Justice (Administration of Justice; A Guide to resolving disputes: 2009)). The UNDT’s creation instituted four major reforms of the previous internal just ice system. First, all current and former UN staff members have access to the UNDT,
698 Muna Ndulo whereas only UN Secretariat staff had access to UNAT (UNGA, 1949, n. 60 at art. 2(1); 2009, n. 65 at art. 3(1)). Second, the UNDT has a two-tiered judicial system allowing UNDT decisions to be appealed to the UN Appeals Tribunal (Hwang, 2009). Third, the UNDT required judges to have legal training (Hwang, 2009). Fourth, under the UNDT, the General Assembly approves judges recommended by the Internal Justice Council, whereas under UNAT, the General Assembly approved judges nominated by Member States (Hwang, 2009). The General Assembly created the Internal Justice Council in 2007 to recommend candidates for the UNDT and the UN Appeals Tribunal (Hwang, 2009). These reforms do not address wrongdoing committed by UN civil servants against civilians for three reasons. First, they are regulations enacted by the UN for internal administration. They can neither amend the UN Charter nor repudiate the doctrine of immunity. Second, the jurisdiction of the UNDT is limited to hearing claims brought by UN staff members or the UN administration regarding employment contract disputes, disciplinary measures, and mediation agreements. These do not touch on the accountability questions raised by sexual abuse cases or health epidemics and other damages caused by UN peacekeepers. Third, the remedies that the UNDT can issue are limited. Rescission of an administrative decision or specific performance of a contract would not help victims of wrongdoing committed by UN civil servants because the victims have no contract with the UN.
39.3.5. Immunity and the Specific Problems Relating to UN Peacekeeping Missions Allegations of wrongdoing committed by UN peacekeepers—the sexual abuse scandals and the Haiti cholera epidemic—have seriously hurt the UN’s credibility and raised questions as to whether the UN should have immunity from jurisdiction in such cases (Bosco, 2012; Benn, 2016; Katz, 2013; Lynch, 2013). UN peacekeepers have allegedly sexually abused women, exchanged money for sex, and fathered several children throughout the UN’s missions (Ndulo, 2009). The difficulty of dealing with sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping missions is compounded by the multi- category personnel structure of UN missions. Not only are UN missions composed of troops from different states, so that troops remain attached to their respective armed forces rather than comprising an independent UN army with the power to implement disciplinary measures, the missions are also composed of complex categories. Different categories of staff and different organizations are typically subject to different rules and regulations. Additionally, individual troop-contributing countries under the Status of Forces Agreements, typically entered into by the UN and troop-contributing countries before troops are deployed for UN service, are solely responsible for the conduct and discipline of their own troops according to their own national laws and military regulations.
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39.3.6. History of Sexual Abuse by UN Peacekeepers Allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers go as far back as 1995 (Ndulo, 2009). The number of allegations reported increased from 2004 to 2006, but have seemed to decline after 2007 (Ndulo, 2009; UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at figs. IV and VI). This may be due to under-reporting because some victims, including minors may be afraid to come forward (Ndulo, 2009). In 2002, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) confirmed accusations that UN aid workers sexually abused refugees in West Africa (UNGA, 2002, para. 29). The OIOS also confirmed reports that peacekeepers participating in the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) paid girls to engage in sexual acts (UNGA, 2002, paras 59, 61). In 2004, reports surfaced of UN peacekeepers in the DRC raping women and having sex with women for money (Clayton and Bone, 2004; HRW, 2005). In 2007, there were reports of UN peacekeepers sexually abusing minors in Haiti and Côte d’Ivoire as well as women in Haiti and Southern Sudan (Ndulo, 2009). In 2015, the UN reported sixty-nine allegations of sexual abuse, including rape, sexual exploitation of minors, and paternity claims in missions in the following states: Central African Republic (CAR), Haiti, DRC, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Cyprus, and Timor Leste (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at paras 8–11). Sexual abuse in the CAR by UN peacekeepers has been widespread and caused the UN to take and propose increased measures to prevent sexual abuse in UN missions. In 2012, in CAR, Muslim Seleka rebels carried out a coup d’état against the current government and caused many civilians to suffer in the process (HRW, 2016a). There were some reprisal attacks and so, concerned about the violence, the Security Council created a mission to the CAR, known as MINUSCA (that is, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic), in April 2014 to protect civilians (MINUSCA, n.d.). In April 2017, MINUSCA was reviewing over 150 cases of sexual abuse by MINUSCA personnel (Benn, 2016). In forty-five of these cases, it has been confirmed that MINUSCA personnel were involved (Benn, 2016). Sexual abuse cases involved allegations of rape and sexual exploitation of minors (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at para. 10). Several cases of sexual abuse resulted in the birth of children. In January 2016, Human Rights Watch reported that UN peacekeepers in the CAR had raped or gang raped at least eight women (HRW, 2016a, n. 90 at p. 10).
39.4. Responses to Violations in UN Peacekeeping Missions The UN has taken steps to stop the abuses and has proposed several methods of holding the alleged perpetrators accountable. After the allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers were revealed, UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon accepted the resignation
700 Muna Ndulo at his request of his special representative in the CAR, Babacar Gaye (UN News Centre, 2015). The UN also created an independent panel to investigate cases of sexual abuse (Benn, 2016). During the course of the UN’s investigations, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) proposed that the UN collect DNA samples from all peacekeeping troops before they are sent to their respective missions and create special military courts in the CAR to try alleged perpetrators (UN News Centre, 2015; ABC, 2016). For the military courts to be effective, they have to be constituted under the respective national military court martial system and sit in operational areas as circuit courts. Equally, contributing countries must consent to these proposals and have them reflected in the Status of Forces Agreements concluded between the UN and troop contributing countries before the UN can implement them (Benn, 2016). The UN has also repatriated alleged perpetrators and can repatriate a troop- contributing state’s entire unit (Benn, 2016; UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at p. 25). However, fears have been expressed that doing this may reduce the numbers of peacekeeping troops on the ground because not many states are contributing troops. Furthermore, the UN has taken measures to reduce peacekeepers’ contact with the civilian population. The UN patrols off-duty peacekeepers to ensure that they remain in their barracks. It has also cordoned off peacekeepers’ barracks to separate them from IDP camps (Benn, 2016). The UN has responded to allegations by investigating the cases and prescribing regulations that discourage similar peacekeeper behaviours in the future. This includes the Secretary-General’s proposal in March 2017 to create a new Assistant SecretaryGeneral-level position to serve as a victims’ advocate at the UN headquarters to ensure that every victim receives appropriate care, follow-up attention, and information as his or her case progresses (Al Jazeera, 2017).
39.4.1. Regulations to Protect from Sexual Abuse Committed by UN Peacekeepers In 2003, the Secretary-General issued a bulletin to all UN staff on special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (UN Secretariat, 2003). The bulletin defined sexual exploitation as ‘any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes, including, but not limited to, profiting monetarily, socially or politically from the sexual exploitation of another’; and sexual abuse as ‘the actual or threatened physical intrusion of a sexual nature, whether by force or under unequal or coercive conditions’ (UN Secretariat, 2003, s. 1). It explicitly prohibits sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, and sexual activity with people under 18 years old regardless of consent and mistake about the victim’s age (UN Secretariat, 2003, s. 3.2(a), (b)). The bulletin also requires UN staff to report concerns or suspicions of sexual abuse and exploitation by other UN staff members and non-UN staff (UN Secretariat, 2003, s. 3.2(e)). Furthermore, it discourages relationships between UN staff
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 701 and the people that they are serving because such relationships are ‘based on inherently unequal power dynamics’ and ‘undermine the credibility and integrity of the work of the United Nations’ (UN Secretariat, 2003, s. 3.2(d)). The Bulletin also mandates Heads of Departments, Offices and Missions to ‘take appropriate action’ in cases where UN staff have committed sexual abuse, to appoint an official ‘to serve as a focal point for receiving reports on cases of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse,’ and to report its investigations of such cases to the Department of Management (UN Secretariat, 2003, ss. 4.2, 4.3, 4.6). In 2005, the UN published a report entitled, ‘Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations’. This report recommended that the code of conduct set out in the 2003 Bulletin should be: (1) included in the contracts or engagement letters of all UN civilian and military personnel appointed or contracted by the UN and (2) printed on cards that peacekeepers can carry around with them (UN, 2003, n. 125 at paras 24, 26). The UN implemented the first recommendation by writing the code of conduct laid out in the Bulletin into all contracts made with experts, volunteers, consultants, and contractors (UN, 2003, at para. 152). All UN personnel in UN missions must sign this code of conduct (UN, 2003). Under measures announced in March 2017, all UN personnel are to attest in writing that they understand the policy against sexual abuse, exploitation, and abuse. In addition, the UN has published the Bulletin to its staff members to serve as a code of conduct (Al Jazeera, 2017, n. 65). Although the Bulletin reaffirms the UN’s commitment to combatting sexual abuse, to be effective, member states must agree to prosecute and punish peacekeepers from their states who have committed sexual abuse because the UN does not have jurisdiction to discipline military personnel (Ndulo, 2009).
39.4.2. Investigations and possible means to improve effectiveness of investigations When the UN receives allegations of violations committed by its peacekeepers, it investigates these allegations (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at paras 32–36). Member states have played different roles in these investigations, partly by reporting cases of sexual abuse to the UN on their own initiative, appointed national investigators, or worked with the OIOS to investigate cases of sexual abuse. The Secretary-General encouraged all member states to investigate claims of sexual abuse as quickly as possible so that investigators can recover as much evidence as possible. At present, investigations of this nature are not public. This creates the impression that the UN is trying to cover-up any allegation. Investigations that are more public might inspire confidence in the UN and increase its credibility because people could be assured that the UN is addressing the allegations. In Hussein’s 2005 report, it was recommended that the UN create a permanent and independent body of professionals to investigate cases of sexual exploitation and abuse in UN missions that would share resources with the DPKO (UN, 2003, para. 32).
702 Muna Ndulo This would have several advantages, such as the expertise, technical resources, and reliable conclusions that professionals have. The DPKO has taken some steps to address the problem of sexual abuse in UN missions. It has created units in all of its missions to provide training and knowledge of sexual abuse and exploitation issues to UN peacekeepers (Ndulo, 2009). It has also required that all UN missions have focal points to monitor whether UN peacekeepers are complying with the prohibition against sexual abuse (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at para. 49). The DPKO is working with the Secretariat and the OIOS to create and implement a training programme for members of ‘investigative response teams’, which are teams in all peacekeeping missions that are responsible for investigating allegations of sexual abuse. Furthermore, the DPKO has collected better data on the problem of sexual abuse, breaking the data down by type of mission personnel and nationality (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at figs I, II). It has also collected data on the number of investigations conducted, the average duration of such investigations, and the amount of pending investigations (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at figs IV–VI).
39.4.3. Potential Legal Responses to Violations— Prosecution by Host States Prosecution in host states would have the advantage of facilitating evidence gathering and the production of witnesses at the trial (Ndulo, 2009). Some disadvantages include the difficulty of gaining custody of peacekeepers because they may have returned home and their home states may not extradite them back to the host countries for various reasons. Furthermore, host states may lack the capacity to prosecute perpetrators because of ongoing conflicts, lack of reliable judiciary and police forces, and corrupt just ice systems. Immunity is a major barrier to the prosecution of UN peacekeepers who have committed wrongdoing in host states. The host state would have signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the UN that includes a provision providing for immunity for UN peacekeepers (Ndulo, 2009). The UN can waive immunity regarding its civilian personnel but not for peacekeepers under the Status of Forces provisions. Regarding peacekeepers, the UN could avoid the problem of witnesses and the return of peacekeepers to the host state by Status of Forces Agreements providing for and permitting troop-contributing states to set up field military courts in the host states to prosecute perpetrators (Benn, 2016). With respect to civilian employees, the UN could waive immunity and allow the host countries to prosecute the alleged perpetrators, once they have ascertained the nature of the crime alleged. This rarely happens, if at all (Benn, 2016; Blokker and Schrijver, 2015). The UN often waives immunity to assist the host countries’ in investigating the alleged crimes but reserves immunity if the host countries attempt to prosecute both civilian personnel and peacekeepers for their crimes (Blokker and Schrijver, 2015).
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39.4.4. Prosecution by Troop-Contributing States in the Home State Currently, the UN sends back peacekeepers alleged to have committed wrongdoing to their home states to be prosecuted because UN peacekeepers are immune from jurisdiction in the host state (Benn, 2016). However, the home states rarely prosecute the perpetrators. The fact that the DRC tried three Congolese peacekeepers for violations that they committed in the CAR is an exception (Benn, 2016). Again, home states that choose to prosecute perpetrators may face challenges in obtaining evidence and witnesses as both are often not in the home state. Establishing court martial in the host state to try soldiers accused of violations would avoid these challenges but is unlikely to happen for reasons previously stated (Ndulo, 2009).
39.4.5. D NA Collection to Resolve Paternity Claims and Medical Testing In the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal in the CAR, Herve Ladsous (2016), The Undersecretary-General for the Department of Peacekeeping proposed that the UN collect DNA samples from peacekeeping troops before they were deployed. The 2015 Report of the Secretary-General on special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse reiterated this proposal, stating that the UN began working on a DNA collection protocol to help address paternity claims (UN Secretariat, 2003, n. 78 at para. 31). The UN also offered to help member states collect DNA samples from mothers and children. By 2015, five member states had created national systems to address paternity claims (UN Secretariat, 2003). Collecting DNA helps in resolving paternity questions and provision of financial support to mothers to raise these children (Ndulo, 2009). The UN should also provide some financial assistance and resources to assist states that may lack the resources to collect DNA samples of the troops that they contribute. Indeed, the UN could provide a facility at the mission to collect DNA samples from the peacekeepers. The UN should also encourage member states to properly screen their troops for communicable diseases or set up facilities at the Mission to do so to prevent another epidemic like the Haiti cholera epidemic. The UN could also set up a fund that would help provide support for mothers who are raising children fathered by peacekeepers. Contributions to the fund could be made by imposing disciplinary fines on UN peacekeepers who violate the rules as is already allowed by the UN Staff Rules or by asking troop-contributing states to pay back the daily allowance of its soldiers who have been found guilty of sexual abuse and exploitation into the fund (UN, 2003, n. 125 at paras 73, 75). The UN could also stop paying countries that fail to investigate claims made against their soldiers in a timely manner and put the money into a trust fund to assist survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse.
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39.4.6. U N Liability for Wrongs and Damages in Host Countries: Haiti Cholera Epidemic The cholera epidemic in Haiti raises a different issue from that of sexual abuse of peacekeepers. It raises the issue of attributing liability to the United Nations for wrongful conduct by its officials that causes damages to individuals or communities. In such situations, should the UN make reparations to victims? In 2004, the Security Council created MINUSTAH (which stands for Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti) to assist the Transitional Government in Haiti (UNSC, 2004). In October 2010, ten months after Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake, a cholera epidemic broke out. By 2014, the cholera epidemic had killed over 8,500 people and infected over 700,000 people (HRW, 2015). The outbreak was allegedly traced to a Nepalese contingent of MINUSTAH, whose waste taken from their septic tanks by a private contractor was improperly disposed (Katz, 2013). The Independent Panel of Experts on the Cholera Outbreak in Haiti, appointed by the UN, published a report stating that tests confirmed that cholera strains taken in Nepal from 2007 to 2010 were very similar to cholera strains taken in Haiti from 2010 onwards (UN, 2011, n. 108 at pp. 27–8). According to a UN official, the Nepalese peacekeepers had not been tested for cholera before being deployed to Haiti (Katz, 2013). At the time, the Medical Support Manual for UN Peacekeeping Operations did not prevent peacekeepers with cholera from serving in UN peacekeeping missions, but the current manual does (Katz, 2013; UN Medical Support Manual; UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2015, p. 72). The UN has been reluctant to accept full responsibility for the outbreak (Katz, 2013; Lynch, 2013). For example, the DPKO refused to accept that UN peacekeepers caused the epidemic and claimed that it was more important to stop the cholera epidemic than to determine the source of the epidemic (Lynch, 2013). When the Institute for Democracy and Justice in Haiti petitioned UN Headquarters in New York to pay compensation to the families of those who died from cholera and to those infected but survived the illness, the UN refused, and invoked immunity pursuant to section 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations (Nichols, 2013; Lynch, 2013). Much later, the United Nations acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that new UN actions will be needed to respond to the cholera crisis in Haiti. It has acknowledged that it needs to do more regarding its own involvement in the outbreak and those affected by cholera. This UN acknowledgement stopped short of saying it caused the epidemic. Nor does it indicate a change in the UN’s legal position that it is immune from legal process including from the Georges v. United Nations case brought by Haiti cholera victims and their families in US courts. As was shown in the previous pages, it is well-established judicial practice of domestic courts that legal actions against the United Nations involving internal constitutional and administrative matters including employment conditions of the UN staff should
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 705 be dismissed because of lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. The cholera cases raise the issue of exploring, assessing, and determining the responsibility of the UN for acts covered by immunity. Italian courts have held that customary international law does not extend absolute immunity to international organizations and that in particular, international organizations established in Italy do not have immunity for transactions of a commercial nature, but only for acts related to their institutional purposes. In Giovan v. FAO (1971), the court ruled that such immunity could only be recognized with regard to public law activities; that is, in the case of an IO, with regard to public law activities which it pursues for its specific purposes as created by its mandate, but not with regard to private law activities where an organization acts on an equal footing with private individuals. On this theory, in 1992, an Italian court denied immunity to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for claims for increases of rent for their office premises in Rome. This approach is based on the view that IO immunity is based on the principle of functionality; that is, that the immunity encompasses only acts needed for the execution of the official functions and activities of the organization. The United States takes the view that the restrictive theory of state immunity has no application to the United Nations because the UN derives its immunity from international obligations based on the United Nations Charter and the Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which do not recognize any difference between non-commercial and commercial acts. In their view ‘immunity from every form of legal process’ as articulated in section 3 of the United Nations Convention on Privileges and Immunities encompasses all enforcement measures imposable by a judicial as well as an administrative or legislative authority.
