As the international community struggles with major issues such as deforestation, it is increasingly turning to sustainable development and market-based mechanisms to tackle environmental problems. Focusing on forestry, this book investigates the legitimacy of global forums and evaluates the quality of global governance in the current era.

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy's importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume: to develop an agenda for systematic and comparative research on legitimacy in global governance. In complementary fashion, the chapters address different aspects of the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy? The volume makes four specific contributions. First, it argues for a sociological approach to legitimacy, centered on perceptions of legitimate global governance among affected audiences. Second, it moves beyond the traditional focus on states as the principal audience for legitimacy in global governance and considers a full spectrum of actors from governments to citizens. Third, it advocates a comparative approach to the study of legitimacy in global governance, and suggests strategies for comparison across institutions, issue areas, countries, societal groups, and time. Fourth, the volume offers the most comprehensive treatment so far of the sociological legitimacy of global governance, covering three broad analytical themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.

This book aims to develop a critical understanding of multistakeholder governance in Internet Governance through an in-depth analysis of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition, the process through which the U.S. Government transferred its traditional oversight role over the Domain Name System to the global Internet community. In the last few decades, multistakeholderism has become the dominant discourse in the Internet Governance field, mainly because of its promise to provide democratic legitimacy for transnational policymaking, although empirical research has highlighted disappointing performances of multistakeholder arrangements. This book contributes to the debate on multistakeholder governance by analyzing the IANA Transition process's normative legitimacy, broken down in the dimensions of input legitimacy (inclusiveness, balanced representation, and representativeness), throughput legitimacy (procedural and discursive quality), and output legitimacy (outcome and institutional effectiveness). Findings warn about the risk that multistakeholderism could result in a misleading rhetoric legitimizing existing power asymmetries.

Rules set by global governance organizations affect communities across the world. Such organizations increasingly seek to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of groups beyond their member state elites. This book advances scholarly debate on the politics of legitimacy and legitimation in global governance. It brings together researchers from different subfields of International Relations in order to highlight trends and contradictions in the contemporary politics of legitimacy across areas of sustainable development, humanitarian relief, responsible investment, sustainable fisheries and labour standards. The chapters explore legitimation efforts by various forms of global governance bodies, such as intergovernmental organizations, public–private partnerships and fully private bodies. The book demonstrates that different governance forms beyond the nation state share deep legitimacy challenges and engage in continuous legitimation attempts. Questions on the audiences of such legitimation attempts are particularly pivotal in understanding the politics of legitimacy. Audiences are not predetermined but constituted through interaction between legitimation efforts and the reactions to those of targeted and other groups, mirroring broader global power relations. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Examining the interplay between the domestic, regional and global aspects of the crisis of legitimacy of global governance, this book theoretically questions and empirically analyses the "crises of legitimacy" in global governance with respect to various mechanisms, actors, and issues. It expertly sheds lights on contemporary legitimacy contestations and crises by analysing conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects of the legitimacy in global governance. The specific issues and case studies collected in this volume survey the evolving nature of legitimacy and legitimization processes in global governance with historical, and theoretical analysis. Perspectives on specific actors and issues provide vital insights for understanding several commonalities and differences of legitimacy crises faced at various global governance mechanisms. Improving the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of current global governance bodies by showing several legitimacy contestations and crises at global and regional level, this book will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, globalization, international Political Economy, regionalism, and general global governance studies.

This book offers a major new theory of global governance, explaining both its rise and what many see as its current crisis. The author suggests that world politics is now embedded in a normative and institutional structure dominated by hierarchies and power inequalities and therefore inherently creates contestation, resistance, and distributional struggles. Within an ambitious and systematic new conceptual framework, the theory makes four key contributions. Firstly, it reconstructs global governance as a political system which builds on normative principles and reflexive authorities. Second, it identifies the central legitimation problems of the global governance system with a constitutionalist setting in mind. Third, it explains the rise of state and societal contestation by identifying key endogenous dynamics and probing the causal mechanisms that produced them. Finally, it identifies the conditions under which struggles in the global governance system lead to decline or deepening. Rich with propositions, insights, and evidence, the book promises to be the most important and comprehensive theoretical argument about world politics of the 21st century.

This book explores what the privatization of global rule-making means for democracy. It reconstructs three prominent rule-making processes in the field of global sustainability politics and argues that, if designed properly, private transnational rule-making can be as democratic as intergovernmental rule-making.

Dilemmas from climate change to financial meltdowns make it clear that global interconnectedness is the norm in the twenty-first century. As a result, global governance organizations (GGOs)—from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council—have taken on prominent roles in the management of international affairs. These GGOs create and promulgate rules to address a host of pressing problems. But as World Rule reveals, they struggle to meet two challenges: building authority despite limited ability to impose sanctions and maintaining legitimacy while satisfying the demands of key constituencies whose support is essential to a global rulemaking regime. Through a novel empirical study of twenty-five GGOs, Jonathan GS Koppell provides a clearer picture of the compromises within and the competition among these influential institutions by focusing attention on their organizational design. Analyzing four aspects of GGO organization in depth—representation and administration, the rulemaking process, adherence and enforcement, and interest group participation—Koppell describes variation systemically, identifies patterns, and offers explanations that link GGO design to the fundamental challenge of accountability in global governance.