Governance through Private Authority? Non-State Actors in World Politics.

• Author: Buthe, Tim
• Position: Reviews of two books - Book Review

Private Authority and International Affairs

Edited by A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 398 pages

The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance

Edited by Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 248 pages

After stagnating in the 1980s, the number And activities of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other non-state actors have grown again throughout the 1990s, contributing to renewed scholarly interest in the nature and influence of non-state actors in world politics. This new international relations (IR) literature is going beyond the earlier debates over whether non-state actors matter, shifting the analytical focus to how they matter. Yet the very notion of non-state actors remains conceptually problematic. It is a residual category, comprising any actor that is not a state, including international governmental organizations (IOs) and NGOs, multinational corporations, formal and informal transnational networks of government bureaucrats, the general public (opinion), international professional associations and commercial lobbying groups, as well as international criminal and terrorist networks. These often collective actors are socially constructed, interact with other non-state actors as well as governments, operate for profit or provide public goods, and in so doing may support or undermine the state system. Can any single analytical framework accommodate and explain the genesis, activities and impact of such a diverse set of actors?

Two recent edited volumes seek to overcome this problem by focusing more narrowly on private authority in international politics, where private is defined as "neither states, state-based, nor state-created" and authority is defined as "institutionalized forms or expressions of power" that are legitimate in the sense that "there is some form of normative, un-coerced consent or recognition of authority on the part of the regulated or governed." The editors and contributors of both volumes seem to agree that authority relationships can be examined empirically only in "recognizable issue domains"--issue areas--and are therefore careful to specify the particular issue domain for each of their hypotheses and findings. Yet, the chapters within each volume also seek broader and common insights. The chapters in Cutler, Haufler and Porter's, Private Authority in International Affairs share an interest in the causes and consequences of the attainment of legitimate power by private actors that directly or indirectly work for profit: firms, business lobbies, industry associations and other "corporate actors." Hall and Biersteker's, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, takes a broader approach and seeks to provide a comparative examination of private authority beyond the realm of international political economy. The book includes analyses of governance through non-governmental social and religious movements in "moral" domains and the private authority of "illicit" actors whose activities violate domestic or international legal norms, such as transnationally organized crime. Both books make significant contributions to what is still a rather new literature.

Private Governance of the International Economy

Cutler et al begin from the observation that there is a large and growing realm in which "the framework of governance for international economic transactions increasingly is created and maintained by the private sector and not by state or interstate organizations." The authors explicitly aim for both a positive and a normative analysis of such private authority, raising a series of questions for each. How does private authority differ from other forms of influence or power? How does it come about? Why is it considered legitimate? Who is governed by it? How does it operate? Does private international authority reinforce state policies or undermine them? Does it exacerbate or ameliorate interstate conflict? And more strictly theoretically: "Can private authority be reconciled ... with the state-centric approaches that dominate the discipline of international relations?"

The empirical chapters are divided into three sections. The first contains four chapters that cover private authority in realms where the groups or individuals who participate in the governance arrangement and those governed by it are thought to be mostly identical. These chapters cover rules and norms for internet commerce, oligopolistic behavioral norms in markets or networks of firms (in minerals and metals, information technology (IT) and health care) and the setting of international standards for telecommunications and IT. The four chapters in the second empirical section analyze private authority where the identity of those governed by the private governance institutions largely differs from the identity of those who create the norms, set the rules, make the decision, i.e., from those who provide governance in the particular issue domain. These chapters cover bond ratings, insurability of political and environmental risks, the internationalization of intellectual property rights norms and conflict and cooperation between transnational issue networks and multinational firms seeking oil exploration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A third...