39.4.7. Duty to Provide Alternative Modes of Settlement Because victims of violations and wrongs committed by UN officials are unlikely to overcome the UN’s immunity in courts of law, NGOs and local communities might focus on lobbying and persuading the UN into developing other measures to address violations. One such way is for human rights groups and activists to insist that the United Nations set up alternative modes of settling claims. Claims commissions should cover non-commercial areas as these are already covered by arbitration agreements. Any such Commissions should manage a fund that would be used to compensate persons who have suffered injury or damages because of UN activity. At the national level, many countries have set up commissions to compensate victims of crime. These could be models for the type of structures the UN can set up. A legal basis exists that can be used to support the setting up of such structures. In 1946, at the time the United Nations General Assembly adopted the unrestricted immunity provision in section 2 of the Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, it also imposed on the UN the obligation, in section 29, to arrange for the settlement of certain disputes. Section 29 reads: ‘The United Nations shall make provisions for appropriate modes of
706 Muna Ndulo settlement of (a) disputes arising out of contracts or other disputes of a private law character to which the United Nations is a party and (b) disputes involving any official of the United Nations who by reason of his official position enjoys immunity, if the immunity has not been waived by the Secretary General.’ A question that might arise is whether section 29 is adequate to support the setting up of the type of commission proposed here. An argument can be made for situating the proposal in human rights instruments. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNGA, 1948, res. A/810), and all human rights instruments, guarantee the right to be heard. Article 10 of UDHR states: ‘Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.’ Similarly, Article 2 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (UNGA, 1966, p. 171) provides that ‘each state party to the present Covenant undertakes: (a) to ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms as herein recognised are violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity’; and (b) ‘[to] ensure that any person claiming such a remedy shall have his right thereto determined by competent judicial, administrative or legislative authorities, or by any other competent authority provided for by the legal system of the state, and to develop the possibility of judicial remedy.’ The United Nations should subscribe to this provision in all its activities, as it is a core value of the organization in the words of the preamble to the United Nations Charter ‘to promote and encourage respect for human rights’. As noted earlier, the United Nations has established procedures with respect to disputes arising out of commercial agreements. The UN agrees to arbitration in these cases. There is no reason why arrangements should not be put in place for claims that arise from civilians who sustain injuries or loss of property arising from peacekeeping operations.
39.5. Conclusion It is morally and legally the correct thing to do for the United Nations to work out arrangements for providing remedies for civilians who have been injured by activities related to the United Nations. Promoting accountability for UN violations will inspire confidence in the United Nations. This is essential for the UN to fulfil its cardinal purpose of maintaining international peace and security. The UN has taken some steps that are generally limited to addressing sexual violence. For example, it has prescribed regulations prohibiting sexual abuse and has created mechanisms to address sexual abuse, mostly in the 2003 Bulletin. It has not done much to provide remedies for claims covered by immunity. The UN needs to do more to set up a mechanism that deals with claims from civilians who sustain injuries or loss of property. It can work with member states to set up victims’ assistance programmes. Implementing these measures is a problem, since it is dependent on the cooperation of member states. However,
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 707 the responsibility of the UN to lead the way in terms of accountability is beyond debate. Institutional failures in the UN or the irresponsible behaviour of peacekeepers or UN personnel must not become another indicator of the failure to protect the weak and vulnerable in society. Failure to give redress to victims’ wrongs committed by the United Nations violates the fundamental principles that informed the establishment of the UN. Member states have an obligation to support progressive initiatives towards finding solutions to this problem.
References Cases Al Adsani v. the UK (2001) ECHR. Beer and Regan v. Germany (2001) ECHR. Behrami and Behrami v. France (2007) ECHR. Boimah v. UN General Assembly (1987) 664 F. Supp. 69. Brzak v. United Nations (2010) 597 F 3D 107. Georges v. United Nations (2016) 834F.3d 88 Germany v. Italy (2012) ICJ. FAO. 1971. Rome Court of First Instance, Labor Section, 25 June 1969. International Court of Justice (ICJ). 1949. ‘Reparations for Injuries Suffered in the Services of the UN’. Advisory Opinion. 11 April. [online], http://www.worldcourts.com/icj/eng/ decisions/1949.04.11_reparation_for_injuries.htm. Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy: Greece intervening) (2012) ICJ 434. Mendaro v. World Bank (1983) US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit, 717 F.2d 610. Mothers of Srebrenica and Others v. The Netherlands and United Nations (2010) Court of Appeal of the Hague, 10/04437. Mothers of Srebrenica et al. v. The State of the Netherlands and the UN (2012) S. Ct. Netherlands, 10/04437. Saramati v. France, Germany, and Norway (2007) ECHR. Stitching Mothers of Srebrenica and others v. the Netherlands (2013) ECHR 194. Waite and Kennedy v. Germany (1999) ECH.
Books and Articles Benn, Margaux. 2016. ‘UN Sex Abuse Scandal in Central African Republic Hits Rock Bottom’. Foreign Policy, 8 April. Blokker, Niels and Schrijver, Nico (eds). 2015. Immunity of International Organizations. Leiden/ Boston: Brill/Nijhoff. Bosco, David. 2012. ‘Suing the United Nations for Cholera in Haiti’. Foreign Policy, 30 October. Bowett, Derek. 1982. The Law of International Institutions. Fourth edition. London: Stevens & Sons. Brownlie, Ian, 2008. Principles of Public International Law. Seventh edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clayton, Jonathan and Bone, James. 2004. ‘Sex Scandal in the Congo Threatens to Engulf UN’s Peacekeepers’. The Times, 23 December.
708 Muna Ndulo Hwang, Phyllis. 2009. ‘Reform of the Administration of Justice System at the United Nations’. The Law & Practice of International Courts and Tribunals, 8 (2). Katz, Jonathan. 2013. ‘In the Time of Cholera’. Foreign Policy, 10 January, http://foreignpolicy. com/2013/01/10. Lynch, Colum, 2013. UN Invokes Diplomatic Immunity on Haiti Cholera Epidemic. Foreign Policy, 21 February. Ndulo, Muna. 2009. ‘The United Nations Responses to Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Women and Girls by Peacekeepers During Peacekeeping Missions’. Berkeley Journal of International Law, 27 (1). Nichols, Michelle. 2013. UN Says Will Not Pay Haiti Cholera Compensation Claims. Reuters, 21 February. [online], http://w ww.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-cholera-unidUSBRE—91K19O20130221. Virzo, Roberto and Ingravallo, Ivan (eds). 2015. Evolutions in the Law of International Organizations. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Nijhoff.
Reports Al Jazeera. 2017. UN Proposes Steps to Curb Sex Abuse by Peacekeepers. Al Jazeera, 17 March, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/17/03. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). 2016. Central African Republic Abuse Claims Prompt UN to Consider Peacekeeping Court Martials, DNA testing. ABC News, 1 April. Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2005. Democratic Republic of Congo: Seeking Justice: The Prosecution of Sexual Violence in The Congo War. Summary. [online], http://pantheon.hrw. org/reports/2005/drc0305/. Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2015. World Report 2015: Haiti. [online], https://www.hrw.org/ world-report/2015/country-chapters/Haiti. Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2016a. Central African Republic: Materials Published Between April 2015 and March 2016. Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2016b. UN: Stop Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers. 4 March. [online], https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/03/04/un-stop-sexual-abuse-peacekeepers. United Nations, A Guide To Resolving Disputes. Administration of Justice, New York 2009, www.un.org/en/ombudsman/docs. United Nations (UN). (2011). Final Report of the Independent Panel of Experts on the Cholera Outbreak in Haiti. [online], http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/haiti/UN-cholera-report- final.pdf. United Nations (UN). 1975. Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in Their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character. Official records of the United Nations Conference on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations, vol. II. New York: United Nations. United Nations (UN). 2003. ‘A Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations’. UN Doc. A/59/7 10. United Nations (UN) Department of Peacekeeping Operations. 2015. Medical Support Manual for UN Peacekeeping Operations. Third edition. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. GA Res. 217A, 3 GAOR. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). 1949. Statute of the United Nations Administrative Tribunal. GA Res. 351(IV), UN Doc. A/RES/351(IV) (24 November).
The United Nations, Peacekeepers, and Accountability 709 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). 1966. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. UNTS 999. 16 December. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). 2002. ‘Report of The Secretary-General on The Activities of the Office of Internal Oversight Services’. Delivered to the General Assembly. UN Doc. A/57/451 (4 October). United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). 2009. ‘Administration of Justice at the United Nations’. GA Res. 63/253 (19 March). United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), 2014. ‘United Nations Peacekeeping’. [online], http://www.un.org/ en/peacekeeping/missions/minusca/. United Nations News Centre, 2015. ‘Central African Republic: Ban Vows ‘Decisive Action’ on Allegations of Sexual Abuse by UN Peacekeepers’. UN News Centre, 12 August. United Nations Office of the Administration of Justice. n.d. UN Internal Justice System. [online], http://www.un.org/en/oaj/unjs/informalres.shtml. United Nations Ombudsman and Mediation Services (UNOMS). n.d. How Can an Ombudsman Help Me? [online], http://www.un.org/en/ombudsman/help.shtml. United Nations Secretariat. 1991. ‘Revised Disciplinary Measures and Procedures’. UN Doc. ST/AI/371, 2 August. United Nations Secretariat. 2003. ‘Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse’. Secretary-General’s Bulletin, ST/SGB/2003/13, 9 October. United Nations Security Council (UNSC). 2004. Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti. UNSC Res. 1542. Secretary-General Comprehensive Review of the Whole Question of Peacekeeping Operations in All Their Aspects, UN. Dc. A/59/7 14 (25 March 2005).
Chapter 40
Internat i ona l Organiz at i ons , C ivil Serva nts , a nd Whistleb l ow i ng James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney
40.1. Introduction In the last hundred years, there has been a rise in transnational administration and the creation of a global public policy arena. Public administration, as seen in previous chapters, is no longer an exclusive act of sovereign states. Some 803 international and regional organizations, employing 264, 298 personnel, have been established by and for countries (Union of International Associations, 2013). These institutions have become significant interlocutors in the quest to address world problems that need collective action to promote peace, security, economic prosperity, and human rights. International organizations (IOs) are not replacements for sovereignty, but rather are state-originated enhancements in the post-Westphalian order. Part of world governance, they are hubs for debates, policies, and laws in an increasingly globalized order. International bureaucracies are the identity and engine of these institutions; their civil servants, with the limited exception of seconded sovereign-level personnel, are not representatives of countries or liaisons between their agency and their home governments. Mandates to encourage anti-corruption reporting and protect whistleblowers in international organizations are, at best, problematic. Not only are there few independent judicial mechanisms for dispute resolution, but also the leaders of these institutions have the sole right to adjudicate cases and determine whether or not they are referred to
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 711 sovereign authorities. Moreover, if cases are referred, problems arise in jurisdiction, evidence gathering, and a reluctance by states to prosecute international public servants. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the principles, problems, and prospects of whistleblowing in the international civil service. It begins by discussing whistleblowing, based largely on the American experience: its significance, relevant legislation, and the nature of bureaucracies. This focus on a nation that has the most extensive whistleblower policies in the world reflects the fact that some international organizations are headquartered in the United States. It also makes substantial contributions to them; American anti-corruption initiatives, then, can have a great deal of influence. Following a brief summary of the literature, liberal democratic whistleblowing protections and the transnational public service are examined. The analysis closes with an exploration of whistleblowing guidelines and best practices in international organization and nation-state administrative structures.
40.2. Background: Blowing the Whistle, Legislation, and Bureaucracies Given the low public visibility and high technical complexity of organizational practices and policies, detection of corruption rests in large part with the workforce. (This section, as well as a small part of the Conclusion, is condensed and adapted from Bowman and West (2015, Chapters 8 and 10)). It is well-documented that whistleblowers—those who reveal information about illegal, immoral, or inefficient organizational activities that endanger the health, safety, or freedom of the public— are the single most important source for exposing crime—more than government regulators, law enforcement personnel, and professional auditors combined (see US Department of Justice, 2010). Whistleblowers, nonetheless, seldom get vindication as lionized persons of conscience; those who do ‘are the rare exception, and even most of them pay a horrible price with lifelong scars’ (Devine and Maassarani, 2011, p. 18). These individuals blow the whistle because of their dread of living with a corrupted self; they are not good at living morally compartmentalized lives, one at work and one at home (Alford, 2000). However, most employees are able to segregate their activities which may explain the reluctance to speak out. There is no uniform national whistleblowing law in the United States. Instead, there are over fifty separate federal statutes and literally hundreds of state statutory or common-law protections. This complicated patchwork of jurisprudence (see Kohn, 2011, p. 27–56) may secure the jobs of civil servants, forbid adverse personnel actions, allow the right to sue for back pay and legal fees, or award a percentage of the money recovered—but only
712 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney under specific circumstances and depending on the jurisdiction, the industry, and the legal issue at stake. The ideal case—one that meets best practice standards (Devine and Maassarani, 2011, pp. 256ff.) and where the dissenting employee is above reproach—may not be typical. Further, the laws are not comprehensive or consistently enforced because of the procedural complexity of bringing a claim, short statutes of limitation, inadequate agency staffing, and narrow interpretations of the law (Miceli, Near, and Dworkin, 2008, pp. 169–70). The crux of the problem is that most public and private bureaucracies resemble autocratic states; their operations involve power, conflict, and domination. They seldom permit opposition; those questioning decisions are seen as a disloyal opposition to be dealt with accordingly (e.g. Alford, 2000; Goffman, 1961; Weinstein, 1979). Indeed, the larger, more systemic the problem, the more intense the managerial effort to silence the whistleblower (Near and Miceli, 2008, p. 277). Organizations assume a self-serving posture wherein dissent is a challenge to legitimacy and an act of betrayal. When a person comes forward, the institution is inherently unable to deal with the issue because of its imperative for survival. Because he or she is objecting to policy, it is not always reasonable to expect an unbiased response. For example, when six experts on a National Space and Aeronautics Administration safety panel issued warnings prior to the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion, they were discharged. In most bureaucracies, there are meagre freedoms: whistleblowers are victimized, few are exonerated, the issues raised are ignored, and wrongdoers typically escape penalties. At odds with the overwhelming proportion of whistleblowing literature as reflected here, Brown (2008) and his contributors (also see Heumann, Friedes, Cassak, Wright, and Joshi, 2013–14) challenge the assumption that whistleblowing is dangerous and that most whistleblowers inevitably suffer harm. They nonetheless confirm that, ‘even if not as endemic as previously believed, poor treatment of whistleblowers is a definitive problem’ (Smith and Brown, 2008, p. 127). At least in the American context, six recent reports based on archival research document that many cases are routinely dismissed, few are properly investigated, and management wins nearly all cases that are adjudicated (Bowman and West, 2015, p. 209).
40.3. Whistleblowing Literature Five generalizations can be derived from the public administration and cognate literature. First, the types of violations prompting disclosure often include fraud, embezzlement, theft, and bribery. More specifically, they can cover gross mismanagement; endangerment to life, health, and safety; sexual exploitation; abuse of power; discrimination; conflict of interest; or unprofessional behaviour that undermines the public service mission (e.g. Miceli and Near, 2013; Munch, 2006; Skivenes and Trygstad, 2014). Second, in order to receive legal coverage, who discloses the issue, and when, is not always clear. Eligible personnel may be restricted to current or former public servants
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 713 and may not include contractors; other groups (e.g. consumers, students, retirees, the unemployed, prisoners) are generally excluded from protection. Private sector coverage is sometimes provided, especially when it involves public policy violations (de Maria, 2006). Requiring the whistleblower to identify herself can increase accountability, but reduce disclosure; anonymous revelations may increase whistleblowing, but decrease accountability (Latimer and Brown, 2008). The time frame to expose corruption varies, but at least one year is a minimum (Devine and Maassarani, 2011). Third, laws and regulations usually identify internal channels of dissent. The selection of an appropriate recipient for allegations is important for the whistleblower and for the administrative response. Reports are usually made directly to employers (e.g. supervisors, or managers or their superiors, legal counsel, human resources personnel, ombudspersons, or hotline operators) as opposed to autonomous non-governmental organizations (e.g. professional associations, unions, and media). Those receiving the information generally assume an investigatory role, even though they may be the target of alleged wrongdoing (Moberly, 2014). External channels (e.g. police, anti-corruption offices, elected officials, journalists) could be tried if internal protests fail, especially where confidence in these procedures is low and/or fear of consequences is high. Fourth, negative employment actions against the dissenter can be appealed to impartial bodies—but they have a long record of ruling against whistleblowers. At the federal level, for example, the 1989 US Whistleblower Protection Act (as amended) authorizes the Office of Special Counsel to investigate complaints of retaliation and pursue relief for the employee. In other settings, hearings in front of administrative boards, judicial bodies, or neutral third-party dispute resolution units may exist to avoid issues of institutional conflict of interest. Even though the burden of proof is now on the organization to show that adverse whistleblower treatment would have been the same for reasons unrelated to disclosures (Devine and Maassarani, 2011; Fasterling, 2014), it is often hard for employees to demonstrate that their actions were in response to whistleblowing. Finally, unique to the United States, financial incentives—in the form of a monetary reward for their actions or reimbursement of costs related to the consequences of reprisal—are sometimes available to whistleblowers who prevail. Relief may also include a restraining order, reinstatement, or the right to relocate in order to pre-empt serial reprisals (Lewis, Devine, and Harpur, 2014). More broadly, employers have a duty of care to support and protect those who fulfil the obligation to report problems. As the world community is increasingly recognizing, the workforce is a valuable source of corruption information. While business-like New Public Management reforms of the last generation were a global phenomenon—and international organizations adopted and exported such reforms—unintended, if not unexpected, consequences emerged (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Accordingly, the next section builds upon the literature to help comprehend international public service whistleblowing. The diversity within and among international organizations must be acknowledged, but the United Nations receives particular attention. Given its size and scope of responsibilities, it is the paramount administrative model, the features of which cover many other secretariats in the UN family.
714 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney This study seeks to add to the extant literature by examining the relevance of liberal democratic ideals embodied in whistleblowing to the international public service. It does so by drawing upon published sources, complemented by interview data from a large sample of international civil service stakeholders. As part of a larger research project, primary and secondary sources examined in the literature were complemented by twenty- seven semi- structured interviews of twenty- nine veteran international civil service professionals (current and past officials) as well as outside experts (representatives of advocacy groups). This purposive sample of elite interviews (Dexter, 2008) was created using the snowball technique. The authors focused on organizations headquartered in Washington, DC and New York City, as interviews were held at the International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, United Nations, World Bank, Government Accountability Project, Heritage Foundation and five other organizations (whose data are not utilized here). Respondents were granted anonymity, although notes were taken.
