deconcentrated global governance, transnational
TRANSCRIPT
Vol.:(0123456789)
Global Public Policy and Governance (2021) 1:175–201https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-021-00013-y
1 3
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational administration, and the public administration discipline
Kim Moloney1
Received: 19 January 2021 / Accepted: 27 April 2021 / Published online: 12 May 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University 2021
AbstractGlobal governance is transnationally administered. Today, global governance is no longer dominated by just states or even international organizations. It is an increasingly populated arena in which multiple actors have global policy power and transnational administrative influence. Each impacts a nation-state’s assumed administrative sovereignty. Global policy and its transnational administration may be decentralized, devolved, dispersed, and/or delegated away from exclusive state control. This reconfiguration of administrative sovereignty is explored via five case studies: Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, the Internet Cor-poration for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Social Forum. The resulting heuristic showcases a diversity of transnational administrative acts, articulates their “institutional center”, and provides opportunities for further public administration research.
Keywords Transnational administration · Global policy · Administrative state · International organizations · Administrative sovereignty
Introduction
This paper links calls for greater globalization of public administration research (Gulrajani & Moloney, 2012) with an emergent literature on transnational admin-istration (TA) (Stone & Ladi, 2015; Stone & Moloney, 2019b). Unlike its admin-istrative ‘cousins’ of sovereign- or state-focused public administration such as comparative public administration or development administration, transnational administration (TA) need not be anchored within the sovereign state or state-created international organizations (IO). The administration of transnational arenas and its
* Kim Moloney [email protected]
1 Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
176 K. Moloney
1 3
actors are infrequently bound by scalar notions among and between municipalities, provinces, or nation-states (Coleman, 2019).
Transnational administration is the “regulation, management and implemen-tation of global policies of public nature by both private and public actors operat-ing beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the state” (Stone & Ladi, 2015, 2). Unlike sovereign state administration, TA is not anchored in concrete notions of the administrative state as “the” originator and implementer of policy. Instead, trans-nationally administered arenas cross states, policy sectors, involve public and pri-vate actors, and operate within a deconcentrated but increasingly populated global governance1 arena in which states, international organizations, civil society, social movements, foundations, regulatory regimes, scientific and expert networks, and even global citizens may influence global policy and its transnational administra-tion. Each actor, including the state, may use its policy voice, its authority, and even its power, to engage the cross-border, multilevel, and complex problems facing our global community (Kaul, 2019). There is an ongoing decentering of the administra-tive state into deconcentrated spheres of influence within global governance.2
For example, if one studies phytosanitary regulations, administrative law schol-ars may explore its TA by engaging the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a devel-oping country’s regulatory challenges, and its local food manufacturers (Chimni 2006). Or perhaps, engage the impact of a country’s manufacturing sector with the United States’ Food Safety Modernization Act and the World Trade Organisation’s phytosanitary agreements (Mosquera et al., 2013). There are thousands of similar policy and administrative acts in which the state may not be the primary progenitor of policy, regulation, and its administration. This is despite the state often becoming a reform object for global policy and its transnational administration.
Others might explore how a post-2005 Responsibility to Protect is transnationally administered in a moving constellation of UN agencies, human rights groups, and states (Chalk et al., 2012). Or even how the migratory birds of the East Asian–Aus-tralasian Flyway (Yong et al., 2018), a transnational network, are counted and pro-tected via transnational arrangements of international organizations, corporations, states, civil society, and individual activists. Each actor constellation is part of a network.
1 There are supranational governance arrangements at the sub-regional (e.g., Southern African Develop-ment Community), regional (e.g., African Union), and global levels (e.g., United Nations). This paper uses the phrase “global governance” to mean all three arrangements. This extension also applies to the phrase “global policy” which may be understood as meaning global policies, regional policies and/or sub-regional policies at the supranational level.2 In the first 45 years of the twentieth century, the (administrative) state was the primary (but not exclu-sive) global governance actor. With the end of World War Two, new international organizations (created by states) took on peace and security issues along with sector-specific global concerns. By the end of the Cold War, civil society actors (and a few foundations) increasingly left domestic arenas to engage international issues. The end of the Cold War also brought an explosion in the number of formal interna-tional and regional organizations but also informal international organizations. By the start of the twenty-first century, transnational public–private partnerships, regulatory regimes, scientific and expertise net-works, and global citizen activism also began to claim global policy power and a desire to transnationally administrate.
