Academic

Anderson on Transnational Governmental Regulatory Networks

By Lawrence Solum

Check out The On-Going Debate Over Transnational Governmental Regulatory Networks, Global Governance, and Legitimacy, a post by Kenneth Anderson, at Opinio Juris.  Here is a taste:

[A]ccountability and democratic legitimacy have become somewhat confused in the literature on networks, governmental and NGO advocacy networks. They are, after all, separate things and separate political/moral values. You can have democratic legitimacy and yet have very poor accountability mechanisms. And you can have excellent accountability mechanisms, yet not through democratic mechanisms, but instead through legally enforceable governance standards, courts of law, efficient bureaucratic oversight, etc. So saying that intergovernmental regulatory networks of the kind praised in A New World Order often lack transparency or accountability is important, but it is not always, and not always most importantly, because of a lack of democratic legitimacy. The question of democratic legitimacy is there independently. So is the question of accountability. (I discuss this in an upcoming review essay in the American Journal of International Law, reviewing a book, NGO Accountability - I think it will be the January 2009 AJIL, but AJIL is a bit backlogged. I also discuss other parts of this in an revised version of my SMU talk on, ?Transnational Governmental Networks: Legitimate for What?? that will come out as part of the conference stuff in The International Lawyer.)

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 29, 2009 (boomark / email).