40.4. Whistleblowing in International Organizations: Loyalty, Impartiality, Immunities, and Disclosure Issues The cadre of international civil servants relies on the universal ideals and great traditions of public administration—competence, integrity, independence, impartiality—to support supranational organizations in seeking the fundamental values of peace, cooperation, social justice, human rights, and the rule of law. The United Nations Charter (Article 100) and its associated declarations call upon staff to meet high ethical standards, including the responsibility to report malfeasance. Indeed, the globalization of the fight against corruption (see Les Pal chapter within this Handbook) has been joined by the internationalization of whistleblowing initiatives. Good governance, though, is not self-executing. Bringing international conventions and agreements to life requires the articulation of key values (liberty, equality, citizenship, human rights, rule of law) and support for institutions that can realize those values. The founders of post-war international organizations thought that Western administration rationality and modernity would be sufficient as memberships in the UN common system and other pillars of the UN family (e.g. the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) expanded and institutional commitments grew (Newman, 2007). The importance and difficulty of harmonizing scores of states and thousands of personnel, however, should not be underestimated. The context within which they work is characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, and heterogeneity. Not only do international agencies typically lack a coherent legal structure, they also have powerful multiple
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 715 principals, a focus on policy formation combined with inadequate means to enforce decisions, and accountability gaps (Bauer and Ege, 2014). It is not hard to see, then, that translating ideals into practice is frequently problematic. Those countries, for example, that are not governed by the rule of law may see international organization norms as anti-national and neo-colonial in content and intent (see, e.g. Verini, 2016, 26 June). The complexity that characterizes international agencies demands that their bureaucracies balance diversity with unity. The way this is accomplished is decisive for the legitimacy of institutions and their anti-corruption efforts (Trondal, Marcussen, Larsson, and Veggeland, 2010, p. 195). As unique instruments of interstate cooperation, these agencies vary, but they share some characteristics. States have endowed them with privileges to protect the pan-national nature of their personnel in the independent performance of their duties. Good judgement, therefore, becomes critical, but before that judgement is exercised, the civil servant must be cognisant of the international mission and the stakes involved: loyalty, impartiality, immunity, and whistleblower disclosure issues.
40.4.1. Loyalty International loyalty means undivided fealty to the international organization. A civil servant’s responsibilities are not national, but international. ‘For loyalty to exist’, writes Edward Newman (2007, p. 436), ‘there must be a clear working ethos, independence from political pressures, and job security: a career civil service’. Personnel are not agents of states since they are representatives of all states. In keeping with their oath of office, they should neither seek nor accept instructions from an external entity. ‘This does not mean that . . . civil servants have to give up their personal political views or national perspectives’ (International Civil Service, 2013, p. 4), but it does mean that they must maintain a cosmopolitan outlook and an understanding of the world community as a whole. Being devoted to the principles and purposes of the profession is a fundamental duty of all personnel by virtue of their status as servants of global interests. Personnel conduct should be such that it furthers good relations with individual member states and contributes to their trust and confidence in the overall institution. The UN Charter declares that the Secretary-General answers to the organization, not member states (Article 100); this includes human resource management decisions. For states, however, there is prestige in filling as many posts as possible with their citizens. They may offer job candidates for open positions or attempt to influence promotions in a manner causing international public servant loyalties to conflict with state attempts to affect administrative actions. As steward and conscience of intergovernmentalism, staff are to act independently of member states. Behaviour can include whistleblowing and, when done responsibly, is an act of loyalty and praiseworthy organizational citizenship.
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40.4.2. Impartiality Impartiality, the second ideal, implies objectivity, a lack of bias, and tolerance. As one executive in the United Nations Office of Administration of Justice stated, ‘the international civil service adheres to the Charter and its Principles as it is impartial and independent of any influence; embodies UN values; and takes the best action needed without fear or favor’ (anonymous, personal communication, 2015, 16 October). As a condition for the credibility and legitimacy of global institutions, an atmosphere of impartiality can generate norms, rules essential for cooperation, and opportunities for interaction. In fact, tens of thousands of employees work in an environment of impartiality for objectives that transcend national policies. While not without questions of plausibility, desirability, and morality—the international civil service does not exist in a vacuum—the goal of impartiality encapsulates a core intuition that world governance be based on something other than bias (Megret, 2014; Langrod, 1963). Yet there is an on-going tension, often manifested in whistleblower incidents, between the centripetal forces tending towards the universal and the centrifugal forces toward the national. ‘What is at stake, especially when states are not governed by the rule of law but by patronage, is the very concept of an impartial international civil service, serving the international organization member countries in an independent way’ (Mouritzen, 1990: 36). The more that nations pressure ‘their’ international civil servants, the more these organizations become multinational conglomerates instead of global institutions.
40.4.3. Immunity Necessary for the independent exercise of their functions, the third characteristic tenet is that these personnel, in concept and by custom, should enjoy safe passage in foreign nations. It includes immunity from their laws and courts, with the understanding that it is the duty of these personnel to respect the laws of the receiving state. Only the general secretaries of international bodies can waive the immunities. Because actions of transnational organizations and their staff are exempt, immunities also mean that whistleblowers are unable to file claims under state laws. Instead, agencies have their own justice systems to evaluate allegations and adjudicate claims; there is no external authority to review employee petitions. In the view of one legal practitioner who represents international public personnel before internal tribunals, ultimately ‘the quality of a whistleblower policy, and the way it is implemented, revolves around immunities’ which are ‘potent’, ‘absolute’, and discourage accountability (anonymous personal communication, 11 November 2015). As Osmat Jefferson (2010, p. 162) argues, ‘the internal governing structure has more rules and procedures to govern employees and few, if any, rules to control the discretionary power of executives’. To discourage the abuse of this power, and to augment existing
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 717 safeguards, immunity could be extended. That is, it might include not only protection from state interference with diplomatic duties, but also protection against international organization interference with the individual’s obligation to report wrongdoing.
40.4.4. Disclosure Issues: Definition, Contract Employment, Retribution, Power Asymmetry The ideal civil servant, then, places loyalty to the international agency above all other loyalties, serves as an impartial decision-maker, and possesses immunities in the conduct of her business. As noted, such aspirational norms promote high standards and professional behaviour. Complementing this recognition, whistleblowing is a key tool by which international administrations are kept accountable to those they serve. Disclosure issues include (a) definition, (b) contract employment, (c) retaliation, and (d) power asymmetry.
Definition The definition of whistleblowing offered earlier is helpful, but a complementary, expansive definition—a means to provide accountability by allowing for the disclosure of information about misconduct while protecting against sanctions (Banisar, 2011)—is also useful because, ‘The UN does not have a consensus on the use of the term’ (anonymous United Nations executive, personal communication, 2016, 6 October). Michael Soussan (2008, p. 85) claims that the tendency in the United Nations of ‘not calling things by their names’ allows officials to ignore basic facts, delay matters, and to make decisions by not making decisions. Without agreement on the translation for the word, this may also reflect the ambiguity of—and connotations associated with—the expression, as well as the relatively recent advent of policy. The United Nations and the World Bank, for instance, did not adopt whistleblower policies until 2005 and then only partly because of the infamous 1995–2010 UN Oil for Food scandal (Soussan, 2008). Although many other international organizations followed suit, it should be remembered that, ‘whistleblowing is an American construct,’ (non-profit law firm attorney, personal communication, 11 November 2015). The concept ‘is driven by a liberal democracy vision of a corruption-free state, a civically active population abiding by the law and reporting those who do not, and a public administration aspiration to reprisal-proof reporting’ (de Maria, 2005, p. 220). This vision is not necessarily shared by all states, notably those that do not have the culture to support or the political will to create the institutional framework consistent with transparency and accountability. For historical and cultural reasons, whistleblowers, especially when anonymous, can be seen as disloyal and dangerous subversive sneaks, informers, collaborators, espionage agents, or just irksome troublemakers (Vanderkerckhove, Uys, Rehg, and Brown, 2014). The absence of an international legal definition also leaves whistleblowing as indistinguishable from other ‘leaking’ or unauthorized release of confidential information
718 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney (Lewis, Brown, and Moberly, 2014, p. 20). Thus, while whistleblower policies can be found in nearly all conventions dealing with corruption, protection is not mandatory and who is considered a whistleblower is generally a matter of national jurisdiction (Djokic, 2011). Hofstede’s (1984) well-known power distance theory helps explain differing views on whistleblowing. High power distance nations accept an unequal distribution of power in institutions as legitimate, thus encouraging loyalty and obedience to authority; low power cultures grant less legitimacy, with the effect that individuals are more independent of, and less submissive to, organizations. The United States, Australia, and England, for example, enacted whistleblowing legislation prior to Japan. Thus, Dowling (2011, p. 904) argues that nations ‘from Russia and Latin America’ to the Middle East and India to parts of Asia and much of Africa are whistleblowing-averse societies. Acknowledging these differences, the act of whistleblowing and reprisal is nonetheless widespread among the concert of nations (Walden and Edwards, 2014, p. 432; Johnson, 2002). It is also true that whistleblower laws have the potential to work only in societies that value the rule of law, open government, and responsiveness supported by an independent legal system.
Employment Contracts The second whistleblowing disclosure concern is the shift from long-term employment contracts, typical of a career service, to short-term, temporary contracts. One of the main institutional innovations of the last century was the international civil service: a corps of permanent career officials was seen as the best vehicle to ensure an independent workforce and to achieve the goals of interstate organizations. This classical conception was largely supplanted by the ‘let-the-managers-manage’ New Public Management philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s, so that an assistant UN Secretary-General simply stated that ‘we use a business management model’ that focuses on flexibility with no career paths, loose regulations, and little job security (personal communication, 15 October 2015). There had always been short-term contract employees, but in some IOs like the United Nations, the proportion has increased steadily over the decades from approximately 20 per cent to 80 per cent (Mathiason, 2008). As John Mathiason opines, the contract issue (N)eeds to be revisited in the context of what a ‘career’ means for the international civil service. Permanent contracts went out of favor because it was perceived that they produced ineffective, change-resistance time servers . . . Whether they did so was never evaluated, and the experience of those organizations [with temporary contracts] was never compared to [those] with permanent contracts. (2008, p. 131)
The effect of changes is the continued deterioration of the professional public service (International Civil Service Commission, 2000, p. 16). When job security is uncertain, ‘people will not stand up’ and blow the whistle (an official from a Latin American-focused institution, personal communication, 27 October
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 719 2015). Since perception can be reality, the simple possibility of discipline may be enough to discourage divulgence of problems. As one international civil service attorney put it, ‘if your contract is not renewed, you are on a flight home’; as such, this is ‘possibly the single most important issue’ facing public service professionals (anonymous, personal communication, 11 November 2015). The contract problem is exacerbated by the so-called G-4 Syndrome (Naím, 1994) that affects employees assigned to entities located in the United States. G-4 status is ‘a powerful deterrent’ to raising ‘inconvenient truths’ that embarrass the organization, according to an Organization of American States staff member (personal communication, 27 October 2015). A UN Ethics Office interviewee observed, further, that there exists an ‘entitlement culture’ for those on these visas: they often come from privileged backgrounds; possess excellent salaries and pensions; earn regular pay increases; enjoy six-week vacations; receive rental subsidies; get dependent allowances; and have educational benefits for children. The possibility of professional and personal ruin, then, produces ‘a culture of silence’ (anonymous UN executive, personal communication, 15 October 2015), as people become accomplices in the problems to save their careers. Except for the sense of professional obligation, there are few incentives—and many disincentives—to report fraud, waste, or abuse.
Retribution When matters become sufficiently serious, some employees will blow the whistle, and may confront retaliation, the next disclosure problem. In fact, ‘it must be the duty . . . to report any breach of the organization’s rules and regulations . . . (and the individual) has the right to be protected against reprisals . . .’ (Standards of Conduct, 2002, p. 4). The institution, though, often reframes the compliant in a ‘shoot-the-messenger’ manner away from the allegation and to the person. The problem, then, becomes a personnel or procedural question, such as a sudden poor performance evaluation or the lack of due process, thereby avoiding the substantive issue (former UN administrator, personal communication, 16 October 2015). The individual’s only recourse is to a complicated internal justice system, a lengthy process not only overwhelmed by those who misuse it as an employment grievance mechanism (UN ethics officer, personal communication, 15 October 2015), but one that virtually always rules against whistleblowers (Walden and Edwards, 2014, p. 439). If employees lack trust in internal justice procedures (see below), then the expectation to report breaches, and to be defended from reprisal can, paradoxically, have the effect of limiting exposés (Vaugh, 2012, p. 250). Indeed, utilizing twenty-four criteria to assess the operation of agency justice systems, Brown et al. (2014) found that the weakest area was associated with whistleblower protection. In a nutshell: (W)histleblower rights are largely symbolic. Employees risk retaliation believing they have genuine protection, when in fact there are no real protections . . . Those . . . investigating the compliant are frequently compromised by
720 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney institutional conflicts of interest and cannot issue impartial decisions without endangering their own careers. (Walden and Edwards, 2014, p. 440)
The organizational instinct is to protect the IO’s own authority (researcher at a Washington, DC foundation, personal communication, 6 November 2015). It follows that there are many reasons why management may be not supportive of disclosures and those that make them (Brown, Meyer, Wheeler, and Zuckerman, 2014, p. 487): risk aversion (an unwillingness to ‘rock the boat’), priorities (the concern is not serious), loyalty (the act is evidence of distrust), motivation (questioning why the information was exposed), and futility (in the end, nothing will change). A corruption allegation that implicates officials and compromises an otherwise valuable programme is not likely to be vigorously pursued. When these factors are taken together, the tendency is not to heed the concern, but to retaliate. This is something that is ‘easy to do, but difficult for the employee to substantiate’ (advocacy group lawyer, personal communication, 6 November 2015) because mistreatment (e.g. intimidation, harassment, ostracism) can be hard to prove or it can be a seemingly routine management task (e.g. work assignment changes). There is, in short, ‘a very hostile environment for whistleblowing; you do it at your own peril’, according to an International Monetary Fund official (personal communication, 4 November 2015).
Power Asymmetry The last disclosure issue is illuminated by the multifaceted legal context found in global affairs: employment law, human rights law, disclosure and secrecy law, and procedural law (which parallel the world goals of social justice, human dignity, and freedom of speech), as well as numerous anti-corruption instruments, such as the 2005 United Nations Convention Against Corruption (Fasterling, 2014). Yet, ‘international public law is less comprehensive than sophisticated national systems . . . and less bound by legal traditions and statutes than their national counterparts’ (Bauer and Ege, 2014, p. 69). For this reason, legal mandates have little explanatory power and potential in understanding administrative behaviour among professional managers (Trondal, 2014, p. 163). What does matter is the power asymmetry found in the competing interests between employer and employee, and the organizational culture that results. International organizations can maintain that the worldwide public interest is properly balanced by them. In so doing they can reject that the whistleblower-identified problem exists, deny reprisals were taken against the employee, and generally discredit the individual (Martin and Riflin, 2004). Employer policies and procedures, in fact, typically receive considerable weight, as tribunals do not substitute their judgement for the discretion of the manager; rather the agency need only to follow its own rules to prevail. Further, individuals are at a severe disadvantage having to—alone—confront the considerable time, money, and staff resources of the institution. One lawyer (personal communication, 11 November 2015) said, ‘Every single international organization has a culture and custom of delay tactics. The more you delay, the more you starve out the employee’, because investigations and case disposition are often a matter of years, not
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 721 months. Walden and Edwards (2014, p. 448) argue that transnational entities simply ‘lack the necessary capacity, impartiality, or willingness to provide an effective system for adjudicating whistleblowers’ retaliation claims’.
Cases Terminological definition, employment contracts, agency reprisal, and power asymmetry, then, show that the management of whistleblowing mirrors contending interests in international organizations. The gap between principle and practice can be illustrated by several case reviews as well as a recently concluded incident. First, Aaronson’s (2016) three in-depth accounts of human rights violations involved civilian protection, employee security, and service provision. She revealed a root problem: the United Nations system—designed to promote human rights and reduce corruption—actively discourages whistleblowing, as it enables corruption, penalizes whistleblowers, and leaves problems unaddressed. Likewise, the Government Accountability Project (2014) examined nine cases including kickback schemes, ethnic cleansing, and sexual exploitation implicating the UN Ethics Office, the Office of Internal Oversight Services and/or the Office of the Secretary-General. Case disposition did not comply with best practices such as protections against retaliation, legal burdens of proof, and access to independent adjudicative bodies. It also analysed 447 reports of retaliation reviewed by the Ethics Office; the Office completed reviews of approximately one-quarter of them and determined that reprisals occurred in just four cases (Laville and Chrisafis, 2015, 30 April). Finally, Anders Kompass, a high United Nations human rights official, received an internal report in 2014 detailing rape and sodomy of boys as young as eight by French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. Since no one had taken action to stop the exploitation, he used formal external channels with member states to transmit the report to the UN French mission (without submitting it to his superior) because they had the authority to act. They thanked him for his action and initiated an inquest only to be hindered by UN claims of immunity. In January 2015, Kompass was asked to resign for not following protocol by leaking the confidential report; he refused, was suspended (an action later ruled illegal), and placed under investigation (Kompass, 2016; Lynch, 2015). In January 2016, Kompass received a letter advising him that he was cleared of all charges; it contained no apology or acknowledgement of his service. His exoneration came after an ad hoc independent panel reviewing the situation in the Central African Republic stated that Kompass had done nothing wrong (Laville, 2016, 18 January). Recalling the international civil service norms—loyalty, impartiality, immunity, disclosure issues—Kompass, loyal to the UN, exercised the duty to report criminal behaviour; indeed, it is required when children are involved. Here, the challenge to loyalty was not from a sovereign state, but from the international institution itself, presumably in a misguided effort to protect its reputation. In the name of impartiality, Kompass acted based on compelling evidence. Once again, the standard was tested not by a member state, but instead by the UN. While it does not have authority to punish soldiers from
722 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney troop-contributor countries, their home nation does have jurisdiction to prosecute (although these countries seldom do so) (Simic, 2015, 9 October). With respect to immunity, third, the peacekeepers as UN employees, had immunity from local laws but not for sexual exploitation of minors. Here immunities could be waived so that home countries can investigate without UN interference. Fourth, this case also illustrates disclosure concerns of definition, employee contracts, reprisal, and asymmetrical power. As a whistleblower, Kompass fits the definitions provided earlier, as he worked through internal channels for external disclosure—although his employer sought to discipline him for misconduct. As a career diplomat, Kompass had a long-term contract which did secure him in the short run from a contract non- renewal. Concerning protection from reprisals, in reckless disregard of criminal behaviour, the UN turned on the lone dissident instead of dealing with the problem he revealed. It reframed the complaint as an issue of document handling and not as an issue of sexual abuse. Employer–employee asymmetries, last, are found in the UN’s power to enforce a suspension and commission a disciplinary inquiry of Kompass while excluding others who received the report and did nothing. As noted, subsequent findings vindicated Kompass. He resumed his post in May, 2015 but resigned a year later when it became evident that no senior officials would be held accountable. In light of at least two decades of peacekeeper sexual abuse in multiple nations (Laville, 2015, 1 May; see e.g. Awordi, Lutz, and Phapa, 2013), this case is merely the tip of the iceberg and demonstrates a gross institutional failure that discredits the UN and undermines its integrity. Systemic problems that hinder investigation in prosecution of crimes are also found in how it treats its own employees. Further, the case data demonstrate that global agencies are not just insulated from external judicial review, but they also lack transparency and act with impunity. It is this set of circumstances that presents challenges for administrators making allegations and seeking protection from retaliation (Walden and Edwards, 2014, p. 430). Whistleblowers discover that their own organization—which is dedicated to the rule of law in the world—may fail to protect them or fully respect the law. They are required to use dense, tortuous, and opaque internal mechanisms for the investigation and resolution of retaliation claims; too often the result is bureaucratic pathologies, expedient decisions, and unaccountable officials. Global institutions, most notably the UN, are much more likely to adopt whistleblower policies than to deploy them effectively. Principles are simply much easier to invoke than to implement. The subtitle of a recent book summarizes the problem as the United Nations’ Culture of Cover-ups, Corruption, and Impunity (Warah and Edwards, 2016).