177
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
States need not originate or lead the global policy action or its transnational administration. For example, the Kimberley Process is a certification scheme for trading conflict-free diamonds. It was a process initiated by NGOs, diamond middle-men in Antwerp, and the world’s largest diamond trading company: De Beers (Hau-fler, 2009). State (and IO) involvement in this certification scheme came toward the end. The network is a deconcentrated representation of policy and its administration. This network is separate from the dominant form of administrative studies in which methodological nationalism and state-led emphases dominate public administration (Stone & Ladi, 2015; Stone & Moloney, 2019a). It is also analytically distinct from typical sovereign level policy network (e.g.,Van Waarden, 1992) or collaborative governance (e.g., Ansell & Gash, 2007) studies.
The next section explains transnational administration importance. This is fol-lowed by conceptually anchoring TA actions away from prior state-driven centres of typical policy and administration study. TA is a structural reorientation away from state-driven policy creation and administration. This reorientation is articulated via their methods of movement away from the state: decentralization, devolution, dis-persal, and delegation. The last sections present five case studies: Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Social Forum. An additional dozen case examples are briefly mentioned throughout the paper. Each case study illustrates how TA operates within an increasingly populated global governance context in which administrative states may play only a minor role, if a role at all.
Importance of transnational administration
There are four reasons why the discipline of public administration should engage TA studies. The first relays an argument echoed by scholars of global governance, inter-national organizations, and those with liberal-institutionalist understandings of inter-national organizations (e.g., Keohane & Martin, 1995). Their insight is oft-stated: there are few policy problems in our modern world that will not involve the interac-tion of more than one state or international organization to suggest policy options, to mobilize resources, to engage stakeholders, and to implement and to evaluate the chosen policies. In a world with multiple global public good issues (e.g., Krisch, 2014; Nye Jr, 2002), cooperation and transnational administrative action is required (Kaul, 2019; Volkmer, 2019).
However, and contrary to typical public administration studies in which the state is its institutional centre of analysis, there is no clear institutional centre within TA. Its administration may emanate from states, international organizations, civil society, social movements, foundations, regulatory regimes, quasi-judicial actors, public–private partnerships, scientific and expert networks, and individual global citizens. This TA may also include conventions and international laws, global administrative law, international administrative law and its tribunals, and the influ-ence of informal international organizations (e.g., Kryvoi, 2015; Kuo, 2019; Roger, 2020; Vabulas, 2019). Each actor and any accompanying legalizations are part of
178 K. Moloney
1 3
a global agora (Stone, 2013) in which global policies need not be bound or led by states. This implies that the state’s administrative sovereignty (Muth, 2019) and the boundaries among and between global governance actors may often be “ill-defined and fluid” (Stone, 2008, 21). This fluidity results from decentralized, devolved, dif-fused, and/or delegated interactions within a deconcentrated global governance among and between its transnationally administered arenas.
This multi-actor transnational arena contrasts with most public administration scholarship where actor interaction with the state largely originates with domestic actors (Moloney & Stone, 2019). However, as studies on the European Union and its multilevel administration have indicated (Trondal & Bauer, 2017), such methodo-logical nationalism limits administrative understandings (Stone & Moloney, 2019a, 2019b). This interpretation is underscored if we consider studies on which actors influence administrative processes within developing countries. There are dozens of academic articles which suggest developing countries are challenged by agen-das arising from IOs with development objectives, states with bilateral aid and eco-nomic policy agendas, and civil society actors seeking to shape state behaviors (e.g., Alesina & Dollar, 2000; Banks et al., 2015; Easterly & Pfutze, 2008; Elbers & Arts, 2011; Moloney, 2020; Woods, 2005). This literature may not label such influence (whether state-sanctioned or not) as altering a state’s administrative sovereignty but that is what occurs. Today, however, such unidirectional influence no longer exclu-sively targets less wealthy or less influential administrative states. Well-developed states and their civil servants are also influenced by (and may encourage) transna-tionally administered activities (Raadschelders & Verheijen, 2019) or engage in transnational interactions via trans-governmental relationships (Abbott et al., 2018; Legrand, 2019).
