Legitimacy in global governance

Whereas legitimacy is already difficult to capture and handle with regard to the nation state, it becomes even more blurred when applied to the transnational sphere. For example, from a normative perspective on legitimacy, the question of what constitutes the adequate criteria against which the legitimacy of global policy-making has to be assessed has been far from uncontroversial. Today many political scientists see a strong linkage between legitimacy and democracy. According to a common argument, legitimacy requires democracy because it is the central principle in contemporary politics that legitimates authority (Westle 1989: 22; Bernstein 2011). However, it is an open debate whether democracy is best served by strengthening the sovereignty of states, or by enhancing citizen participation in global policy-making.

Traditionally, states have been considered to be the only source of legitimate global rule-making (Held & Koenig-Archibugi 2004). As regards this point of view, global governance is legitimate in so far as states – as the constitutive entities of the international system – decide about and control global politics. Options for strengthening the legitimacy of international governance therefore could include greater transparency of international organizations towards governments as regards their operations and decision-making, as well as enhanced accountability, participation, and fairness among states (Woods 1999: 41). However, it has also been argued that cooperation and delegation by states could only confer legitimacy to international governance to the extent that states are democratic and that consent is on-going. What is more, even under these conditions ongoing consent by rights-respecting democratic states might be not sufficient to guarantee legitimacy, given that governments are accountable only to their own citizens, and not to those affected by their decisions (Buchanan & Keohane 2006: 412–416).

Another group of authors suggests that ultimately, legitimacy may only be granted by individual citizens. Self-determination should be realized at the global level through

44 For example, an empirical approach to legitimacy might ask whether philosophically deduced norms are in fact held by relevant stakeholders. In turn, a normative work might ask whether empirically held criteria of acceptability are in fact convincing from a normative point of view.

enhanced possibilities for participation, for example through regional parliaments such as the European parliament, referenda, or the opening up of IOs to enhanced public scrutiny and agenda-setting as well as accountability (Held 2003: 476–477). It is in this context that the establishment of participation mechanisms for non-state actors is being discussed as a way to increase the legitimacy of global governance. For example, Dingwerth (2007) proposes a set of criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of private global governance mechanisms deduced from theories of democracy beyond the state.

He suggests that participation, inclusiveness, democratic control, and discursive practice are important elements for evaluating the legitimacy of transnational governance arrangements, and concludes that private transnational governance may at least be as legitimate as international rule-making by states.

Others have suggested that governance arrangements beyond the state might have to be evaluated according to other, substantive criteria than according to their democratic potential. For example, with regard to the European Union (EU), some scholars have argued that non-majoritarian and post-parliamentary standards and models of accountability may be appropriate (Føllesdal 2007: 221). While a group of authors warns that any application of criteria distinct from those used to evaluate the legitimacy of states might lead to a weakening of democratic standards (Hurrelmann et al. 2007b), others argue that the domestic analogy is misleading given that relationships of international domination fundamentally differ from domination exercised by the state over its citizens (Steffek 2003: 259). Again others have integrated different approaches into a complex normative standard of legitimacy in global governance; in this view, legitimacy requires ongoing consent by democratic states, the fulfillment of substantive legitimacy criteria including respect for basic human rights, comparative benefits, and institutional integrity; and lastly, the enabling of continued informed and principled contestation and critical revision of activities by civil society actors (Buchanan &

Keohane 2006). It thus becomes clear that, depending on the general premises a researcher makes, she may convincingly argue for very different criteria of legitimacy.

Moreover, it has also been suggested from a normative point of view that legitimacy requirements may vary according to the specific circumstances and over time. There might be topics and policy areas which are especially prone to broad cooperation, while in other issue areas more restricted circles of participants could be legitimate. For example, it has been pointed out that in technical issues such as telecommunication,

decision-making of smaller groups of experts might seem suitable, while other more political issues require broader participation (Tamm Hallström & Boström 2010: 5–6).

Additionally, it has also been argued that different legitimacy standards apply to organizations according to the stage of the policy process in which they are active and their respective activities (Beisheim & Dingwerth 2010: 94–95; Erman 2018). What is more, it has been suggested that normative yardsticks of global policy-making are currently undergoing a process of change. Whereas traditionally legitimacy was conceived as being the result of uncoerced interaction between sovereign states, nowadays new norms are on the rise putting emphasis on criteria such as inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, and deliberation (Clark 2007: 209-210; Dingwerth et al.

2015).

In turn, for scholars taking an empirical approach to legitimacy the relevant question is on which (morally justifiable) grounds constituencies accept and support transnational institutions. Generally, the fact that we can observe expressions of compliance and support towards inter- and transnational institutions has been taken as an indicator for the relevance of legitimacy at the global level (Steffek 2003: 257). Moreover, Ian Hurd (1999) argues that there is no plausible reason why legitimacy as one of the mechanisms of social control (the other two being coercion and self-interest) should not exist internationally, when its relevance is admitted for national political systems. In this regard, recent research suggests that the bunch of governance beyond the state neither counts with strong democratic legitimacy nor suffers from severe legitimacy crisis, but is characterized by more ambivalent “precarious legitimacies”; these are characterized by the parallel and often contradictory justification and criticism of different layers and elements of the respective institution by various individuals and constituencies (Nullmeier et al. 2010). However, it has also been argued that individual transnational institutions especially in the area of global health governance enjoy solid legitimacy (Huckel Schneider 2009). Generally, it has been suggested that concrete legitimacy requirements of policy-making beyond the state vary between different forms of governance and issue areas as the respective values and norms of constituencies differ, and are currently subject to change (Bernstein 2011: 41-42).

Thus, both strands of research on normative and empirical legitimacy of global policy-making suggest that legitimacy beyond the state is by tendency unstable and in a process of transformation. At the same time, new norms of legitimacy and criteria for

moral acceptability beyond those depending on state sovereignty are in the process of gaining broader acceptance. However, the concrete degrees of legitimacy of real-world transnational institutions seem to depend on the exact conditions and institutional features of global policy-making, and the current scientific discussion – including this dissertation – intents to specify these conditions which shape legitimacy.

In this dissertation, I opt for an empirical approach to legitimacy. This is mainly due to my main research interest: While it has been argued from a normative point of view that the participation by movements and organizations of affected peoples strengthens the legitimacy of global policy-making, I ask empirically whether it has in fact led to higher morally grounded acceptance as perceived by pertinent constituencies. In other words, I ask whether the good normative reasons that exist for justifying APO participation are in fact shared by relevant actors in the field. Additionally, empirical approaches have the advantage of being able to capture the dynamics of legitimacy creation and to disclose potential disputes over legitimacy. Thus, empirical research might not only assign a degree of legitimacy to an institution, but is able to highlight different preferences and evaluation yardstick of various constituencies.