Nicolas Hachez

Global governance and democratic legitimacy: a bottom-up approach

This special issue aims to contribute to the debate on the democratization of global governance. Its starting point is that, two decades after the emergence of the concept of ‘‘global governance’’ in scholarly literature, the empirical specificities of the transforming political landscape that it seeks to describe remain largely unsettled. Literature in various disciplines has identified key trends in governance beyond the nation state. These suggest that global governance envisions a growing role for variegated (non-)state actors that act through multilevel and multidimensional regulatory networks and processes to tackle global challenges in a wide range of issue areas and in the absence of a central public authority. Yet, global governance is a highly diverse, complex and continuously changing phenomenon. How it manifests itself empirically depends on a variety of factors, like the respective governance modes, processes, logics, agents, outcomes and subjects involved, as well as the timeframe and issue area in which a particular governance arrangement is embedded. Global governance arrangements thus display a great diversity, from the more institutionalized and intergovernmental formats to networks, private regulatory schemes and standards, public private partnerships or multistakeholder initiatives. However, certain themes of inquiry run across the academic literature on global governance. The most prominent question may be that of the legitimacy of some of these innovative and peculiar governance schemes. Global governance initiatives, and notably public private partnerships, have often been praised for their problemsolving capacity with regard to cross-border issues that challenge state authority and domestic regulation. Their effectiveness has served as an important source of legitimacy, or in Scharpf’s terminology, output legitimacy (Scharpf 1998). A normative critique of global governance in legitimacy terms, however, arises from the fact that global governance arrangements are often authoritative and their outcomes govern or have an indirect or direct impact on the daily lives of people (De Búrca 2008). As a result, there is increasing support for the view that global governance, like more traditional types of modern government, ought to derive its legitimacy from its democratic character. Recent debates about the democratization of global governance have witnessed efforts by political scientists, philosophers and legal theorists to explain and conceptualize democracy beyond the nation state at a general level. These efforts underline the interdisciplinary nature of global governance as a field of study, as well as the potential that can be reached if academic scholars bridge disciplinary divides in order to achieve a better and more nuanced understanding of global governance. However, the debate on the democratization of global governance tends to take global governance for granted as an analytical category, and seldom pays due attention to the great diversity of particular schemes and initiatives. Therefore, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2013 Vol. 26, No. 3, 197 200, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2013.771898

Public and Private Food Safety Standards and International Trade Law. How to build a Balanced Relationship

The expert contributors assess the state-of-the-art with regard to private regulation of food, natural resources and labor conditions. They begin with an introduction to, and discussion of, several leading existing private standards, and go on to assess private food standards and their legitimacy and effectiveness in the context of the global trade regime.

Views on International Law and International Relations in Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence

This article aims to analyze and interpret the views on international relations and international law expressed in Adam Smiths little studied Lectures on Jurisprudence, in connection with the works of Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. In order to do so, the article first tries to unravel Smiths account of the formation of society and government in domestic orders, understood as a complex intertwinement of human and economic factors. The article then goes on to analyze Smiths stated reasons why the seemingly universal human and economic processes leading to the formation of domestic societies and governments are failing when they are to apply in the international order. Finally, this article explores Smiths views on the idiosyncratic rules governing international relations, i.e. the Law of Nations. The conclusion of the article then attempts to formulate insights for a more harmonious international society based on Smiths premises.

The Relations Between the United Nations and Civil Society: Past, Present, and Future

This paper addresses the question of the relations between the United Nations and “civil society” with a twofold starting point. First, the United Nations, which is the only truly global organization in terms of geographical and material reach, was primarily designed as a partnership of states, and its modes of action and decision reflect this a priori. Second, the recent history of the world has witnessed the emergence of a global human consciousness, which is increasingly able to organize into a global “civil society” voicing a global “public opinion.” Both the United Nations and the emerging global civil society claim to have a role to play in the government of world affairs. We will thus study how these two forces have interacted in engaging with this task. Global civil society is reflected by a multitude of forms, of which the most prominent is the figure of the “Non-Governmental Organization” (NGO), which we will define below. We will therefore use NGOs as our ideal-type in this paper. International Organizations Law Review 5 (2008) 49–84