Second, global governance is no longer a “terra incognita et obscura” (Coen & Pegram, 2015, 420). The methodological nationalism common to most public administration research (including comparative administration and development administration) has limited its disciplinary contribution to international and trans-national administrative studies (Moloney & Stone, 2019; Stone & Moloney, 2019b). Administrative sovereignty is the “assertion of control over recognizable administra-tive mechanisms of a government separate from the comprehensive operation of a nation” (Muth, 2019, 60). It is not a new concept but instead a concept often uncriti-cally assumed to be present in most public administration scholarship.
While the world’s developed states may not be impacted by multilateral aid objec-tives (the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Coop-eration and Development are notable exceptions), nearly all states are influenced by TA. This is neither limited to the European Union states who chose such administra-tive interaction nor the poorer or less powerful states whose perspectives have been historically marginalized. With the administrative state’s acquiescence to globaliza-tion and perhaps also, state survival requiring integration with transnational activi-ties that limit its administrative sovereignty, one output is an increasingly porous administrative “boundary” and a necessity to study actors with transnational admin-istrative influence, not just the administrative state.
Third, scholarship increasingly engages the international public administra-tion (IPA) component of TA. Recent IO bureaucracy scholarship builds upon
179
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
prior largely descriptive studies within international public administration (e.g., Gould & Kelman, 1970; Green, 1954; Weiss, 1982). Modern IPA scholars right-fully suggest that “public administration has been largely neglected by those studying international bureaucracy” (Bauer et al., 2017a, 2017b, 1) and as impor-tantly, “international bureaucrats matter” for global governance (Eckhard & Ege, 2016, 969; Ege et al., 2019). IPA research uses theories and concepts from pub-lic administration and sociology to understand how IOs adopt, alter, encourage, and implement global policies (Bauer et al., 2017a; Knill et al., 2019). Given its engagement with a key international actor, IPA research is also important for TA since IO employees can influence global policy outputs.
Unlike IPA studies where two disciplines each claim partial ownership, trans-national administration studies are the domain of no particular discipline (Molo-ney & Stone, 2019). Instead, we may see clusters of sector-specific studies from environmental or health studies which engage transnational arenas but overlook how regional or global governance actors administratively structure and imple-ment policy. Similarly, with a recent conceptualization of a TA term by Stone and Ladi (2015), sustained scholarship that engages TA with public administration, public policy, or even sector-specific work remains in its infancy.
A fourth reason for TA importance is that while some prior research has focused on either the transnationalization of administrative arenas or the admin-istrative actions specific to international organizations as an organization of study, the transnational administration of global governance involves many more actors. Each actor may originate policy action that interacts with or even ignores the states and IOs who have traditionally created global policy. Like the sector-specific work that infrequently engages administrative implications, much of the non-IO scholarship has also overlooked its transnational administration.
For example, we know that civil society exists where “alter-globalization resistances, subaltern governance contestations, and unanticipated enactments of policy occur” (Stone, 2017, 99). Just because transnationally administered arenas may be structurally fragmented among many actors, need not imply civil society’s limited influence. Since civil society works outside the state and “from below” the state, this gives power to civil society in its interactions with states and IOs as well as the other actors who populate our deconcentrated global governance. One example, as noted later in this paper, is World Social Forum creation in response to the World Economic Forum (Whitaker et al., 2006).