40.5. Conclusion The international public service—a ‘great experiment’ of the twentieth century (Macy, 1970)—bears responsibility for translating the highest aspirations of the people of the world into reality (International Civil Service Commission, 2013). Globalization—the
International Organizations and Whistleblowing 723 movement of capital, goods, services, people, and ideas across boundaries—has fostered the development of the world community. Most of these trends will intensify in the future and cannot be effectively addressed by sovereign states alone. The expanding information diffusion, enhanced role of international organizations, and empowerment of anti-corruption norms are consistent with the accountability and transparency standards expected by many countries in the twenty-first century. Whistleblowing will continue to spread as technological advances make it easier to reveal corruption, and as deepening scepticism of government and business leads to greater acceptance of whistleblowers and their disclosures. In fact, the years ahead may not only focus on how to protect whistleblowers from organizations, but also how to guard society from organizations that ignore whistleblowers’ warnings (Vandekarckhove, Brown, Tsahuridu, 2014). The prospect of more effective whistleblower regimes recognizes the advantages to institutions of transparency and accountability and the value of whistleblowing to overall good governance. As one World Bank official observed, ‘institutions need to be proactive, instead of reactive’ (anonymous, personal communication, 2015, 6 November). Nothing will change, however, unless there is real accountability: a truly independent and separate agency, not part of the UN Secretariat, that reports directly to member states (Hamilton-Martin, 2015, 14 September). Yet the international system is basically anarchical, and this is seen in its institutions and how they respond to dissent within them. Indeed, if interstate governance lags behind the world’s needs, international bureaucratic cultures lag behind whistleblower reforms (for an update, see Edwards, 2016, 7 July). It is important to recall that the public administration literature is ‘grounded in a relatively ordered sovereign-level governance system with balanced or separated powers. In contrast, the emergent global administrative order has no equivalent governance structure or separation of powers’ (Moloney, 2015, p. 1). The effect is that when facing whistleblower issues, ‘more and more UN staff (are) less concerned with abiding by the ethical standards of the international civil service than with doing whatever is most convenient—or least likely to cause problems— for themselves or for member states’ (Kompas, 2016, 16 June). Systematic organizational procedures, nonetheless, can be useful if executives act strategically to deter malfeasance and retain conscientious personnel. This can be accomplished by creating an ethical infrastructure in organizations to reduce opportunities for corruption, offer incentives for exemplary conduct, and increase risk of unethical behaviour (Bowman and West, 2015). The conundrum is to create a culture supportive of dissent, one that sees it as an event to fortify institutional standards. Because this may involve changing behaviour, attitudes, and culture, perhaps an easier strategy would be to affect a change ‘so that problems are less likely to arise and resolving them is more accepted’ (Martin, 2014, p. 516). The US State Department’s long-standing, well-regarded ‘dissent channel’ programme, for instance, encourages any employee to voice criticism and have it addressed by the Department’s senior policy planning staff; the dissenter is not only protected from reprisal, but there are also annual prizes for those who object in the most effective manner.
724 James S. Bowman, Jonathan P. West, and Kim Moloney A best practice standard, derived from national laws and international organization policies contains twenty specific criteria organized by:
• the scope of whistleblowing coverage (the presences or absence of loopholes); • the forum for cases (adjudication bodies that provide fair process); • rules needed to prevail (realistic burdens of proof and statutes of limitations); • scope of relief (victims obtain benefits; wrongdoers held accountable); and • making a difference (positive results not only for the employee but also society; Devine & Maassarani, 2011, 256ff.).
Meritorious processes include facilitation of good faith disclosures, prevention of misuse of protections, full investigation of claims, and creation of a culture of transparency and accountability (Chene, 2009; Government Accountability Project, 2013). Indeed, organizations impose a positive duty to report suspected fraud and corruption. Virtually all interviewees in the present research believed their organizations did not compare favourably to robust whistleblowing rules which should increase the number of disclosures, reduce reprisal frequency, restore monetary losses to the organization, improve procedural transparency, and enhance personnel awareness and perceptions (Banisar, 2011). While it may be true that a ‘new era’ for whistleblowing may be emerging (Devine and Maassarani, 2011; Kohn, 2011), whistleblowers confront deep-seated cultural biases in organizations. The legal framework for changing administrative practices exists in some nations, but the risks to employees remain: advocates agree that even strong whistleblower cases in the United States are hard to win (e.g. Devine and Maassarani, 2011; Hesch, 2008; Kohn, 2011). The underlying challenge is not only to safeguard dissenters, but also to reduce the need to blow the whistle. That is, reforms must become embedded in a process that deals with the substance of dissent. If the daily interactions among employees and employers do not provide for the exercise of integrity, whistleblowing will remain a perilous, if vital, task.
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Index
Tables, figures, and boxes are indicated by an italic t, f, and b following the page number. Aaronson, S. 721 Abbott, K. W. 33 Academic Council of the United Nations Systems (ACUNS) 368 Accenture 590, 593 Acemoglu, D. 82 Acharya, A. 281 Acholiland, Uganda 66–7 Ackrill, R. 112 Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) 392 Adam Smith International 395–6 Adidas, human rights compliance 613 administrative sovereignty, potential and limits of 14, 59–73, 376–7 associations and affiliations surrounding the UK 69–70 characterizing 71–3 co-administration strategies 72 colonial frameworks 62 concept defined 60–2 Curaçao (circa 2009) 64–5 entities that are not states 62–6 examples of administrative functions 62 four-part distinctions 71–2 Hong Kong (post-war colonial period) 65 Hong Kong (post-2016 elections) 70–1 Macau (circa 2017) 64 Monaco (circa 1963) 65–6 post-Britannia (sub-Roman Britain) 63–4 Somaliland and Acholiland (present day) 66–7 South Sudan (prior to independence from Sudan) 67–8 and state capacity 59
state-like associations with limited aspirations 66–7 1 stateness as separate from statehood 61, 62, 72–3 Taylor Street, Chicago 68–9 Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization 683 advocacy groups 456, 458, 459 advocacy networks 386, 460 Afghanistan 75, 77, 78, 86, 412, 539 National Solidarity Programme (2003–10) 99 Africa: philanthropic activities 625 Ubuntu 242, 248 Ushahidi mapping site 252 African Development Bank 429–30 African Union 78, 373 Agenda 21 initiative 141 agenda-setting see global networks, agenda setting capacity of Ahluwalia, Montek Singh 645 AidData reports 44, 49–50 AIDS/HIV see HIV/AIDS Al Jazeera 242, 249 Alexander, E. R. 449, 450 Alexandroff, A. 639 Alliance for A Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) 623 American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) 351 Donald Stone Lecture (2015) 351 American University’s School of International Service 353–4 Amnesty International 602 Anderson, B. 246 Anderson, K. 158–9
730 Index Angelsen, A. 589 Anglosphere: Border 5 (B5) 211, 214–15 Five Countries Conference (FCC) 211, 213–15 Five Eyes alliance 477 Migration 5 (M5) 211, 214–15 Policy Networks (APNs) 211 transgovernmental networks 210–11 Annan, Kofi 171, 174, 232, 551, 623, 656 Arab region: satellite channels 249, 250 Ummah 242, 248 Aranda, Lourdes 645 Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM ) 3, 276 Asian Development Bank 282 Asian financial crisis (1997–9) 643 Asian Group for Public Administration (AGPA) 352 Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) 530 accountability 539 governance 536, 537 participation 540, 541 Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) 351, 352, 360 member programmes and schools 352–4 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 43, 97, 204, 227, 275, 373 Atlas of Public Management 354–5 ATTAC organization 650 austerity 54, 441, 594 Austin, Sidley 645 Australia: Anglosphere network collaboration 210–11, 213–15 Department of Immigration and Border Protection 12 National Innovation and Science Agenda 105–6 Try, Test and Learn Fund 105–6 Azevedo, Roberto 661 Bailey, S. D. 167 Baker, A. 213 Balboa, C. M. 160
Bali Climate Change Conference (2007) 588 Bamsey, Harold 431, 432 Ban Ki-moon 176, 699–700 ‘band-waggoning’ process 99 Banks, N. 160–1 Barber, B. R. 142–3 Barnett, M. N. 171, 172, 176, 386 Basel Committee on Banking Supervision 209, 331, 476, 478 Basel III Accords 648–9 Batiwala, S. 149 Baumgartner, F. R. 462 Bayne, N. 642 BBC 252 Beck, U. 251 Beevor, John 426 behavioural economics 317 Behrami and Behrami v. France 696 Belgium: sub-and supranational regions 275 transnational policy learning 102 Benson, D. 104 Bezanson, K. A. 533–4 Biermann, F. 115 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 158, 188, 463, 538, 551, 552, 621, 622, 624, 625, 626, 629–30, 651 Black, Eugene R. 425, 426, 659 Black Bloc 650 Blair government, UK 390–1 Blondin, D. 267 Bloomberg Philanthropies 118 Blyth, M. 29 Boao Forum, Asia 375 Bobrow, D. B. 448, 449 Bock, S. 590–1 Boltanski, L. 389 Bolton, John 173 Bono 457 boomerang model 460 Börzel, T. 277 Bosnian civil war 119, 175 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 171 Bouwen, R. 123 Bozeman, B. 428 Brahimi report (2000) 175 Brazil 405
Index 731 inequality in cities 141 Institute of Environmental and Renewable Natural Resources 12 paradiplomacy 132, 133 public administration programmes 349 and WTO leadership selection (2013) 661 Bretherton, C. 304 Bretton Woods institutions 76, 370, 411 Brexit 59, 209, 289, 367 BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China group) 5, 216, 373, 401, 517, 661 Brigg, A. 248 Brinkerhoff, D. W. 86 Brisbane G20 summit (2014) 649 British Empire 249 Broadwater, I. 454 Brookings Institute’s Index of State Weakness in the Developing World 80 Broome, A. 97, 378 Brown, A. 712, 719–20 Brown, Gordon 646, 651 Brown, L. D. 149 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 551, 658, 663, 665 Brunet-Jailly, E. 137 Budapest Process (BP) 409 Bujagali Falls Project, Uganda 158–9 Bulmer, S. 97 Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI) 568 Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände (BDA) 568 Burke, M. B. 84 Burke, P. 248 Buse, K. 454 Bush, George W. 77, 645 Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) to the OECD 568 Buzan, B. 280 C20/C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group 118, 124, 125, 130, 131 Caines, K. 454 Cameron, David 117 Canada: AIDS Committee of Toronto 231 AIDS Vancouver 231
Anglosphere network collaboration 210–11, 213–15 city authorities and cross-border conflict resolution with US 137 Constitution Act (1867) 229–30 global public policy for indigenous peoples 233–7 HIV/AIDS pandemic 228, 229–31, 232 National AIDS Centre 230 National AIDS Strategy 230–1 Public Health Agency (PHAC) 232 US-Canada relations 208, 209 Cannes G20 summit (2011) 648, 650, 651 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 129, 183, 429 carbon markets 267–8, 586–7 Caribbean Community 283, 403 Caribbean Development Bank 282 Carleton University’s Country Indicators for Foreign Policy 80 Carment, D. 84 Carnegie, Andrew 623, 624, 628 Carnegie Corporation 624, 625, 630 Carnegie Endowment for International Affairs 373 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) 623 Carpenter, C. R. 463 Cassese, S. 332 Castells, M. 207, 224, 225–6, 227, 276 Central and East European (CEE) countries 44 impact of EU accession on civil servants 46–8 impact of fiscal crisis on civil servants 53 peer-to-peer engagements 47 post-accession socialization 47 Central Africa Republic (CAR): UN sexual abuse scandal 699, 700, 703, 721 Central European University 353, 376 School of Public Policy 354 Chan, Margaret 658–9, 666 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative 622 charisma routinization of 419, 423–4, 431, 433 Weber’s definition 423
732 Index charismatic leaders (zealots) 419, 422 Green Climate Fund (GCF) 430–1 International Finance Corporation (IFC) 427–8 Charles, Prince 588 Cheikhrouhou, Helen 425, 429–31 Chicago, Taylor Street 68–9 Children and Armed Conflict (CaAC) 463 Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI) 551–2 China 350, 405 climate agreement stalemate with US 140 copying administration policy systems 99 economic and fiscal devolution 274 and the EU 98 and the G20 647–8 Harmony and public discourse 242, 248 One Belt and Road initiative 288 Sino-European trade 286 Chinese Communist Party 64 cities, and climate change 117–19, 129–30, 131–2, 135 Cities Alliance 130, 133, 530 governance 536, 537 participation 541 city networks and paradiplomacy as global public policy 14–15, 129–43 academic development of paradiplomacy 133–8 border initiatives 137–8 defining the space: sub-sovereign actors and networks 130–3 future research on paradiplomacy 142–3 ‘global city’ concept 135 mapping and measuring city paradiplomacy 138–9 paradiplomacy: accountability, challenges and opportunity 139–42 paradiplomacy as type II multi-level governance 135 ‘world city’ hypothesis 135 ‘civic action’ notion 244 civic identity, fluidity of 246 CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation 148 civil servants: EU and limited impact of socialization on Central and Eastern European states 46–8
impact of EU secondment 43, 44–6 impact of global fiscal crisis 53–4 impact of globalization 43–4, 44–53, 55–6 impact of interaction between international and national administrations 43–4 impact of interaction with international financial institutions and other international actors 43–4, 48–50 international networking of national-level 12 perceptions and impact of globalization, US 43, 44, 51–2 see also international civil service/ servants (ICS) civil society organizations (CSOs): and global health partnerships 540 see also transnational civil society organizations (TCSOs) Claude, I. L. 166–7 Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) 409 climate change 206, 244, 313, 410, 586–90 and cities 129–30, 131–2, 135 EU policy 294 and global public goods 260–1 international civil service and organizational mandates to address 171 Ken Livingstone and the C40 cities climate leadership group 117–19, 123 need for global response 275 OECD contribution to G20 efforts 497 regime complex for 492 and state fragility 84 see also Green Climate Fund (GCF); Paris Climate Change Conference and Agreement; UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Climate Investment Fund (CIF) 530 accountability 538, 539 governance 536, 537 participation 541 Clinton, Bill 620, 665 Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) 118, 124 closed policy communities 462–3 CNN 249 Cobb, R. W. 455 Codex Alimentarius Commission 331 Coen, D. 296, 299 Coffey consultancy firm 395–6
Index 733 Cohen, B. J. 312 Cohn, T. H. 137–8 Cold War 76, 169, 170, 175, 411, 625 end 169, 280, 403, 459–60, 531 colonialism: European justifications 77 post-colonial independence and nation-building 76–7 and the ‘transnational’ 249 Columbia space shuttle explosion (2003) 712 Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) 353 Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) 426 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 53 communism 76, 77, 622 comparative methodology 5–6 complexity theory 315 Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) 70 Computer Security Incident Response Team 472 Concert of Europe 403 Conference of Parties: COP13 (2007) 586 COP21 (2015) 497 Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building in Asia (CICA) 412 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 411 conflict diamonds 155 Congress of Vienna 167 Conservative Party, UK 117 constructivism 281, 302, 312 Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) 530 accountability 539 governance 536, 537 participation 540, 541 Convention on Biological Diversity 338, 339 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) 4, 12 Convention on International Transport of Goods Under Cover of TIR Carnets (TIR Convention) 287 Cooper, A. F. 269
Coordinating Council on Trans-Siberian Transportation 287 Copeland, P. 112 Copenhagen Accords (2009) 140 Cornforth, C. 555 corporate governance 556 and compliance with international standards 609–10 Corporate Human Rights benchmark 613 corruption 84 and agenda-setting 456–7 anticorruption standards and compliance 600, 601, 603, 607, 609, 614 OECD integrity agenda 501–2 Costa Rica 63 Council of Europe 138 Council of Foreign Ministers 403 Cox, R. 311, 657, 667 Cunliffe, Jonathan 645, 646 Cunningham, P. 102 Curaçao (circa 2009) 64–5 Curitiba’s rapid bus transport system 136 cybercrime 206 Dalglish, S. L. 480 Davies, S. E. 117, 120 Davies, T. 150, 152 DB Cargo 286 de Coning, C. 88 De Villeroché, Hervé 644 Deacon, R. 370 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS (2001) 232 deforestation see United Nations REDD+ Deloitte professional services network 590 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): and UN sexual abuse scandal 699, 703 Democratic Revolutionary party (DRP), Mexico 141 ‘democratization’ trend 346 demos: ‘global’ 246, 251, 340 synonymous with ‘ethnos’ 241 Department for International Development (DfID), UK 510 definition of fragile states 79 Dependency Theory 312 Desveaux, J. A. 230
734 Index Detroit, US 63 Deutsch, K. 280, 385 developing/less-developed nations: ‘climate finance’ 429 extreme poverty 132 Green Climate Fund (GCF) 431 malaria and other endemic diseases 459 Development Impact Bonds 519 development partnerships 17, 529–43 accountability 534, 535 accountability, comparative study 538–9 assessment of development partners/ national officials interaction 49–50 and attribution 541 Bali Guidelines 535 comparative analysis and findings 536–42 evolution of 531–2 governance 534, 535 governance, comparative study 536–8 and increased aid effectiveness 532 monitoring and evaluation (M&E) 529, 532, 534, 539, 543, 549 monitoring and evaluation (M&E) 539, 543 participation 534, 535 participation, comparative study 540–2 the partnership 530–2 strengths and weakness of the partnership model 532–5 ‘vertical’/‘horizontal’ funds 531 see also product development partnerships (PDPs) Dewey, J. 130 Dewulf, A. 123 DHL package carrier 61 Diana, Princess 458 ‘digital activism’ 243 digital deliberation 250–3 digital ecology 240, 247, 250 Digital Era Governance 201, 206, 207–8, 214–15 Diouf, Paul 658 discourse ethics 241 Dobusch, L. 476 Doha Round of trade negotiations 30, 31, 668 Doing Development Differently 473, 480 Dolowitz, D. 54, 102–3 domestic capacity to deliver innovative solutions 15, 182–96
absorptive capacity concept 189–91, 194 communication capacity concept 192, 194 conditions for impact at the domestic level: three dimensions of capacity 189–92 implementation through new and existing organizational structures 184–5 knowledge economics 190–1, 194 medicine access for neglected diseases 186–9 new global governance architectures and global partnerships 183–6 organizational capacity concept 191–2, 194 outputs and outcomes focus 184, 185 whose capacity? and how to analyse it? 192–4 Downs, A. 419, 421–3, 424, 428, 431–2, 433 Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) 188 Drummond, Eric 168 Dryzek, J. S. 439 Duchacek, I. 135 Dunleavy, P. 207–8 Eastern and Southern Africa anti-Money Laundering Group 412 Easton, D. 385 Eberlein, B. 209, 210, 213 Eckhard, S. 406 Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) 408 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 78, 275 economics 312, 314 ‘behavioural’ 317 ‘failure’ of 317 responses to the global financial crisis 310 Edwards, B. 721 Edwards, Len 645 Edwards, M. 160–1 ‘efficient marketing’ paradigm 29, 317 Ege, J. 406 Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units 478 Elder, C. D. 455 emergent states 6 epistemic communities 385–6 Ernst & Young 395
