Now showing 1 - 10 of 53
  • Publication
    Multi-layered differentiation in the climate regime: the gradual path from Rio to Paris
    ( 2023-01-01)
    According to a commonly held view, states have fundamentally re-organized the differentiation between developed and developing countries in the climate regime in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In this view, the Paris Agreement replaces the ‘rigid’, ‘static’, and ‘dichotomous’ system of differentiation based on Annexes I and II to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with a more ‘flexible’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘subtle’ solution. I argue that this view is incomplete. In fact, the early climate regime included additional layers of differentiation that go beyond the binary distinction between Annex and non-Annex parties. Through a discussion of three episodes in which states adjusted the system to the ‘special circumstances’ of regime members, I show how informalization and individualization – two hallmarks of differentiation in the Paris Agreement – had become central well before COP-21 and that the international climate regime thus developed a lot more gradually than is often assumed.
    Scopus© Citations 1
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    Scopus© Citations 40
  • Publication
    Global governance vs empire: Why world order moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy
    (Palgrave McMillan, 2015-01-05)
    Baumann, Rainer
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    Current debates in International Relations (IR) entail two different claims regarding the global structures evolving in the post-Cold War world. Some suggest that the scope of the US power amounts to lasting American hegemony or even to a US empire; others speak of global governance in light of waning capacities of single states to tackle international problems or the growing salience of non-state actors. In this article, we discuss these two bodies of literature in conjunction. We argue that the global governance literature and the empire literature use different lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politics after the Cold War, and that they both address the question of power and authority in IR. The global governance literature identifies a diffusion of power and authority in world politics and thus a move from anarchy to heterarchy. The empire literature, in contrast, identifies a concentration of power and authority in the hands of the United States and thus a move from anarchy to hierarchy. We discuss different attempts to redress this seeming contradiction and show that there is much ground to believe that world politics is in fact characterised by both a concentration and a dispersion of power and authority. What we may see is neither global governance nor empire alone, but rather moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time.
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    Scopus© Citations 13
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    Democracy Is Democracy Is Democracy? Changes in Evaluations of International Institutions in Academic Textbooks, 1970-2010
    This article examines what democracy means when it is used in academic textbook evaluations of international institutions and how the meaning of the term "democracy" in such evaluations has changed over time. An analysis of 71 textbooks on international institutions in the policy areas of international security, environmental, and human rights politics leads us to several answers. We observe slight changes in relation to three aspects. First, the range of democracy-relevant actors expands over time, most notably in relation to nonstate actors as important participants in (or even subjects of) international policymaking. Second, representational concerns become more relevant in justifying demands for greater participation in international institutions. Third, international organizations are increasingly discussed not only as subjects that enhance the transparency and accountability of the policies of their member states, but also as the objects of democratic demands for transparency and accountability themselves.
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    Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    Global democracy and the democratic minimum: Why a procedural account alone is insufficient
    (Sage, 2014-12-01)
    In this critical comment on the global democracy debate, I take stock of contemporary proposals for democratizing global governance. In the first part of the article, I show that, empirically, many international institutions are now evaluated in terms of their democratic credentials. At the same time, the notions of democracy that underpin such evaluations are often very formalistic. They focus on granting access to civil society organizations, making policy-relevant documents available online or establishing global parliamentary assemblies to give citizens a voice in the decision-making of international organizations. In the second part, I challenge this focus on formal procedures and argue that a normatively persuasive conception of global democracy would shift our focus to areas such as health, education and subsistence. Contrary to much contemporary thinking about global democracy, I thus defend the view that the institutions we have are sufficiently democratic. What is needed are not better procedures, but investments that help the weaker members of global society to make effective use of the democracy-relevant institutions that exist in contemporary international politics.
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    Scopus© Citations 27
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    Tamed Transparency: How Information Disclosure under the Global Reporting Initiative Fails to Empower
    (MIT Press, 2010-08-02) ;
    Eichinger, Margot
    In this contribution, we explore the tensions that seem inherent in the claim that transparency policies "empower" the users of disclosed information vis-àvis those who are asked to provide the information. Since these tensions are particularly relevant in relation to voluntary disclosure, our analysis focuses on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) as the world's leading voluntary corporate non-financial reporting scheme. Corporate sustainability reporting is often hailed as a powerful instrument to improve the environmental performance of business and to empower societal groups, including consumers, in their relations with the corporate world. Yet, our analysis illustrates that the relationship between transparency and empowerment is conflictual at all four levels of activity examined in this article: in the rhetoric and policies of the GRI as well as in the actual reporting practice and in the activities of intermediaries in response to the organization's disclosure standard.
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    Scopus© Citations 165
  • Publication
    Forum: Global Governance: Decline or Maturation of an Academic Concept?
    (Blackwell, 2010-12-01)
    Overbeek, Henk
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    Pattberg, Philipp
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    Compagnon, Daniel
    This forum discusses contemporary scholarship on global governance in light of various problems that have commonly been associated with the global governance concept and literature. In the first contribution, Henk Overbeek maintains that global governance talk has undergone a profound transformation. While the concept initially referred to a radical restructuring of the global economic order, it is nowadays used as a reformist concept that seeks to accommodate the interests of neo-liberal globalization with relatively marginal reforms that are seen as necessary to keep the system running. Because definitions of global governance, including that of the Commission on Global Governance, tend to presuppose rather than question the existence of common interests and the willingness to cooperate at the global level, they serve to depoliticize the debate about world order. Moreover, the concept is analytically misleading given the rise of traditional forms of interstate bargaining that followed both the global financial crisis and the rise of the BRIC states. In the second contribution, Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg revisit the common critique that "global governance" is essentially a misnomer, as it overestimates the actual globality of existing governance schemes and as it portrays transboundary regulation as a mostly apolitical or post-political activity. Finding some truth in both claims, the authors however note that the more recent contributions to the global governance literature are very much aware of these conceptual challenges and frequently manage to address them without depriving the concept of global governance of its particular strengths. However, the authors identify a third challenge that has largely gone unnoticed thus far, namely the tendency of global governance research to almost exclusively focus on densely regulated policy areas while at the same time neglecting the more fundamental question why some issues become considered global governance issues and others not. In the third contribution, Daniel Compagnon brings the conceptual debate down to earth. He takes issue with the common claim that global governance ignores the South. As a matter of fact, and in spite of the structural imbalances in the distribution of power and resources in the global political economy, Third World countries have not been lacking overall influence both on the international state system and on transnational politics. Rather than assuming that Third World countries are structurally excluded from global governance, the author argues for a more nuanced and fact-based assessment of global governance in the South and the inclusion of Third World countries in global governance research.
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    World Politics and Organizational Fields: The Case of Transnational Sustainability Governance
    (Sage, 2009-12-06) ;
    Pattberg, Philipp
    Transnational rule-making organizations have proliferated in the area of sustainability politics. In this article, we explore why these organizations share a set of core features that appear overly costly at first sight. We argue that norms that evolved out of the social interaction among transnational rule-making organizations account for this phenomenon. Thus, in the early 1990s, an organizational field of transnational rule-making has gradually developed in the field of environmental politics. Responding to a broader social discourse about global governance that stressed a need for innovative forms of cooperation among different societal sectors, this organizational field gained in legitimacy and strength. A set of commonly accepted core norms, the increasing density of interaction among the field's members, and the success and legitimacy ascribed to the field's key players by the outside world helped to solidify the organizational field until it eventually developed a ‘life of its own'.
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    Scopus© Citations 218