Another example are public–private partnerships. Transnational public–private partnerships are “institutionalized transboundary interactions between public and private actors, which aim at the provision of collective goods” (Schäferhoff et al., 2009, 455). An example is an Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) effort to create global mining industry standards. EITI funding comes from IOs, private sector actors, and NGOs. It interacts with 50+ states to improve extrac-tive industries standards. Its standards are created through consultative processes. While we may debate how consultative EITI standard creation may or may not be (Haufler 2010, Aaronson 2011), only a few will question whether EITI shapes the mining industry. EITI administratively influences corporate behavior since few
180 K. Moloney
1 3
globally prominent mining companies wish to be viewed as neither supporting nor implementing such standards.
Transnational administration is our present. Its actors exist in an increasingly populated global governance deconcentrated from state-led policy and administra-tive dominance. It re-engages our understanding of administrative sovereignty and impacts typical sovereign-focused public administration research. The next section unpacks how states and IOs have decentralized, devolved, dispersed, and delegated transnational administrative action by first emphasizing the institutional depolitici-zation of TA and secondarily, creating a heuristic for exploring such administrative interactions.
Deconcentration, institutional depoliticization, and transnational administration
Administrating global governance requires power and authority. Power and author-ity interact with two countervailing pressures. The first is a rule-based depoliticiza-tion that integrates the creation of international hard law into actionable behaviors for states and other actors to implement (Stone, 2017). It bears similarities to de jure or delegated private authority from the state (Green, 2013, 2018). These rules, laws, and supranational institutional regulatory regimes have obtained significant schol-arly attention (for a start, see Eberlein & Newman, 2008; Cafaggi, 2019; Overdevest & Zeitlin, 2014). However, it is on a second countervailing pressure of emergent institutional depoliticization in which administration and policy research has been limited. Before turning to this pressure, a note about deconcentration is required.
Deconcentration is when an actor (normally the state) engages in a “geographical deconcentration of central government bureaucracy and service delivery” (Martinez-Vazquez & McNab, 1997, 2).3 Within states, this deconcentration activity occurs between a central ministry and a lower jurisdictional level where the same central government actor has provincial or local offices (Litvack et al., 1998; Rondinelli, 1981). Such deconcentration efforts desire a flexibility in which local authorities are encouraged to be respondent to the central government. It is a top-down activity in which the “top” is the central state apparatus.
In global governance, deconcentration is different. The “top” need not be a state or IO directing “across” or “downwards” to other global governance actors. Instead, it is the opposite: the “top” is filled with actors with global policy and transnational administrative power. Yes, those actors can include states and IOs. But it may also include civil society, social movements, foundations, regulatory regimes, quasi-judi-cial actors, public–private partnerships, scientific and expert networks, and individ-ual global citizens. Four of the five case studies profiled in this paper (see Table 1)
3 In the US, housing policy and urban studies frequently use the deconcentration term in a strict geo-graphic sense to ask whether a deconcentration of public housing from areas where such housing had been clustered and into new dispersed placements of public housing across socioeconomic areas leads to less poverty and inequality (e.g., Cassidy et al., 2014; Owens, 2015).
181
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Tabl
e 1
Heu
ristic
for t
rans
natio
nal a
dmin
istra
tion
and
its st
ruct
ural
shift
s
CIT
ES S
ecre
taria
tIC
AN
NIn
spec
tion
Pane
lG
ates
Fou
ndat
ion
Wor
ld S
ocia
l Fo
rum
Adm
inist
rativ
e St
ate
Stat
e co
ntro
l ove
r ac
tor?
Mod
erat
e. S
tate
s cr
eate
and
fund
U
NEP
Min
imal
. Gov
t A
dvis
ory
Com
-m
ittee
has
no
pow
er
Non
eM
inim
alN
one
Itsel
f
IO in
fluen
ce o
ver
acto
rIm
parti
al th
ird
party
Non
eN
one.