Index 735 Eurasian economic integration 284, 285 Eurasian Economic Union 284, 287 Eurasian overland rail transport 286–9 Eurogroup 408 European Association for Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA) 348, 349, 351, 360 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 282 European Central Bank 54, 408 European Commission 29, 33–4, 45, 46, 54, 373 civil servant performance appraisal 685–6 civil servant recruitment and representation 677–8, 679 Erasmus Mundi scheme 353 Kinnock reforms (2000) 686 secondment 680 European Convention on Human Rights 696 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 672, 696–7 European Economic Area 282 European External Action Service (EEAS) 45, 46 European Forum for Urban Security 142 European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) 349, 352 European Institute of Public Administration 45 European Investment Bank 282 European Parliament 29, 297, 301 European Public Administrative Network (EUPAN) 47 European Union (EU) 43, 72, 134, 137, 138, 204, 247, 275, 285, 287, 383, 498, 672 advocacy coalition framework 298–9 and Afghanistan 99 Article 50 69 and China 98 climate change policy 294 common agricultural policy (CAP) reform (1992) 299, 306 constructivist accounts of policy making 302 ‘defederalisation’ 278 democratic deficit 297 effect of lack of investment in capacity for global engagement 55
Emissions Trading System (ETS) 518 Energy Community 284 enlargement 285, 409 environmental policy 302 European regulatory networks (ERNs) 296, 299, 300, 306 experimentalist governance 447 failure to diffuse regulatory model for GMOs to US 35 as global actor 303–5 ‘good governance’ 460 governance approaches and transnational administration 295–7 innovative public rule-making 297, 306 ‘international public administration’ studies 10 limited impact of socialization on CEE member states 43 and middle-east regulators 212–13 and migration 283 as multi-level system of governance 277 as nested form of regions 279 network governance 296–7 new institutionalism and Europeanization 300–3 ‘normative Europe’ 303–4 Open Method of Coordination (OMC) 297 orchestration frameworks 302 partnership instruments 378 policies to stimulate innovation 102 and policy diffusion 304–5, 370 and policy entrepreneurship 112 and policy networks: transnational and global 298–300 principal–agent approaches 301–2 private-public hybrids for sustainability standards 33 public administration studies 170 regional policy and multi-level governance 295 and the ‘regulatory state’ 296 Renewable Energy Directive 33, 34 role in providing budget support 48–9, 318 rotating Presidency 407 Schengen area 72, 279, 283 science diplomacy 395 secondment of national officials 43, 44–6 Secretary-Generals 660
736 Index European Union (cont.) sectoral governance 296 shared sovereignty 42 Single Market 283–4 Sino-European trade 286 socialization of national officials 301 ‘Study on Urban Functions’ (ESPON) 139 support for farmers 30 think tanks 373 trade agreements 70 transgovernmental networks 209–10 and transnational political authority 28, 29 as a tributary of global policy and transnational administration 15, 293–307 uniqueness and applicability 10, 52–3, 170, 367 water policy 299 European Union-China Connectivity Platform 287, 288 European Vaccine Initiative (EVI) 188 Euroregion for joint economic development 138 evidence-based medicine (EPM) 390 evidence-based policy making (EBPM) 391, 392, 393 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative 13 Facebook 240, 247 Fairtrade 601 Faul, M. 483 Fawcett, L. 279 Federation of International Civil Servant Association (FICSA) 684–5 Federation of Latin American Cities, Municipalities and Association of Local Government 142 Ferencic, Nina 229 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 13, 601, 602 blacklist 607 Financial Stability Board (FSB) 643 and the G20 652 Finer, H. 333 Finland, international engagement by officials 51 Finnemore, M. 171, 172, 176, 386
Fioramonti, L. 281 First Nations indigenous peoples 233–7 Flash Appeal inter-agency strategy 515 Flores, R. V. 137 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 571 directors-general (DGs) 655, 658, 659, 664, 668 election process 660, 662 immunity denied 705 Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture (SAFA) Guidelines 600–1 food crisis (2007–2008) 30 food security and trade liberalization 30–1 Ford Foundation 133, 621, 623, 624, 626, 630 Foreign Policy Institute 625 Foreign Policy magazine 79 Forest Stewardship Council 13, 492, 601 formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs): Chairs 411 definition 403 establishment by international treaties 404 membership defined by states 404 role of secretariat 402, 405–7 Foucault, M. 498–9 Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) 188 Four Countries Conference (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK) 13 fragile states see state fragility, international development policy and global responses Fragile States Index 67, 79 Fragility Study Group policy framework 89, 90 France 405 compliance liability regimes 610–11 relationship with Monaco 65–6 Franco-Monegasque Treaty (1861) 66 Franke, M. M. 54 Fraser, N. 244, 252 free-riding concept of public goods 259–60 free trade 275, 282 Freyburg, T. 212–13 Friedrich, C. J. 333 Friends of the Earth, REDD+ assumptions 589 Froman, Michael 646
Index 737 Fuchs, D. 32 Fugger Newsletter, The 248 Fuller, L. 336, 337, 339 functional integration 42 functionalism 279 Fund for Peace 79 funding patterns of global programmes 17, 509–25 bi-lateral activities 510 blending finance 519 business approach to philanthropy 516 changing landscape for multilateral cooperation 511–13 core/non-core funds 510, 511–13 debt for development swaps 518–19 donor-led accountability 520–1 evolving multilateral programme delivery and managing financial transfers 521–4 flows beyond ODA 515–17 future of financing 524–5 global and regional programmes 509–11 guarantee mechanisms 518 impact investing 519 innovative financing for development 518–20 market mechanisms 518 multi-donor and pooled funding 513–15 Multi-Donor Trust Funds (MDTF) 514 multi-lateral activities 510 pooled funding mechanisms 514 results-based management (RBM) 520 Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) initiatives 523 South-South and triangular cooperation 517–18 taxes imposed on globalized activates 519 Value for Money (VfM) allocation 512, 513, 521 G7 (Group of Seven) 204, 401 4th Ministerial Meeting (2016) 412 ‘sherpas’ 402 summitry 638, 639, 640, 641, 643, 644, 650 G7+ group of fragile and conflict-affected countries 81, 88, 412 G8 (Group of Eight) 31, 120, 154, 551, 642, 665
G20 (Group of 20) 2, 5, 31, 240, 285, 367, 497, 551, 626, 665 at the core of the management of global problems 642–7 Mutual Assessment Process (MAP), G20 645 and NGOs 650–1 and OECD 497, 504 OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plan 649 ‘sherpas’ 402 summitry 638–47 Think 20 373, 480 Troika 405 see also individual summits game theory 312 Garner, Robert L. 425, 426–7, 427–8 Garzón, Baltasar 457 Gates, Bill 630 Gates Foundation see Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Gaye, Babacar 700 gender equality in public life 501 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 30, 407, 659, 668 Genschel, P. 36 Georges v. United Nations 691–2, 695, 704 Ghana 87 Giddens, A. 245 Giovan v. FAO 705 Gisselquist, R. M. 83, 87 Gladden, E. N. 215 global administrative law and global governance 16, 328–41, 387–8 classical model of administrative law 333, 334 distributed administration 331 and global constitutionalism 339–41 global demos 340 hybrid intergovernmental–private administration 331 and individual states 332–3 informality and pluralism 333–4 ‘inner morality of law’ 336, 337, 339 international administration 331 inter-regulatory regime relationships and collisions 338–9
738 Index global administrative law and global governance (cont.) legal positivism (Hart’s legal theory) 336–7, 339 legitimacy, the rule of law and political space 329–35 legitimacy and legality issues 333, 334, 335, 336, 338 ‘private bodies’ 331 and publicness 335–9 traditional international administrative law 329, 330–2 transnational networks and coordination arrangements 331 types of norms in 335 global advocacy networks 457 global (policy) ‘agora’ 154, 156, 158, 162, 200, 366 internet as 250 and philanthropy 619, 630 Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) 516, 530, 535 accountability 538, 539 governance 536, 537 National Fortification Alliance (NFA) 542 participation 540, 541 Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization (GAVI) 13, 49, 157, 462, 516, 518, 530, 535, 550, 551 accountability 539 governance and administration 536–7, 537–8, 552, 555, 556, 557 participation 540, 541–2 vertical funds 531 global (transnational) benchmarks 393, 513 Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) 154 ‘global city’ concept 135 Global City Indicators Facility European Green City Index 138 global civil society 30, 140, 149, 207, 373, 596 OECD engagement 497–8 vague role of transnational media 243–4 Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP) 13, 155–6 Global Commission on HIV and the Law 375 global corporate elites 135
Global Currency Transaction Tax proposal 519 Global Drug Commission 375 global economic developments, impact on the civil service and the state 44, 53–4 Global Environment Facility (GEF) 530 accountability 538, 539 governance 536, 538 participation 540, 541 vertical funds 531 global financial crisis (gfc, 2007–2008) 29, 206, 593, 643 and the end of global health ‘golden era’ 553 and ‘failure’ of economics 317 and the G20 639, 647, 651 impact on the civil service 53–4 limits of disciplinary responses 310, 311 Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS and Malaria (Global Fund) 49, 516, 530, 535, 550, 551 accountability 539 Debt2Health 519 governance and administration 448, 536, 538, 552, 555, 556 participation 540, 542 performance-based funding assessments 50 vertical funds 531 global goods see global public goods (GPGs) global ‘goods’/’bads’ 75 global governance 3 actors 3 current systems 491–3 and global administrative law 328–41 and global health organizations 556 and international organizations’ policy lexicon 377 and knowledge networks 386–7 new architectures, and global partnerships 183–6 and policy scholarship 366–7 1 and transnational communicative mechanisms 244 under-utilization of administrative theories and public policy concepts in scholarship 8 widening and diversifying 8–9 Global Governance journal 367–8, 371
Index 739 Global Green Growth Institute, Seoul 431, 432 global health organizations, governance and administration 17, 547–59 and business and corporate governance studies 556–7 conceptualization of global health organizations 550 and global health governance 549–50 and global governance scholarship 556 ‘golden era’ (1998–2008) legacy 547–8, 551–4 multi-disciplinary perspectives for understanding 554–7 and new standards of transnational administration 548, 557–9 and organizational theory 555 and public administration studies 557 Global Health Partnerships review (2005) 538 Global Impact Inventing Network (GIIN) 519 global Masters of Administration/ Masters of Public Policy (MPA/MPP) programmes 342–66 accreditation systems 347–51, 360 associations and networks 351–4, 360 complementarity with other degree programmes and initiatives 357–8 curricula characteristics 355–7, 360–1 ‘economy of scope’ with existing MPA/MPP programmes 358–9, 361 potential future trajectories of curricula development 358–60 Profession, Preference and Priority 359–60, 361 styles of programme’s curricula 354–60 Global Network on Violence against Women 154 Global Networks journal 368 global networks, agenda-setting capacity of 16, 453–66 accountability issues 465 framing strategies 458–9 global networks as gate-keepers 454–5, 460–4, 464–5 global networks as policy entrepreneurs 457–8, 459, 464 governmental vs. decision agendas 455 ideal coalition types 461
increase in network numbers 454 and information 456–8 issue attributes 458 issue prioritization 455–6, 461, 464 legitimacy issues 465 methodological shortcomings in study of 465–6 and preferences 459–61 systemic vs. institutional agendas 455 Global Partnership for Education (GEF) 530, 531 accountability 538–9 governance 536, 538 participation 540–1, 542 global policy 16, 364–79 advancement in academia and scholarly journals 365–7 1 analytic fragmentation 9 case studies 227–38 conceptual thinking and world- making 364–5, 369, 376, 377, 378–9 de-politicization 7, 18 development, and policy transfer 94 influence of international civil servants 171, 172 intellectual currents 364–79 and philanthropy 619–29 policy making as two-way process 7 rise of 3–19 role of international NGOs, think tanks and global programmes in policy development 372–8 transnational themes 5–13 and the transnationalization of public spheres 240–53 Global Policy Institute (GPI), London Metropolitan University 374 Global Policy journal 368, 379 global policy networks 298–300 see also global networks, agenda-setting capacity of global (transnational) problems and pathologies 200, 299, 275–6, 367 and creation of new organizations 421 G20 at the core 642–7 and the global/local dilemma 206–7 see also grand social challenges
740 Index global procurement, and compliance 603 Global Program on Aids (GPA) 229 ‘global public domain’ 5 global public goods (GPGs) 15, 49–50, 257–7 1, 289, 375 approaching provision in an integrated manner 265–6 at the centre of policy analysis and policy making 264–5 current analysis and the future 270–1 defining 259–60 distinguishing features of 260–3, 261b, 262f fostering adequate financing 267–9 free-riding concept of 259–60 and global policy networks 453, 465 global public policy conflated with 378 global publicness: aligning consumption and provision with decision-making 269–70 identifying GPG-specific policy challenges 263–4 identifying the policy challenges posed by 258–63 provision of 261–3, 262f provision paths 260, 265 pure public/impure public goods 259 reducing the risk of dual-actor (market and state) failure 266–7 and states 266–7 global public policy (GPP): analytical tools for assessing the emergence of 224–7 assessing effectiveness 447–8 attention to non-state actors 314–15 behavioural approaches 319–20 city networks and paradiplomacy as 129–43 conceptualizing 15, 257–7 1 and the constitution of political authority 14, 23–37 debate over parameters of ‘public policy beyond the nation-state’ 9–10 decentralization into global and regional domains 3 definition 203, 293–4 delegation to semi-private networks and non-state actors 3–4
effect of OECD standards and norms 501 expansion of 223–38 as field of inquiry in own right 311 fostering the provision of global public goods 264–70 and global network societies 226–7 and global policy complexity 315–17 growing interest in 314 around HIV/AIDS 272–32 for indigenous peoples 233–8 international NGOs, transnational civil society and 15, 148–62 at the meso level 182–3 need for dialogue with international political economy 311 and organized business 17, 565–81 processes and outcomes 12–13 responses to the global financial crisis 310 role of large management consultancy firms 583–96 and scale 223–4 strategic foresights and futures 318–19 and supra-territorial concept 225 structure and function of global health organizations 549–50 and transnational civil society 148–62 see also global Masters of Administration/ Masters of Public Policy (MPA/MPP) programmes Global Public Policy (Reinicke) 369 global public policy design 16, 437–50 acknowledging and conceptualizing multiple actors 444–5 addressing effectiveness at the global level 447–8 approach to global initiatives 444–8 design as visual arts 449–50 design space 441–2 early years (pre-1980s) 438–40 instrument selection 445–7 instruments and instrumentation 440–1 new design orientation (2010s–) 441–4 patching 441–2 path-breaking years (1980s–1990s) 440–1 policy cycle stages 440 policy mixes 441–2
Index 741 policy uncertainty 439 problematizing instrument selection: power and experimentation 445–7 research agenda 448–50 Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) 373–4 global public policy networks (GPPNs) 115, 204, 298, 299–300, 356, 376, 477 global public-private partnerships (GPPPs) 509, 516, 524 and international organizations 516–17 global social policy 370 Global Social Policy journal 368 global South 369 access to medicines 186–7 and Cities Alliance 133 INGOs 430 post-colonial nation-building 76–7 and think tanks 373, 374 trade liberalization and food insecurity 31 global summitry 17, 638–53 de-centring process 641 finance and central bank officials 643–4, 645–6, 651–2 functional fragmentation 640–1 G7/G20 difference in agendas 643 of the G20 638–47 G20 at the core of the management of global problems 642–7 as hub mechanism of global governance 640 iceberg theory 638, 639, 644 legitimacy debate 642–3 and NGOs 641 the pull and push back of technocratic management 651–3 sherpas 638–9, 641, 642, 644–7, 650, 651–2 shifting domain for global policy cooperation 647–9 stretching the boundaries 649–51 troika system 640 Working Groups (WGs) 644–5, 650 Global Summitry journal 368 Global TB Partnership 553 ‘global thinking’ trend 346 Global Water Partnership 13, 462 GlobalBusiness Coalition (GBC) 569, 571, 572
‘globalist’ label 18 globalization and internationalization 41–55, 224–5 and ad hoc global governance 207 and the ‘epistemological shift’ 251 as exogenous force/new space 370 global economic developments, impact on the civil service and the state 44, 53–4 governments and public servants remain core actors 11 impact on civil service/servants 14, 43–4, 44–53, 55–6 impact on the state 6, 14, 41–3, 54–5 incorporation into NASPAA conference themes 350–1 influencing and being influenced by 44–53 influencing and being influenced, trends and patterns in 52–3 need for academic response 366 perceptions of, and impact on officials in the US 51–2 and policy complexity 315 and policy design 442 and public spheres 244–5 and skills requirements 54 and state decline 205 and state transformation 205–6 transformative effect on governance 114–15 and trans-sovereign policy questions 313 and the two-way street of interaction 41–4 ‘globalization paradox’ 212 ‘glocalization’ 245 and multi-level governance 274–7 ‘good governance’ 19, 352, 447, 460, 521, 535, 714 Gould, D. J. 675 Governance journal 8 grand social challenges 184, 191–2, 194–5 Grande, E. 27 Grant, R. W. 26 grassroots activism 246 and the growth of transnational civil society 151, 160 Grävingholt, J. 84 Graziano da Silva, José 662, 664 Greece, implementation of EU law 101
742 Index Green, L. C. 169 Green Climate Fund (GCF) 420, 425, 428–32 charismatic leadership 430–1 hazards of early stages of organizational life cycle 431–2 greenhouse gas emissions 118, 129, 140 Greenpeace 252, 585, 593, 594 REDD+ assumptions 589 Gulf War 249 Gupta, A. 115 Gurry, Francis 658, 659, 662, 664 Guzman, A. 406 Haas, E. B. 280, 385 Haas, P. M. 385–6 Habermas, J. 241–3, 251, 389–90 Hague, William 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Hague Tribunals 383 Haiti: cholera epidemic 691–2, 695, 698, 704–5 earthquake (2010) 646, 704 US invasion 77 Hall, P. 35, 102, 135 Han Mingzhi 644 Hangzhou G20 summit (2016) 651 happiness, as global well-being indicator 500 Harmer, A. M. 454 Hart, H. L. A. 336–7 Haudenosaunee peoples 229 Hay, C. 205 He Yafei 645 heads of international organizations (IOs) 12, 17, 655–69 contact with national leaders 665 diplomatic role 657, 663, 664–5 expertise 659 maintaining trust and legitimacy 667–9 managing role 657, 662, 663–4 political role 665–7 position of national leaders compared 656 quality and calibre 658–60 (s)electing 657–62 (s)election processes 660–2 visons for the IO 658–9 Heclo, H. 473 Heidelberg School 330 Held, D. 247
