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An examination of three major trends in global governance, exemplified by developments in transnational environmental rule-setting. The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainability governance: the emergence of nonstate actors; new mechanisms of transnational cooperation; and increasingly segmented and overlapping layers of authority. The book, which is the synthesis of a ten-year “Global ...
Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Commission, this book explores the different methods that states employ to ensure their interests are being served, and identifies the problems involved with monitoring and managing IOs. The contributors suggest that it is not inherently more difficult to design effective delegation mechanisms at international level than at domestic level and, drawing on principal-agent theory, help explain the variations that exist in the extent to which states are willing to delegate to IOs. They argue that IOs are neither all evil nor all virtuous, but are better understood as bureaucracies that can be controlled to varying degrees by their political masters.
øThis collection explores the frontiers of knowledge at the intersection of public administration and international relations scholarship. The culturally, generationally and academically diverse team of editors stake a meaningful claim in this burgeoni
Once dismissed as ineffectual, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has in the past twenty years emerged as a powerful international organization. Member states allow the IAEA to render judgment on matters vital to peace and security while nations around the globe comply with its rules and commands on proliferation, safety, and a range of other issues. Robert L. Brown details the IAEA’s role in facilitating both control of nuclear weapons and the safe exploitation of nuclear power. As he shows, the IAEA has acquired a surprising amount of power as states, for political and technological reasons, turn to it to supply policy cooperation and to act as an agent for their security and safety. The agency’s success in gaining and holding authority rests in part on its ability to apply politically neutral expertise that produces beneficial policy outcomes. But Brown also delves into the puzzle of how an agency created by states to aid cooperation has acquired power over them.
Rethinking Private Authority examines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence spanning a century of environmental rule making, Green shows how the delegation of authority to private actors has played a small but consistent role in multilateral environmental agreements over the past fifty years, large...
When powerful states and international organizations decide to respond to violent conflict around the world, their preferred policy instrument is to deploy peace operations -- institutions that must serve both the international politics of their creation as well as the fractured local societies they aim to transform. But while their international face has been widely analysed, we know less about how peace operations function 'on the ground.' In How Peace Operations Work, Jeni Whalan addresses this critical dimension of peacekeeping. She analyses the effectiveness of peace operations through a local lens, asking new questions about how they work, and generating new insights about how they mig...
Evaluation has become a key tool in assessing the performance of international organizations, in fostering learning, and in demonstrating accountability. Within the United Nations (UN) system, thousands of evaluators and consultants produce hundreds of evaluation reports worth millions of dollars every year. But does evaluation really deliver on its promise of objective evidence and functional use? By unravelling the internal machinery of evaluation systems in international organizations, this book challenges the conventional understanding of evaluation as a value-free activity. Vytautas Jankauskas and Steffen Eckhard show how a seemingly neutral technocratic tool can serve as an instrument ...
International Organizations (IOs) are important actors within global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention and cooperation about social policies. Our knowledge about the involvement of IOs varies significantly by policy fields, and we know comparatively little about the specific roles of IOs in social policies. This volume enhances and systematizes our understanding of IOs in global social governance. It provides studies on a variety of social policy fields in which different, but also the same, IOs operate. The chapters shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy field by describing the population of participating IOs; exploring how a particular global social policy field is constituted as a whole, and which dominant IOs set the trends. The contributors also examine the discourse within, and between, these IOs on the respective social policies. As such, this first-of-its kind book contributes to research on social policy and international relations, both in terms of theoretical substantiation and empirical scope.
Terrorism and National Security Reform demonstrates that blue-ribbon commissions can be powerful vehicles for policy change, overturning the conventional wisdom that views them only as devices for passing the buck. Jordan Tama explains how the unique political credibility of commissions can enable them to forge bipartisan consensus on tough policy challenges. He also shows that commissions are most valuable during a crisis, when policymakers face pressure to make changes but frequently cannot agree on what to do. Using an original database, case studies, and more than 200 interviews of policymakers and commission participants, Tama reveals how commissions have shaped Barack Obama's plan for ending the Iraq War, spurred the largest government and intelligence overhauls since 1947, and driven many other elements of U.S. counterterrorism policy. In an era of unrelenting partisanship and extreme polarization, this book shows that commissions are increasingly valuable policymaking tools.