Pan
el is
in
depe
nden
t of
Wor
ld B
ank
Min
imal
Non
eM
ore
likel
y if
stat
e is
no
t a su
perp
ower
or
mid
dle
pow
erN
on-s
tate
act
or
cate
gory
Inte
rnal
IO D
epar
t-m
ent
Publ
ic–p
rivat
e pa
rtner
ship
Qua
si-ju
dici
al a
ctor
Foun
datio
nC
itize
n A
ctiv
ists
and
NG
Os
Stat
e
Stru
ctur
al sh
iftIn
stitu
tiona
l Cen
treIts
elf,
but h
ouse
d w
ithin
UN
EPIts
elf
Itsel
f, bu
t hou
sed
with
in th
e W
orld
B
ank
Itsel
fN
one
Itsel
f
182 K. Moloney
1 3
Tabl
e 1
(con
tinue
d)
CIT
ES S
ecre
taria
tIC
AN
NIn
spec
tion
Pane
lG
ates
Fou
ndat
ion
Wor
ld S
ocia
l Fo
rum
Adm
inist
rativ
e St
ate
Dec
entra
lizat
ion
Act
or p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
is d
ecen
tral-
ized
from
stat
e co
ntro
l?
Yes,
from
the
stat
e to
the
Secr
etar
iat
to se
rve
as in
for-
mat
ion
depo
si-
tory
. But
als
o no
, sin
ce it
is n
ot
CIT
ES o
r UN
EP
that
has
dec
entra
l-iz
ed p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
but
the
conv
entio
n
Yes,
both
bef
ore
and
afte
r the
201
6 re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k an
d its
mem
ber-s
tate
s
N/A
as t
he F
ound
a-tio
n w
as n
ever
w
ithin
a st
ate’
s co
ntro
l
Parti
ally
. The
stat
e ha
s not
giv
en
this
pol
icy
and
adm
inist
ratio
n to
the
Foru
m b
ut
the
Foru
m h
as
crea
ted
spac
e fo
r su
ch p
olic
ies a
nd
task
s to
be in
flu-
ence
d by
For
um
atte
ndee
s
Onl
y if
stat
e’s
insti
tutio
nal c
ente
r cr
eate
s cen
tral
gove
rnm
ent o
ffice
s w
ithin
pro
vinc
es/
mun
icip
aliti
es
Act
or p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
is d
ecen
traliz
ed
from
IO in
flu-
ence
?
Onl
y pa
rtial
ly.
UN
EP is
one
of
man
y IO
s with
in
fluen
ce
Yes,
both
bef
ore
and
afte
r the
201
6 re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k
Yes a
lthou
gh W
HO
an
d G
ates
bat
tle
for s
upre
me
influ
ence
Parti
ally
. IO
s ha
ve n
ot g
iven
th
is p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
to th
e Fo
rum
but
th
e Fo
rum
has
cr
eate
d sp
ace
for
such
pol
icie
s and
ta
sks t
o be
influ
-en
ced
by F
orum
at
tend
ees
Mor
e lik
ely
if st
ate
is
not a
supe
rpow
er
or m
iddl
e po
wer
183
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Tabl
e 1
(con
tinue
d)
CIT
ES S
ecre
taria
tIC
AN
NIn
spec
tion
Pane
lG
ates
Fou
ndat
ion
Wor
ld S
ocia
l Fo
rum
Adm
inist
rativ
e St
ate
Dev
olut
ion
Act
or’s
pol
icy
and
adm
inist
ratio
n po
wer
is d
evol
ved
from
stat
e co
n-tro
l?
Yes,
from
stat
e to
Se
cret
aria
t in
how
they
act
as
an in
form
atio
n de
posi
tory
. It i
s no
t dev
olve
d,
how
ever
, fro
m
the
IO to
the
stat
e in
how
a st
ate
crea
tes p
olic
y or
im
plem
ents
Yes,
befo
re 2
016
refo
rm a
nd
stren
gthe
ned
afte
r th
e re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k an
d its
mem
ber-s
tate
s
N/A
as t
he F
ound
a-tio
n w
as n
ever
w
ithin
a st
ate’
s co
ntro
l
N/A
as n
o fo
rmal
ac
t of d
evol
utio
n ha
s occ
urre
d
Onl
y if
stat
e’s
insti
tutio
nal
cent
er a
gree
s tha
t pr
ovin
ces/
mun
ici-
palit
ies s
hare
ha
ve su
ch p
ower
s. Re
porti
ng is
bac
k to
the
cent
ral
gove
rnm
ent
Act
or’s
pol
icy
and
adm
inist
ratio
n po
wer
is d
evol
ved
from
IO in
flu-
ence
?