Henderson, Saki 237 Héritier, A. 193 Hewlett-Packard 286 High Authority 45 High Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness 81 Hindu Times 252 Hirschman, A. O. 312 Hirshleifer, J. 260 HIV/AIDS 224, 375, 551 AIDS service organizations 231–2 building global public policy around 227–32, 238 drugs 190 funding impasses 551 Global Commission on HIV and the Law 375 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS 375 see also Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS and Malaria Hoffman, S. 280 Hofstede, G. 718 Hollis, S. 210, 216 Hong Kong: post-war colonial period 65 post-2016 elections 70–1 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region status 60 Hooghe, L. 134–5 Hopkins, R. F. 43, 44, 51 Howard Hughes Medical Institute 626 Howlett, M. 441, 447, 448 Huitema, D. 112 Hulme, D. 160–1 human rights 396 Corporate Human Rights benchmark 613 sanctions for non-compliance in supply chains 611 standards along the supply chain 607–8 UN Global Compact approach 610 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 463, 699 humanitarian intervention: and knowledge networks 388, 389–90, 391–3, 395, 396 late 1980s 77 needs assessments 391–2, 395 Hume, D. 259
Index 743 Idris, Kamil 658 Ikenberry, G. J. 99, 269 ‘imagined community’ 246 income contingent loan concept 100 India, colonial-era newspapers 249 Indian Act (1876), Canada 234, 236 indigeneity concept 224 indigenous peoples, and global public policy 233–8 Indonesia REDD+ Management Agency 590, 593 industrial capitalism 135 inequality: within and between developed and developing nations 130 within cities 130, 141 informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) 16, 401–14 definition 403–5 deliberate choice to have no independent secretariat 402, 404–5, 407–8 establishing a rotating Chair 410–12 establishment by explicit understanding among states 404 lacunae of research on role of the Chair and administrative function analysis 407 relying on a state to provide a technical secretariat 410 relying on established organizations to host 409 rising importance of 401–3 state-level membership 404 Ingle, M. 86 Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC) 188 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico 141 Inter-American Development Bank 100 Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development (G24) 410–11 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) 166, 168, 242, 244, 247, 271, 283, 491 Correlates of War dataset 402, 403 criticism of OECD 504 ‘Frankenstein problem’ 406 IGO partnership and cooperation 492 and organized business 570–6, 573t
see also formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs); informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 493, 585 International Accounting Standards Body 3 International Advisory Board Report on Foreign Income Policy 426 International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) 521, 539 International AIDS Society (IAS) 239 International Air Transport Association (IATA) 570, 572, 601 International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) 348, 351, 360 partnered programmes 352 international benchmarking: impact on national policy makers 49, 50, 52–3 see also global (transnational) benchmarks International Campaign to Ban Landmines 148, 152 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 566, 568–9, 578 International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) 566, 572 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) 131 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) 572, 601 international civil service/servants (ICS) 4, 7, 10, 15, 165–6 classical model 166, 168, 169, 175 compensation 685 confidentiality over-use 683–4 constructivist approach 170 contractual labour 680–1 data 672–3 ‘de Merode’ principle 685 as empirical category 165–6 establishment in the League of Nations and UN systems 168–70 functional origins 167 gender representation 679 geographic representation 677 geography vs. technocratic skill debate 677–8
744 Index international civil service/servants (ICS) (cont.) ideal/reality conflict 174, 176, 177 importance of 12 independence and immunities 675–6 influence of 171–2, 406–7, 413 interaction typology 13 international model 168, 169 and international relations 170–1, 172–3, 177 legal and adjudicative rights 682–4 legitimacy 174–7 management of 17, 671–87 no global constitution, separation of powers or branches of government 674 no singular 673 as normative concept 165, 166–7 organizational culture 681–2 paradox inapplicability 674–5 paths forward 687 performance appraisal 685–6 politicization concerns 676 principal–agent approach 170, 171, 173 and public administration 170–1, 172, 177 ‘rational actor’ model 168 recruitment and representation 11–12, 677–9 role in formal international organizations 402, 405–7, 408 secondment 679–80 staff numbers 672 and state control 172–4 and transnational policy communities (TCPs) 474 tribunals 683–4 in the twenty-first century 170–7 unions/staff associations 684–5 visa status 686 whistleblowing 683, 710–24 working languages 678 International Code of Marketing for Breast- Milk Substitutes (1981) 155 International Commission on Accreditation of Public Administration Education and Programmes (ICAPA) 348–9, 351, 360 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 457, 463 International Competition Network 476, 477
International Conference of Indigenous Peoples (1975), Canada 235 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists 247 International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO) 239 International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) 570 International Court of Arbitration (ICA) 578 International Court of Justice (ICJ) 683, 692–3 Reparations Case 693 International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims 120 International Crisis Group 373, 463 international development policy see state fragility, international development policy, and global responses International Dialogue 81, 88 International Energy Administration (IEA) 409 International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements 601 International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) 572 International Fertilizer Association (IFA) 568 International Finance Corporation (IFC) 420, 425–8 charismatic leadership 427–8 middle age 426 International Financial Institutions (IFIs) 43, 46, 48 International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 601 International Health Partnerships+ 553 International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) 349, 351 partnered programmes 352 International Labour Organisation (ILO) 375 International Maritime Organization (IMO) 572 international monetary fund (IMF) 7, 10, 35, 42, 54, 81, 100, 134, 138, 204, 217, 247, 319, 389, 407, 504, 643, 646 Article IV assessments 50 establishment 76
Index 745 and the G20 643, 646, 651 human resources function 684 Joint Vienna Institute (JVI) 378 managing directors 655, 658, 659, 660, 663, 667 and organized business 575 and policy diffusion 35 secretariat 169 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) see non- governmental organisations (NGOs) International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation 412 International Organic Accreditation Service 601 International Organisation for Migration (IOM), international civil service influence 171 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 3, 299 International Organization of Employers (IOE) 568, 569 International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) 601 international organizations (IOs): ‘black box’ 13, 170 budget transparency 12 civil servant management 671–87 civil servant performance appraisal 685–6 civil servants’ legal and adjudicative rights 682–4 compliance standards 601 concept of 550 and contractual labour 681 criticism for failures 212 as drivers of city-to-city action 131 evolving multilateral programme delivery and managing financial transfers 521–4 future of financing global programmes 524–5 as global governance actors 3 and global policy development 377–8 and ‘global policy studies’ 367 and global public-private partnerships (GPPPs) 516–17 governance mechanism 512
increasing importance in global policy and transnational administration 170 influence on national policy design 42–3 institutional growth 5, 165 legal status of 692–3 Multi-Donor Trust Funds (MDTF) 514 non-core funding 512–13 OECD as 493–8 and Official Development Assistance (ODA) 510 organizational culture 681–2 and organized business 575 paradiplomacy 132 and the paradox of democracy 675 and policy complexity 316, 317 and regulatory networks 479 regulatory powers granted by member states 54 and representative bureaucracy 11–12 role in policy diffusion 34–5 secondment 680 as ‘sites of contestation’ 29–31 and state control 172–3 struggle to address global pathologies 200 transnational engagement typology 13 and transnational political authority 28–31 and transnational private standards 599 Trust Funds 510 US-driven research 10 see also heads of international organizations; international civil service (ICS); transnational organizations; whistleblowing in international organizations International Organizations Immunities Act (1945), US 694, 695 international policy entrepreneurship 11, 111–26 and ambition 121 analytical framework 120–5 attributes of entrepreneurs 121–2 avenues of future research 125–6 case studies 116–20 creating a guiding advocacy coalition 123–4 and credibility 122 distinguished from transnational advocacy coalitions (TANs) 116
746 Index international policy entrepreneurship (cont.) framing problems and redefining policy solutions 123 and global networks 464 global policy networks as entrepreneurs 457–8, 459 individuals as entrepreneurs 114, 375 international context 114–16 and International Labour Organization leadership 375 Ken Livingstone and the C40 climate leadership group 117–19 leading by example 124, 126 multiple streams framework 112–13 researching 112–13 scaling up the advocacy effort and supporting policy change 124 and social acuity 121 and sociability 122 strategies of 122–5 and tenacity 122 and UN Secretary-Generals 171 using and expanding networks 123 William Hague and Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative 119–20 windows of opportunity 112, 117, 121 international policy transfer 14, 94–107 agents of transfer 96–8, 103 barriers to policy-oriented learning 101–2 cognitive obstacles/enablers 101 copying 99 criteria for identifying 97 democratizing policy transfer 106–7 direct coercive 99 emulation 99–100 environmental obstacles/enables 101–2 evidence-based policy making and innovation 105–6 forms of 98–9 future directions in the study and practice of 103–7 and governance 104–5 hybridization/bricolage 100 ideational approaches 96 indirect 99 inspiration 100 negotiated 98–9 outputs from the process of transfer 102–3
policy diffusion contrasted 96 policy transfer/policy convergence distinguished 96–7 process-centred approaches 95–6, 98–9 processes of policy-oriented learning 99–101 ‘soft transfer’ 100 what is studied? 95–103 international political economy (IPE) 15–16, 310–21 behavioural approaches 317–18 critical approaches 312 inadequate response to global financial crisis 310, 311, 313, 314 multidisciplinary origins 312–13 need for dialogue with global public policy 311 and policy complexity 315–17, 319–20 ‘policy turn’ 311, 313–14, 319–21 rationalist approaches 312 rationalist-reflectivist (‘trans-Atlantic’) divide 312, 320 rationalist-reflectivist divide questioned 312–13 reflectivist approaches 312 scholarly analysis, and policy development 310–11 and strategic foresight and futures 318–19 transnationalism and complexity in public policy 314–19 international public administration (IPA) 4, 10 international relations (IR) 7, 8, 11, 314, 367, 433, 454, 548, 556, 624 conceptual development of transgovernmentalism 208–9 dialogue with public administration 414 and informal governance structures 401 intergovernmental organization secretariat influence 406 international social service studies 170–1, 172–3, 177 and knowledge networks 384–8 liberal internationalist school 166–7 pluralist tradition 385 problematic theory/practice relationship 310–11 state-centrism 413
Index 747 and state interconnectedness 204–5 and transnational administration in intergovernmental organizations 406 and ‘world city’ hypothesis 135 International Rescue Committee 153 International Review of Administration journal 368 International Rivers Network (IRN) 158 international secretariats, nineteenth century 167, 168 International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance 601 Credibility Principles and the Assurance Code of Good Practice 600 International Standardization Organization (ISO) 3–4, 299, 331, 601 26000 601, 607–8 ISO 37001 601, 614 International Telegraph Union (1865) 243, 332 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 4, 12, 299 Interpol 12, 672 ‘inter-regionalism’ 276 Iraq 75, 77, 78, 86, 206 Isenman, P. 533–4 Islamism, radical 83 isomorphic mimicry 86 Italy: colonial rule 67 courts, and IO immunity 705 James, S. 112 Jefferson, O. 716 Joachim, J. 458 Johnson & Johnson supplier assessment 605 Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda 391 Joint United Nations/IASIA Task Force on Standards of Excellence for Public Administrative Education and Training Final Report 349 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS 171, 230, 232, 375, 558 Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), IMF 97 Jolie Pitt, Angelina 119, 123, 124 Jones, B. D. 462 Jordan, R. S. 104, 177
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART) 366 Juncker, Jean-Claude 408 Justinian, Emperor 621 Kaiser, K. 203 Kaldor, M. 244 Kalfagianni, A. 32 Kaplan, S. 83 Katsikas, D. 25 Kaul, I. 259, 267, 454 Kay, A. 112 Kazakhstan administration review (OECD) 503 Keck, M. E. 204, 460, 462 Kelman, H. C. 675 Kenis, P. 480 Kennett, P. 9 Kenya, post-election crisis (2007–2008) 252 Keohane, R. O. 26, 76, 88–9, 202, 208, 212, 312, 385 Khrushchev, Nikita 676 Kim, Jim 659, 660 Kim Dae-jung administration, South Korea 35 Kimberly Process Certification Scheme 155 King, Martin Luther 122 Kingdon, J. W. 11, 112, 121, 439, 455 Kingsbury, B. 330, 331–2, 333, 336–7, 338–9, 420–1 Kirshner, J. 205 Kirzner, I. M. 121 Klabbers, J. 174 Klijn, E.-H. 482 Knill, C. 9, 303 knowledge networks, scientific communities, and evidence-informed policy 16, 187, 300, 370–1, 383–97 evidence-based policy-making 391, 392, 393 expertise and policy relationships 393–6 humanitarian relief 388, 389–90, 391–3, 395, 396 the idea of evidence and the decline of expert judgement 390–3 needs assessments in humanitarian relief 391–2, 395 transnationalization and differentiation 394–6
748 Index knowledge networks, scientific communities, and evidence-informed policy (cont.) values and knowledge 388–90, 396–7 and world politics 384–8 Kompass, Anders 721, 722 Koppell, J. G. S. 176 Koppenjan, J. 482 Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) 358 Kosovo 696 KPMG company 395 Krisch, N. 330, 331–2, 333 Kyoto Protocol (1997) 586 Labour Party, UK 117 Lacarte, Julian 668 Ladi, S. 8, 202, 203, 304, 387, 420, 421 Laffan, B. 47 Lagarde, Christine 663 Lal, D. 98–9 Lamb, Geoff 651 Lamy, Pascal 658, 662, 664, 665 Langrod, G. 167 large management consultancy firms (LMCFs) 12, 17, 583–96 alumni networks 593, 595 business model 591, 595 consultocracy 583–4, 585 contesting consultancy 593–4 ‘double-dealing’ 593 fees 593 forest certification (FFC) for sustainable management 586 influence in the global arena 590–3 LED lighting 587 legitimacy of 590–3 Marginal Abatement Curve (MAC) 587, 588, 591, 592 national contexts 584 neoliberal frameworks and values 394, 583, 591, 593 and the North-South divide 593–4 ‘rank and yank’ policy 592 recruitment policies 591–2 REDD+ case 585–91, 593, 594 ‘thought leadership’ 587, 591, 595 transparency and accountability 585, 594
Lasswell, H. D. 439, 441 Latin American Group for Public Administration (LAGPA) 352 Lavenex, S. 283 League of Nations 5, 383 and establishment of international civil service 165, 166, 167, 168–9 Lee Jong-wook 662 Lefebvre, H. 141 legal personality 692–3 legal positivism (Harts’ legal theory) 336–7, 339 Legrand, T. 210, 211 Lejano, R. P. 441 Levitte, Jean-David 645 Li Baodong 651 liberal democracy 210, 216 liberal democratic norms 24, 210 liberal internationalism 165, 166–7, 176, 211 Lie, Trygve 165, 169, 655 Lindberg, L. 280 Lindquist, E. A. 230 Lingenthal, Dietrich 644 Lippmann, W. 426 Lipsky, M. 215 Lisbon strategy, EU 182 Lisbon Treaty (2009) 408 Listening to Leaders’ report (Custer) 49–50 Livingstone, Ken 116–17, 117–19, 121, 123, 124, 125 Local Education Groups (LEGs) 539 Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) 118, 130, 131–2, 136, 140, 141, 142 Lodge, M. 192 London G20 summit (2009) 646, 651 London Plan 117 Lord’s Resistance Army 67 Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) 79 Luckhurst, J. 649 Luetjens, J. 117, 119 Macau, administrative sovereignty (circa 2017) 64, 71 Macklem, Tiff 644 Mahler, Halfdan 228–9 Major, John 117
Index 749 Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) 410 malaria 158, 186, 461 ‘economic’ frame 459 see also Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS and Malaria; Roll Back Malaria Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) 188 Malik, K. 102 Malkki, L. H. 390 Malan, Pedro Sampaio 643 Mann, Jonathan 229 Manners, I. 303 Mantega, Guido 647 Manuel, Trevor 643 Margulis, M. E. 30, 31 Marine Aquarium Council 601 Marine Stewardship Council 601 ‘market for advice’ 48 ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ report (Parks) 49, 50 Marks, G. 134–5 Marrakesh Treaty (2013) 668 Marsh, D. 99, 102–3, 205, 462, 473 Marshall Plan 76, 493 Martinez Cobo, José 235, 236 Mastenbroek, E. 47 Mathiason, J. 171, 177, 718 McAdam, D. 386 McCann, E. 105 McCoy, John J. 425 McGrew, A. 247 McKinsey & Co., and the REDD+ initiative 585, 586, 587–90, 591, 592, 593, 594 McNamara, Robert 659 media: fluidity of national media as a ‘fourth estate’ 246–7 media-state relations 249–50 methodological rationalism in research 245–6 Médicin Sans Frontières 188, 392 medium and small enterprises (MSEs), compliance and monitoring 604, 606, 610 mega slums 136 megacities 136 megalopolises 136, 142
Meijerink, S. 112 Mendaro v. World Bank 694–5, 697 Mendoza, R. U. 159 Mercosur 43, 275 Merkel, Angela 645, 652 methodological nationalism: in comparative media research 245–6 and the Habermasian public sphere 251 institutionalization in science funding 369 and the ‘nation state’ 371 in policy and administration studies 8, 15, 203, 311, 365, 369 in the Public Affairs field 347 in the social sciences 370 US 10 methodological transnationalism: and diffusion of regulatory policies and practices 304–5 evolution of the concept 16 and the global public sphere 371 and global social policy 370 nascence as a research agenda and policy approach 379 and public administration 203, 365–6 Metropolis (the World Association of Major Metropolitan governments) 131 Mexico 69, 98, 136, 137, 661 local bond market 217 paradiplomacy 132, 136, 141 US-Mexico border cooperation via Merida Initiative 137 Mexico City 136, 140 policy clashes between city and government 141 Meyer, Eugene 425 Meyer-Sahling, J.-H. 47 Middle East and North African Public Administration Research Network (MENAPAR) 352 migration, regional forums for 283 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), UN 88, 133, 182, 183, 184, 185, 374, 434 and increase of development partnerships 531 Mintrom, M. 117, 119 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 404, 410
750 Index Mitrany, D. 385 Mohan, Rakesh 644 Moloney, K. 170, 431 Monaco (circa 1963) 65–6 Moore, Michael 655 Moravcsik, A. 280 Mothers of Srebrenica and Others v. The Netherlands and United Nations 696 Mukherjee, I. 447 multi-level governance (MLG) 36, 43, 134 and the EU 295–6 federalism distinguished 134 and glocalization 274–7 Type I and Type II 134–5 Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) 497–8, 504 multinational corporations (MNCs): chief compliance officers (CCOs) 609, 612, 613 compliance with transnational private regulation 600–16 corporate philanthropy 631 Murdoch, Z. 45 Muslim countries: importance of ‘public dialogue’ 248–9 sixteenth century resistance to print 248 Myanmar 84, 206 Nagel, S. 369 Naím, M. 686 National Action Party (PAN), Mexico 141 National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), Canada 235 nationalism 289 1930s 168 Nay, O. 80–1 neoliberalism 35, 275, 368, 639 Nestlé International Babyfood Campaign (NIBC) 155 Netherlands: Antilles 64–5 Dutch law and Curaçao 64 and the Srebrenica massacre 696–7 network diplomacy 374 network governance 207, 479, 480, 482 and the EU 296–7 see also global networks; global public policy networks (GPPNs); transgovernmental networks (TGNs)
Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Centre and Eastern Europe (NISPACEE) 349 Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) 351, 360 Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation (COPRA) 348–9 globalization incorporated into conference themes 350–1 ‘network politics’ 247 ‘network society’ 245, 276–7 ‘network state’ 247 networks, discursive roots 471–2 New Deal for Engagement in Fragile Sates (2011, Busan) 81, 88 New Eurasian Land Transport Initiative (NELTI) 287 New Public Management (NPM) 53, 54–5, 142, 207, 370, 557, 628, 713, 718 New York University (NYU) School of Law 328, 329 New Zealand, Anglosphere network collaboration 210–11, 213–15 Newman, A. L. 209, 210, 213, 476, 478 Newman, E. 715 newspapers, role in early colonial transnational publicness 249 9/11 terrorist attack 75, 77, 89 non-communicable diseases (NCD) Alliance 553 non-governmental organizations (NGOs)/ international NGOs 9, 28–9, 30, 32, 141, 148–62, 244, 360, 361, 430, 705 alliances with TCSOs 153 authority contests 33–4 compliance monitoring 602 and development funding 522 and G20 summits 641, 650–1 as global governance actors 3 global policy groups 458 global policy initiatives 374 and global policy networks 453, 462–3 humanitarian 395 and the REDD+ initiative 589 non-state actors 314–15, 367 as drivers of conflict 78 global policy coordination 492 global policy development 374–7
Index 751 and governance 274–5 and intergovernmental organizations 420 and political authority 25–6 political role 115 proliferation in world politics 404 and transnational political authority 32–4 WHO Framework for Engagement with non-State actors (FENSA) 558–9 non-state market-driven governance (NSMD) 32, 33 non-state/state interaction 204, 314 in global networks 454 and regionalism 281 Nordic Council 138 North, D. C. 82 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 204, 275, 283 North Atlantic Fishing Organisation 403 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 72, 77, 282 North-South divide: and consultancy firms 593–4 and South-South cooperation 517–18 and transnational civil society 150, 158, 161 Norway, REDD+ initiative 587, 590 not-for-profit governance 556–7 NoVo Foundation Radical Hope Fund 623 Novosad, P. 174, 678–9 nudging 317–18 Nye, J. S. Jr. 76, 88–9, 202, 208, 212, 385 Obama, Barack 460, 660 off-shore bureaucracy 215 Official Development Assistance (ODA) 509–11 ‘oil-for-food’ scandal (1995–2010), UN 174, 717 Open Economy Politics 312–13 Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness 148 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 17, 42, 46, 81, 138, 139, 172, 204, 491–505, 575, 640, 643 agenda-setting process 497 anticorruption standards 601 ‘At a Glance’ series 499–500
‘Better Life Index’ 500 committees 494, 494t, 498 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions 501–2 Council 493–4, 498 definition of fragile states 79 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) 82, 84, 87, 503, 622 diffuse common policy responses 101 Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs 495, 496t directorates 495 engagement in global governance systems 492–3, 503–4 Forum 498 and global civil society 497–8 and global tax governance 649 incremental evolution of instruments 501–2 innovative development financing 519–20 instrument classification 500 as an international organization 493–8 knowledge production 499–500 Ministerial Council Meeting (MCM) 494, 498 paradiplomacy 132 partnerships 497–8 peer review 13, 502–3 PISA 500 and policy diffusion 370 and policy transfer 98 and the power/knowledge matrix 498–9 and public governance integrity 501–2 Recommendations of the Council on Gender Equality in Public Life 501 Secretariat 495, 497, 498 ‘Sherpas’ 497 standard-setting, norms and instruments 13, 500–2 and transnational political authority 28 Working Party on Aid Effectiveness 531–2 organization theory 433 and global health organizations 555 organizational learning, and policy transfer 96 organizational studies 6
752 Index organized business and global public policy 17, 565–81 administrative context of 566–70 industry associations 568, 569–70, 573t national associations 567–8 participation in intergovernmental organizations 570–6, 573t peak associations 568–9, 573t, 577–8 private rules and initiatives 577 secretariats and scale of global associations 567–8 self-regulation activities 576–9 Ottawa Landmines Convention (1997) 152 Oxfam International 374, 602, 650 Behind the Brands scorecard 611 Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency 5 Pacific-Northwest regional integration 137–8 Padgett, S. 98 paradiplomacy see city networks and paradiplomacy as global public policy Paris Climate Change Conference and Agreement (2015) 117, 269, 294, 432, 497 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) 511, 513, 522 Parízek, M. 174 Parkinson, Patrick 644 Partnership for Effective Development Declaration (2012), Busan 522 Pauly, L. W. 27 Peace Palace, The Hague 624 Peters, B. G. 27, 103 Peterson, J. 298, 299 Peterson, S. 277 Pevehouse, J. 403 philanthropy and philanthropic foundations 17, 619–32 approaches to shaping global policy and administration 624–6 beyond pleasantries and paranoia 680–2 complementary/supplementary/adversarial relationships between philanthropy, policy and administration 627–8 fears and furore 621–2 foundation fatigue 631 ‘global’ philanthropy 620–1, 626–8 implications of transience for global policy 629–30
longstanding links between philanthropy and (global) policy and administration 620, 622–4 philanthropenese 628 philanthropoids 628 philanthropy as contested concept 620–1 ‘philocapitalism’ 628–9 ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power over’ 626 ‘scientific philanthropy’ 628 use of philanthropy in the policy landscape 627 Philippines, war with US 77 Picciotto, S. 483–4 Piot, Peter 229, 374 Pittsburgh G20 summit (2009) 646, 648 Plato’s Academy 621 Pliny the Younger 620 Poland 102 policy capacity, emerging literature on 320 policy community concept 473 ‘policy cycle’ heuristic 11 ‘policy design’ 11, 318 see also global public policy design policy diffusion 96, 204, 314, 370 and the EU 304–5 and global policy networks 457 policy transfer contrasted 96 and transnational political authority 34–5 ‘policy entrepreneur’ concept 11 see also international policy entrepreneurship ‘policy flexians’ 376 policy learning 15, 95, 97, 98, 103 in Belgium 102 and causal theorization 189 and issue attention 456 transnational 102 and transnational civil society 155 ‘policy streams’ 11 policy transfer 203–4, 348, 370 and paradiplomacy 136 see also international policy transfer Pollack, M. A. 301 Porto Alegre’s participative budgeting 136 power distance theory (Hofstede) 718 power/knowledge matrix 498–9 Pressman, J. 421
Index 753 Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) 119–20, 122, 123, 124 Price, Daniel 645, 646 Princen, S. 47 principal–agent approaches 170, 171, 173, 301– 2, 306, 386, 413, 669 private-public partnerships see public-private partnerships private sector: and global policy development 375 and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) 426–7 involvement in WHO policy making 559 and New Public Management 628 Prodi, Romano 305 product development partnerships (PDPs) 183, 186–9, 190, 193, 194 Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) 553, 556 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 50, 500 Proliferation Security Initiative 401 Provan, K. G. 480 public administration: and authority transformation 419 comparative methodology 5–6 conceptual arsenal 11–12 curricula innovation demands 9 dialogue with international relations 414 domestic focus challenges 6 extension of remit to transnational management practices 7–8 five trends affecting 246 and global health organizations 557 and informal governance structures 401 intergovernmental organizations’ secretariat influence 406 and international civil service studies 170–1, 172, 177 lack of attention to domestic influence on transnational domains 6–7 lessons from charismatic leadership of transnational organizations 433 methodological nationalism 8 and transnational administration in intergovernmental organizations 413 vacation of global governance field 366–7 ‘who benefits’ 421
see also global Masters of Administration/ Masters of Public Policy (MPA/MPP) programmes Public Administration journal 8 Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) rankings 50 public goods: and development partnerships 533 and governance 282 provision of regional 282–5 provision spread across different entities 274 states as sole providers 274 see also global public goods (GPGs) public organization theory 428, 433 public policy: challenges to domestic focus 6 comparative methodology 5–6 conceptual arsenal 11 curricula innovation demands 9 extension of remit to cross-border problems 7–8 lack of attention to domestic influence on transitional domains 6–7 methodological nationalism 8 see also global public policy public-private blurring 114 public-private partnerships 11, 13, 185–6, 462, 463 Advanced Market Commitments schemes 518 anti-corruption initiatives 456–7 concern over private influence 534 and global policy development 377–8 policy co-creation 316 WEF meetings, Davos 375 see also global public-private partnerships (GPPPs) public spheres, transnationalization of 11, 15, 240–53, 371 conceptualizing transnationalized public communication 243–6 concepts of the public sphere 241–3 ‘debordering’ of ‘political spaces’ 245 and digital ecology 240, 250–3 fluidity of civic identity 246 fluidity of governance 247 fluidity of national media as ‘fourth estate’ 246–7
754 Index public spheres, transnationalization of (cont.) fluidity of the public sphere ‘mechanism’ 246–7 future research 253 globalization debates 244–5 ‘glocalization’ processes 245 Habermasian public sphere 241 Habermasian public sphere, gaps in 241–2 legitimacy issues 244 and media and communication research 245–6 ‘network centrality’ and ‘centrality of networks’ 252–3 public discourse practices in non-Western regions 243, 248 from public spheres towards subjective horizons of publicness 250–3 towards transborder ‘publicness’ 248–50 ‘punctuated equilibrium’ 11 Qatar Foundation Reach Out to Asia (ROTA) 625 Quack, S. 476 Raadschelders, J. 346 radio technology 243 Rainforest Alliance 601 Rainforest Foundation, REDD+ assumptions 589 Ramalingam, B. 87 RAND Corporation 373 Rantanen, T. 245–6 rational choice institutionalism, and the EU 301 Rayside, D. M. 230 refugee crisis 78, 242–3 refugees, and humanitarian actors 390 regime complexes 492 regional development banks 42, 43, 282, 431 Official Development Assistance flows 511 regionalization and trans-regional policies 15, 274–89 constructivist approaches 281 debate over regionalism 279–80 disintegration concept 278 economic realm 282–3 Eurasian overland rail transport 286–9
‘federal bargaining’ process 280 and functionalism 279 ‘glocalization’ and multi-level governance 274–7 and infrastructure 284 integration notion 277–8 intergovernmental approach 280–1 migration management 283 movement of goods, energy and information 283–4 neo-functional approach 280 ‘new regionalism’ 279, 280, 288–9 ‘old regionalism’ 280–1 political economy studies of regionalism 313 provision of regional public goods 282–5 Regional Integration Studies 281 ‘regional security complex theory’ 280 regions defined 275 rise of regions as a worldwide phenomenon 276–9 ‘security community’ notion 280 security provision 282 and standardization 284–5 theoretical considerations to regionalism 279–81 and transactionalism 279 transregionalism 285–8 transregionalism defined 276 Regulation and Governance journal 370 regulatory networks 17, 471–2, 476–87 accountability 484–5 activities 477–8 collaboration instruments 481–2 definition 472 formation of 479–80 future research 486–7 governance mechanisms 480–1 legitimacy 483 membership and participation 476–7 organizational attributes and institutionalization 478–9 power distribution 483 towards a global administration? 485–7 ‘Type-1’ 477 ‘Type-2’ 477 Reinicke, W. 204, 224, 225, 369, 462 Renaissance 248
Index 755 ‘representative bureaucracy’ 11–12 representative democracy 130, 484 Reuters 249 Rhodes, R. A. 298, 462, 473 Riker, W, H. 280 Rio Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) (1992) 152, 497, 585 Rio de Janeiro, global engagement 136–7 Rischard, J-F. 115 Robinson, J. 82 Rock, Allan 231 Rockefeller, John D. 622–3 Rockefeller, Nelson 426 Rockefeller Foundation 623, 624, 625, 628, 630 Green Revolution initiative 623 Roll Back Malaria 538, 552–3 Roman Britain 63–4 Rose, R. 104 Rosenau, J. 386 Roundtable for Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) 34 Ruggie, J. G. 385 Ruggiero, Renato 665, 666 Rüland, J. 276 Russia, and the G8 642 Rwanda: genocide 175 Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to 391–2 mass rapes 119 Sabel, C. F. 297, 447 Sabin Vaccine Institute (SVI) 188 Sachs, Jeffrey 459 Salamon, L. 150–1, 440 Saramanti v. France, Germany and Norway 696 Sarfaty, G. A. 681–2 Sarkozy, Nicolas 650, 651 Sassen, S. 135, 138 satellite news channels 249–50 scales and network societies 15, 223–38 analytical tools for assessing the emergence of global public policy 224–7 building global policy for indigenous peoples 233–8
building global public policy around HIV/ AIDS 227–32, 238 global network societies 225–7 supra-territorial solutions 225 transnational actions 225 transplanetary concept 225 Schengen Agreement, EU 69 Schiavon, J. A. 133–4 Schmidt, V. 25, 27 Scholte, J. A. 225 Schön, D. A. 440 Seabrooke, L. 378 Second World War 76, 165, 211 sectoral governance, and the EU 296 sector-specific focus 9, 370–1 security, regional provision 282 Sending, O. J. 172, 364 Seoul G20 summit (2010) 650 sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers 174–5, 691, 698, 699, 703, 721, 722 sexual violence in conflict 119–20, 125 Shaffer, G. 266 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 282, 288 Transport Facilitation Agreement 283 shared sovereignty 42, 43 Shari’a law 67–8 Siemens bribery scandal 600 Sikkink, K. 204, 460, 462 Simmons, B. A. 318 Singapore 99 Singh, Manmohan 645 Sister Cities International 131 Slaughter, A-M. 209, 212, 269, 289, 639, 640 Slim, H. 390 small and medium enterprises see medium and small enterprises Smith, P. J. 137–8 Snidal, D. 33, 403 Social Accountability International 601 social media 243, 247, 251, 252, 368 social movements 141, 374, 626 studies 453, 454, 465 social network analysis 483 Soldatos, P. 135 Somalia 60–1 Somaliland 66–7 Sørensen, G. 203
756 Index Soroos, M. S. 367, 369 Soros, George 353, 376, 630 Soussan, M. 717 South Korea 87, 350, 405 globalization of the public administration curriculum 358 Green Climate Fund (GCF) 429, 431, 432 Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning 12 South-South cooperation (SSC) 510, 517–18, 532 South Sudan: identification scheme 62 prior to independence from Sudan 67–8 Southern African Customs Union 282 sovereignty: confined to states 275 disaggregation 207, 247 as dominant reality in policy and administration 366 ‘food sovereignty’ 30, 31 as outdated concept 420 policy-making as central tenet 369 renewed, and transgovernmental networks 200–16 ‘sovereignty over territory’ principle 243, 245 trumping global governance 675 Westphalian notion 274 see also administrative sovereignty; shared sovereignty Soviet Union (former): collapse 77, 281, 409 international civil servants 676, 681 Sphere Project 392 Srebrenica massacre (1995) 175, 696–7 St Petersburg G20 summit (2013) 649 state capacity 192 state fragility, international development policy and global responses 14, 75–90 agency perspective 84–5 authority gaps 83 ‘bad neighbourhoods’ phenomenon 84 conceptualizing state fragility and failure 78–80 debates and controversies 80–1 donor definitions 78–9
functional approach 83 and global threats 83–4 historical perspective 76–8 indexes and taxonomies 79–80 legitimacy gaps 83 links with economic dependence on natural resources 82 looking forward 88–90 and Northern hegemony 81 pathways reducing fragility 85–8 resilience building 86, 88 resilience defined within security framework 89 resilience leading to stability 83 resilience as opposite of stability 81 and resource shocks 84 security agenda 77, 78, 89 service gaps 83 shift towards more egalitarian assistance 81 and the social contract 82–3 state-building blueprint thinking 85–6 state-building blueprints, beyond 86–8 and state-society interactions 82–3 systems thinking 87–8 today’s view 84–5 transnational drivers 78 unpacking 82–5 as ‘wicked problem set’ 89 states: and administrative law 329, 330 centrality in policy studies 365, 366 as ‘closed container’ for the public sphere 371 and control of international civil service 172–4 decentring and fragmentation 200 decline in importance 205, 278 devolution of power to sub-and supra- national organizations 274, 278 domestic policy design and global policy issues 442–3 evolution of 394 and ‘fluid’ governance 247 and global administrative law 328 and global carbon emission reduction 429 ‘hollowing out’ 207
Index 757 impact of global fiscal crisis 54 impact of globalization 6, 41–3, 54–5, 205–6 importance of transregionalism 289 increasing permeability of borders 245, 276 integration between 277 interaction with non-states 204, 281, 314, 454 interdependence 205, 208 and intergovernmental organizations 491 and international administrative l aw 332–3 and international organization leaders 658, 659, 665–7, 668–9 and international organization privileges and immunities 694–5 legitimate political authority 24–6 media-state relations 249–40 and national administrative law 339–40 negotiated 61 ‘network state’ 247 OECD representation 495–7 and ‘old regionalism’ 280 persistence of ‘regulatory’ 296 and policy design (1880–1890s) 441 primacy of capacity and sovereignty 369 prosecution of UN by host 702, 703 and (global) public goods 266–7, 274, 533 remain as main players 276 shift of power to a multi-polar world 241 statehood through administrative orientation 60 ‘stateness’ under stress 371 think tank commitment to 373 transgovernmental networks between 208–11 and transnational pathologies 206–7 transnationalism, transformation and 204–8 typology of interaction with informal intergovernmental organizations 402, 405–6, 408–12, 413 use of informal intergovernmental organizations 401–2, 407–8 Weberian ideal 77, 80, 86, 87 Westphalian model 5, 24, 243, 296, 420, 491 see also methodological nationalism; sovereignty
Stewart, R. B. 330, 331–2, 333 Stitching Mothers of Srebrenica and other vs. Netherlands 696–7 Stone, D. 8, 97, 100, 200, 202, 203, 204, 387, 420, 421, 473–4 Stop TB Partnership 552–3, 556 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 658 structural adjustment programmes 48, 53 and decentralization 134 influence of neoclassical economics 7 Summers, Larry 376 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), UN 16, 81, 87, 88, 133, 137, 182, 183, 184, 185, 359, 374, 391, 465, 514, 518, 535, 536 Philanthropy Platform 631 scepticism over 533 ‘sustainable systems’ trend 346 Sutherland, Peter 659, 665 Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) 510 systems thinking 316 Tallberg, J. 161 Tarrow, S. 386, 461, 465 tax havens: and global public goods 261 targeted by the G20 643 Taylor, P. 138 TB Alliance 553, 556 ‘technological boom’ 346 terrorism 78, 83, 130, 206 Thatcher, M. 296, 299 think tanks: and global policy development 373–4 and knowledge networks 395 Tilly, C. 386 ‘time-space distanciation’ 245 Tomaskovic-Devey, A. 458 Toner, G. 230 Toronto G20 Summit (2010) 641 Tosun, J. 9 ‘Towards a Global Polity’ (Higgott and Ougaard) 369 trade liberalization and food security 30–1 Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD 497 transactionalism 279