N/A
as t
he
devo
lved
pow
er
to st
ates
was
not
th
e IO
s to
give
. In
stead
, sta
te
pow
er to
cre
ate
polic
y an
d ad
min
-ist
ratio
n is
with
in
the
conv
entio
n
Yes,
befo
re 2
016
refo
rm a
nd
stren
gthe
ned
afte
r th
e re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k
Parti
ally
as W
HO
an
d th
e Fo
unda
-tio
n ba
ttle
for
influ
ence
N/A
as n
o fo
rmal
ac
t of d
evol
utio
n ha
s occ
urre
d
Mor
e lik
ely
if st
ate
is
not a
supe
rpow
er
or m
iddl
e po
wer
184 K. Moloney
1 3
Tabl
e 1
(con
tinue
d)
CIT
ES S
ecre
taria
tIC
AN
NIn
spec
tion
Pane
lG
ates
Fou
ndat
ion
Wor
ld S
ocia
l Fo
rum
Adm
inist
rativ
e St
ate
Dis
pers
alA
ctor
’s n
orm
di
sper
sal i
s ind
e-pe
nden
t of s
tate
co
ntro
l?
No.
The
re is
no
‘stic
k’ to
enf
orce
co
mpl
ianc
e or
no
rm d
ispe
rsal
to
stat
e
Yes
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k an
d its
mem
ber-s
tate
s
Yes,
as a
pub
lic–
priv
ate
partn
er-
ship
. No,
in
its te
chno
logy
ve
rsus
cul
tura
l co
ntex
t/sys
tem
s de
bate
s
Yes
Dep
ends
whe
re
norm
cre
atio
n is
ce
nter
ed
Act
or’s
nor
m
disp
ersa
l is
inde
pend
ent o
f IO
in
fluen
ce?
Yes,
mos
tly
inde
pend
ent f
rom
IO
as S
ecre
taria
t do
es n
ot im
ple-
men
t
Yes
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k
Parti
ally
as W
HO
an
d th
e Fo
unda
-tio
n ba
ttle
for
influ
ence
Yes
Mor
e lik
ely
if st
ate
is
not a
supe
rpow
er
or m
iddl
e po
wer
185
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Tabl
e 1
(con
tinue
d)
CIT
ES S
ecre
taria
tIC
AN
NIn
spec
tion
Pane
lG
ates
Fou
ndat
ion
Wor
ld S
ocia
l Fo
rum
Adm
inist
rativ
e St
ate
Del
egat
ion
Act
or p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
is d
eleg
ated
aw
ay fr
om st
ate
cont
rol?
Yes,
in p
olic
y cr
eatio
n. N
o, in
im
plem
enta
tion
Yes,
via
2016
re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k an
d its
mem
ber-s
tate
s
N/A
, Yes
, and
No
appl
y de
pend
ing
on p
ersp
ectiv
e.
N/A
as t
he F
oun-
datio
n w
as n
ever
w
ithin
a st
ate’
s co
ntro
l. Ye
s, an
IO
(WH
O a
nd it
s m
embe
r-sta
tes)
ha
ve d
e fa
cto
del-
egat
ed so
me
of
its p
rior a
utho
rity
to G
loba
l Fun
d an
d G
AVI.
The
answ
er is
no
for
poor
er o
r les
s po
wer
ful c
ount
ry
as y
our i
nflue
nce
is fa
r les
s ove
r an
y di
scus
sed
devo
lutio
ns
N/A
as t
he F
orum
w
as n
ever
with
in
a st
ate’
s con
trol
Onl
y if
stat
e’s
insti
tutio
nal c
ente
r ag
rees
Act
or p
olic
y an
d ad
min
istra
tion
is
dele
gate
d aw
ay
from
IO in
fluen
ce
Larg
ely
yes.