758 Index Transatlantic Tree and Investment Partnership (TTIP) 70 transgovernmental networks (TGNs) 200–16, 247, 492 Anglosphere 210–11, 213–15 between states, beyond institutions 208–11 democratic legitimacy concerns 213–15 future research prospects 216 governing the global/local 207–8 imperatives of global collaboration: transnationalism, transformation and the state 204–8 Memorandums of Understating (MOUs) 213–14 as off-shore bureaucracy 201, 215 rationalizing the rise and resonance of 211–13 transgovernmental dynamics as an element of transnational administration 202–3 and transnational policy communities 204 transnational policy making and domestic public policy 203–4 transnational administration 16, 364–79 advancement in academia and scholarly journals 365–7 1 assessing effectiveness of 447–8 from the beginning 16, 419–34 conceptual thinking and world- making 364–5, 369, 376, 377, 378–9 debate over parameters of ‘public policy beyond the nation-state’ 9–10 and decentralization 4 definition 203, 294 and delegation 4 de-politicization of 7, 18 and EU governance 295–7 intellectual currents 364–79 international civil service compared 166 international public administration compared 4 new ‘agora’ of 200 and new standards of global health organizations 548, 557–9 OECD ‘brand’ in 493 and philanthropy 619–32 policy design research agenda 448–50
and policy transfer 94 processes and outcomes 12–13 rise of 3–19 role of international NGOs, think tanks and global programmes in policy development 372–8 transgovernmental dynamics as an element of 202–3 transnational themes 5–13 US-driven research 10–11 without independent secretariats 401–14 transnational advocacy networks/coalitions (TANs) 113, 116, 153, 299–300, 453, 457 institutional features 462 transnational benchmarking, OECD peer reviews 503 transnational civil society (TCS) 148–62 conceptualizing 149–51 creation of a global civic space (‘global agora’) 150, 151, 154, 156 criticism and controversy 157–9 democratic accountability 160 direct/indirect stakeholders 158 drivers of growth 151–2 global policy-making partnerships 157 and the globalization process 151–2, 54 and grassroots activism 151, 160 implementation, monitoring and enforcement roles 154–5, 156–7 information and communicator technologies 151 legitimacy and accountability challenges 150–1 and NGO alliances 153 norms of inclusion 149–50, 154 and North-South divide 150, 158, 161 opportunities and challenges 156–9 role in global policy-making 152–6 role in policy learning 155 strengthening the global policy-making potential 159–62 transnational civil society organizations (TCSOs) 131 local/global policy levels 153–4, 159 mechanisms of non-domestic policy influence 153 ‘watchdog role’ 155
Index 759 Transnational Executive Networks (TENs) 300 transnational governance systems 492 Transnational Institute, Amsterdam 374 transnational networks 13, 18, 47, 80–1, 97, 100, 204, 246, 299, 331, 387, 391, 393, 404, 414, 556 transnational organizations 419–34 and administrative behaviour 420–1 charismatic leaders (zealots) 419, 422, 427–8, 430–1 early years case studies 424–32 ‘ideal-types’ of bureaucrats 422 initial assessments and lingering issues 433–4 links between ‘public’ and organization 433 organizational life cycles and consequences 421–3 ‘public’ and ‘organization’ links 420–1 routinization of charisma 419, 423–4, 431, 433 transnational policy communities (TCPs) 17, 471–5, 479–87 accountability 484–5 analytic discourse 475 collaboration instruments 481–2 communicative discourse 475 concept of 473 coordinative discourse 475 definition 472, 473–4 formation of 479–80 future research 486–7 governance mechanisms 480–1 intermediaries 474 international civil servants 474 internationalized public sector officials 474 legitimacy 483–4 power distribution 485 towards a global administration? 485–7 transnational policy professionals 474 transnational policy networks 100, 277, 300, 301, 378, 640 transnational political authority 23–37 authority contests 29–31, 33–4 constituting in transnational policy pathways 24, 26–35 coupling ‘in authority’ and ‘an authority’ 24–6
delegated accountability model 28 delegated model of legitimacy 26–7 input legitimacy (domestic realm) 26 input legitimacy (transnational) 27, 36 output legitimacy (domestic realm) 26 output legitimacy (transnational) 27, 32–3, 36 participatory model of legitimacy 26–7, 28–9 ‘political authority’ and ‘political power’ 25 private/public hybrids 33 throughput legitimacy (domestic realm) 26 throughput legitimacy (transnational) 27, 33, 36 via diffusion 36 via international institutions 28–31, 36 via market incentives 36 via private standard setting and market regulation 32–4 via voluntary policy diffusion 34–5 transnational private regulation (TPR) compliance in global supply chains 17, 599–616 ‘beyond compliance’ approaches 604, 605, 606 certification 614 choice of instruments 610–12 combined with national public regulation 600 compliance programmes 602–3 compliance with objectives 605 compliance with rules 604–5 continuous improvement approach 610, 615 control by intermediaries (third-party monitoring) 614, 615, 616 costs and their distribution 605–6 dynamic compliance notion 610 ex-ante/ex-post evaluation 606 hierarchical compliance control 612–13, 615 instrument choice and monitoring strategies 612–14, 615–16 liability regimes 610–11 monitoring/enforcement link 615 monitoring instrument variables 602–3 monitoring internal units and external suppliers 608–10
760 Index transnational private regulation (TPR) compliance in global supply chains (cont.) peer control and self-monitoring 613–14, 615–16 and regulated entity homogeneity 607 sanctions and rewards 607, 609, 611, 615 scoreboards 613 and social norms 603 supply chain interdependencies 607 voluntary vs. mandatory standards 600–3 what is evaluated in compliance monitoring? 603–6 whose compliance is evaluated? 606–8 transparency 594 Transparency International 154–5, 374, 456, 603 Corruption Perceptions Index 607 Integrity Packs 600, 609, 614 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 243 Trondal, J. 45 True, J. 117, 120 Truman, Harry 426 Trump, Donald 367, 460, 620 Tsarouhas, D. 304 Tsing, A. L. 223, 225 Tsingou, E. 481 Twitter 247 UHC (universal health coverage)2030 553, 556 Union of International Associations 672 UNITAID 518, 553 United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) 131, 136, 141, 142 United Kingdom (UK) Anglosphere network collaboration 210–11, 213–15 associations and affiliations surrounding 69–70 compliance liability regimes 610–11 Department for International Development (DfID) 79, 510 digital public service delivery 100 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 119, 120 international engagement by officials 51 Multilateral Aid Review (MAR) 520–1
New Deal for Young People, UK 100 Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) 119–20 vote to leave the EU (Brexit) 59, 209, 289, 367 United Nations (UN) 4, 10, 17, 46, 78, 81, 139, 204, 374, 420, 491, 533, 691–707 civil servant recruitment and representation 677, 678–9 geographic representation of civil servants 677 and global public policy for indigenous peoples 233–7 and the HIV/AIDS pandemic 228–9, 232 and human rights compliance 601 humanitarian intervention, late 1980s 77 immunity from jurisdiction or legal process 695–7 ‘impartiality’ in civil conflict situations 175 and the international civil service system 165, 166, 167, 169 legal basis of immunity 694–5 legal status 692–3 loyalty conflicts in humanitarian agencies 176 internal dispute settlement system 697–8 ‘melancholy nadir’, 1950s 169 official development assistance (ODA) flows 511 ‘oil-for-food’ scandal 174, 717 overrepresentation of small rich democracies 174 partnerships 533–4 privileges and immunities 693–4 right to food principle 30–1 ‘rights-based agenda’ for cities 130 secondment 680 secretariat recruitment quotas 173 short/fixed term appointments 680–1 staff associations 684 and US McCarthyism 169 and violence against women 458–9 whistleblowing 714–24 United Nations Academic Input (UNAI) 358 United Nations Administrative Tribunal (UNAT) 697 United Nations Agenda 2030 268
Index 761 United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund 515 United Nations Charter 691, 692, 693, 695, 705, 706 Article 7 169 Article 9 684 Article 99 169 Article 100 169, 677, 714, 715, 716 Article 101 169, 677 Articles 104/105 693–4 and status of the secretariat 169 United Nations Children’s’ Fund (UNICEF) 49, 157, 522, 551 United Nations Commission on Global Governance 386–7 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (2012) 136 United Nations Conference on the Environment (1992) 131 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNCTAD 517 United Nations Consolidated Appeal Process 515 United Nations Convention Against Corruption (2003) 155, 720 United Nations Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations (1946) 691, 693, 694, 695, 704, 705 United Nations Corruption Perceptions Index 155 United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples 234–5 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 224, 236, 237–8 United Nations Delivery as One (UN-DaO) reform 514 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) 352 United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) 700, 701–2, 704 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 169, 375, 378, 551 international civil service influence 171
level of interaction with national counterparts 49–50 United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) 697–8 United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) 287 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 463, 571, 572 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) 287 United Nations Ethics Office 719, 721 United Nations Foundation for Partnerships 378 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 117, 140, 425, 492, 497, 585–6, 590 Cancun Congress of the Parties 428–9 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 698, 705–6 International Convention of Civil and Political Rights 706 United Nations Global Compact 182, 565, 571, 607, 610 Cities Program (UNGCCP) 138 United Nations Global Policy Forum 373 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 12, 119, 153, 172, 392 international civil service influence 171 United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) 132–3, 136, 141–2 Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Quito Habitat 111), 2016 133 Habitat III meeting 137 World Urban Forum (2010) 136 United Nations Inter-Agency Standing Committee (ASC) 392 United Nations International Conference on AIDS (1985) 228 United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development (2002), Monterrey 515 United Nations Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) 171, 230, 232, 375, 558
762 Index United Nations Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti (MINUSTAH) 704 United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) 699 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) 392 United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) 553 United Nations Office of Administration of Justice 716 United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) 699, 701, 702 United Nations peacekeeping missions: ‘Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Peacekeeping Operations’ 701 DNA collection to resolve paternity claims and medical testing 703 duty to provide alternative modes of settlement 705–6 and the Haiti cholera epidemic 691–2, 695, 698, 704–5 immunity and specific problems relating to 698 potential legal responses to violations- prosecution by host states 702 prosecution by troop-contributing states in the home state 703 regulations to protect from sexual abuse committed by 700–1 responses to violations by 699–706 sexual abuse by 174–5, 691, 698, 699, 703, 706, 721, 722 UN liability for wrongs and damages in host countries 704–5 United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2000) 236–7 United Nations REDD+ 585–91, 593, 594 United Nations Research Institute on Sustainable Development (UNRISD) 378 United Nations Secretary-Generals 172, 655, 700, 701 appointment system 173 authority and influence 172
calls to reform appointment process 176 as norm entrepreneurs 171 A World that Counts (2014) report 391 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 120, 176, 696, 697 deputies at the WHO 663 Resolution 1325 119 Resolution 1960 119 Resolution 1963 124 United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict 119 United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities 235 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 87, 133, 137, 359 United Nations Working Group for Indigenous Peoples 235–6 see also Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) United States of America (US) 10–11, 141, 173 Administrative Procedure Act (1946) 334 Anglosphere network collaboration 210–11, 213–15 APSIA member schools 350 Army’s Stability Operation Field Manual 85 Centre for Disease Control on Ebola 12 city authorities and cross-border conflict resolution with Canada 137 city indicators 139 Civil Rights movement 122 civil servant numbers 672 climate agreement stalemate with China 140 Department of State Special Representation for Global Intergovernmental Affairs 132 failure to diffuse regulatory model for GMOs to EU 35 G4 visas 686, 719 global MPA/MPP programmes 350, 351, 353–4 higher education 353 infrastructure fragmentation 284 international administrative law 334
Index 763 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) 131 international civil servants, politicization concerns 676 international development policy 85–6 international development policy, historical perspective 76–8 and Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) 410 McCarthyism, and the UN 169 methodological nationalism 10 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) 139 model of administrative law 334 NASPAA accredited programmes 348 News and World Report ‘Public Affairs Graduate School Ranking’ 347, 351 Office of Housing and Development 132 perceptions on globalization, and its impact on officials 43, 44, 51–2 philanthropic foundations 621, 624–5 president’s role in appointing IO leaders 660 and the replacement of Asian development model with neoliberalism 35 State Department ‘dissent channel’ programme 723 subnational governments 139 support for farmers 30 and UN immunity 691–2, 694, 695, 705 US-Canada relations 208, 209 US-Mexico border cooperation via Merida Initiative 137 Welfare to Work schemes 100 Whistleblower Protection Act (1989) 712 whistleblowing 711–13 and World Bank immunity 694–5 and WTO 665 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 510 definition of fragile states 78–9 Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management 77 Office of Transition Initiatives 77 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNHDR) 234, 706 Universal Postal Union (1874) 332 University of Texas, Austin 356
university rankings 443 Uruguay Round of trade negotiations 30, 659, 665 Vabulas, F. 403 van der Stolk, C. 47 Van Langenhove, L. 279–80 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 404, 694, 695 Article 6 693 Vietnam War 77 Vigoda-Gadot, E. 346 violence against women 458–9 ‘virtual activism’ 252 Vogler, J. 304 von Bogdandy, A. 330 Waite and Kenney v. Germany 696, 697 Walden, S. 721 Ward, K. 105 Washington Consensus 48, 54, 641 Washington G20 summit (2008) 646 weapons, prohibition of conventional 457, 459–60 Weaver, C. 682 Weber, M. 24, 83, 394, 419, 423, 424 Weberian bureaucracy 7, 165, 168, 172, 419, 165, 168, 486 Weberian rationalization 176, 177 Wegrich, K. 192 Weidmann, Jens 644–5 Weimar Triangle 403 Wellcome Trust 621 Weller, P. 170, 172 Wener, M. 172 Werker, E. 174, 678–9 Westphalia Peace Treaty 274 Westphalian system, and international administrative law 332–3 Whaites, A. 83 whistleblowing in international organizations 17–18, 710–24 background 711–12 case studies 721–2 definition of whistleblowing 717–18 disclosure issues 717–22 employment contracts 718–19
764 Index whistleblowing in international organizations (cont.) immunity 716–17 impartiality 716 literature on 712–14 loyalty 715 power asymmetry 720–1 retribution 719–20 tribunals 716 types of violations 712 Wildavsky, A. 421 Wilson, W. 433 ‘windows of opportunity’ 11, 112, 117, 121 Wolfensohn, James 658, 664, 666, 668 Wolfowitz, Paul 658, 659 women’s rights violations 458–9 World Bank 5, 7, 10, 42, 45, 81, 100, 118, 133, 134, 138, 172, 186, 204, 217, 319, 376, 377, 403, 407, 425, 427–8, 430, 463, 493, 498, 504, 550, 551 civil servants 685 client surveys 44, 48 Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) 79 development economics civil servants 679 Development Grant Facility programmes 514 ‘Doing Business’ list 50 Education and Health Sector Reviews 50 establishment 76 global benchmarks and indicators 393 Global Cities Indicator Facility (GCIF) 138 Global Environment Facility 492 ‘global program’ partnerships 377 ‘good governance’ 460 human resources function 684 immunity from legal processes in US 694–5 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 672 ‘Investing in Health’ report (1993) 551 level of interaction with national counterparts 49–50 norm-setting role in global health policy 548 official development assistance (ODA) flows 511
organizational culture 681–2 participatory model of legitimacy 27 and policy diffusion 34–5, 370 Post-Conflict Unit 77 potential loyalty conflict 175–6 presidents and presidential selection 655, 658, 659, 660, 664 problems establishing 425–6 ‘Reshaping Economic Geography’ report (2009) 132 secondment guidelines 680 as ‘site of contestation’ 29 Too Global To Fail 378 whistleblower policies 717 World Development Report (WDR) 86–7 World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) 569, 571 World Cities Leadership and Climate Summit, London (2005) 117–18 ‘world city’ hypothesis 135, 136 World Conference of Mayors (WCM) 130, 131 World Council of Indigenous Peoples 235 World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos 13, 156, 372, 375, 568–9, 571 World Food Programme (WFP) 171, 672 World Future Council 374 World Health Organization (WHO) 12, 158, 228, 389, 548, 550, 552, 572, 575 and the Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI) 551–2 Commission on Macroeconomics and Health 459 criticisms 549–50, 557–8 directors-general (DGs) 655, 658–9, 663, 665, 667–8 directors-general (DGs), election process 660, 662 Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FTCC) 316, 558 Framework for Engagement with non-State actors (FENSA) 558–9 Global Coordinating Mechanism for Non- Communicable Diseases 558 HIV/AIDS funding impasses 551 ‘housing’ smaller organizations 550, 559 private sector involvement in policy formulation 559
Index 765 secretariat 169 structural and administrative reforms 558–9 support for Bangladesh 538 World Humanitarian Summit (2016) 511 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): directors-generals (DGs) 655, 658, 659, 664, 668 directors-generals, election process 660, 662 World Policy Analysis Institute, UCLA 374 world politics 245 role of knowledge networks 384–8 as a web 289 World Resources Institute 118 World Social Forum 13, 148 World Systems Theory 312 World Trade Organization (WTO) 10, 247, 389, 672 Agreement on Agriculture 30, 31 authority contests around trade liberalization and food security 30–1 ‘Battle of Seattle’ (1999) 461 delegated accountability model 27 directors-generals (DGs) 655, 658, 659, 663, 664, 665, 666, 667 directors-generals, selection process 660–1 Doha Trade Round 30, 31 global trade round chairmanship 407 and government procurement 294, 300 and organized business 575 public administration studies 170, 172
sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) Agreements 331, 338, 339 and transnational political authority 28, 29 troika 661 World Vision 650 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 602, 604 debt-for-nature 519 palm oil buyers scorecard 611 Wright, M. 473 Wright, S. 250–1 Xu, Y-C. 170, 172 Yashwant, Sinha 643 Yeates, N. 370 Yonsei University Department of Global Public Administration 358 Young, A. R. 305 Yousafzai, Malala 375 YouTube 240, 247 Zakaria, Fareed 375 Zangl, B. 36 Zaring, D. T. 476, 478 Zeitlin, J. 297, 447 Zhang, Shengman 664, 666 Zhang, Y. 99 Zhou Xiao Chuan 645 Ziang Huai Cheng 643 Zoellick, Robert 659, 664, 665 Zuckerberg, Mark 630 Zuern, M. 295–6