Whi
le
the
CIT
ES S
ec-
reta
riat i
s a v
oice
in
rela
ted
glob
al
gove
rnan
ces,
it is
no
t the
onl
y vo
ice
Yes,
via
2016
re
form
Yes,
Pane
l is i
nde-
pend
ent o
f the
W
orld
Ban
k
Parti
ally
as W
HO
an
d th
e Fo
unda
-tio
n ba
ttle
for
influ
ence
N/A
as t
he F
orum
w
as n
ever
with
in
an IO
’s c
ontro
l
Mor
e lik
ely
if st
ate
is
not a
supe
rpow
er
or m
iddl
e po
wer
186 K. Moloney
1 3
involve such non-state “top” actors. The fifth (CITES Secretariat) is illustrative of how even institutionally centering a Convention within an IO does not equate to that IO having global policy and transnational administration power over Convention outputs or outcomes. Table 1 also includes a column for the Administrative State to differentiate typical public administration understandings of its key actor (the state) from other non-state actors with global policy and transnational administra-tion powers.
Without a global government and with a multiplicity of new and powerful glob-ally relevant non-state actors, this global deconcentration action removes global policy and administrative power away from exclusive state or IO control and places it within civil society, social movements, foundations, regulatory regimes, quasi-judicial actors, public–private partnerships, scientific and expert networks, and global citizens to articulate, define, debate, implement, and evaluate. It also removes such global deconcentration from typical sovereign-focused intergovernmental stud-ies since the transfer is not simply between one state actor to another.4 The global deconcentration action may be decentralized, devolved, dispersed, and/or delegated from prior expectations of state and/or IO-led controls and influence (see Table 1). As noted in each of the five profiled case studies, prior administrative sovereignty is given to any number of global governance actors. Each of these global governance actors, in turn, may “turn back” onto the state and affect the state’s administrative sovereignty via public policy creation and its administration.
Given that depoliticized transnational arenas need not be led or influenced by the administrative state, deconcentrated global governance also bears similarities to de facto or entrepreneurial private authority (Green, 2013) but on a global scale. This relates to why this paper uses transnational administration and global policy and not transnational public administration or global public policy (Moloney & Stone, 2019; Stone & Moloney, 2019b). Two reasons drive this naming choice. One, transnational administration by definition, need not be centered on the state. Moreover, global policy can be created by non-state actors who also transnationally administrate pol-icy. An example is the Forest Stewardship Council which has created and currently implements a market-based certification program. The Council is a global private governance effort to encourage forest harvesting sustainability. Although questions are raised about the Council’s legitimacy (Schepers, 2010), the certification program celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018. Two, the administrating acts and actors need not be part of a public regulatory regime (e.g., rule-based depoliticization or del-egated private authority) nor have a long lifespan. It may occur via public–private partnerships, civil society, foundations, and scientific or other expert actors. Each are private entrepreneurial actors. Transnational administration and global policy do not require a fixed actor constellation in which the public actor (state or IO) is its perpetual “sun”.
4 This observation holds true when extended to intergovernmental studies (and its extensive debates) within the European Union (e.g., Garrett and Tsebelis, 1996; Kleine and Pollack, 2018; Moravcsik, 1998).
187
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Depoliticization is also influenced by multilevel environments where historically assumed rules about local or national level policy or administrative primacy evapo-rate. This multilevel activity, deconcentrated from the national administrative state, may occur at the local level via the paradiplomatic actions of cities which bypass the state to engage other global cities or even IOs on environmental action (Aldecoa & Keating, 2000; Smith, 2019) or even city engagements with transnational civil society actors via bodies like the International Council for Local Environment Ini-tiatives (Zeppel, 2013). It may also occur at provincial or national levels via mul-tilevel administration. For example, in the European Union, certain administrative decisions in consumer protection have “shared competence” whereby member-states cannot create policies or administrate product-specific consumer decisions if the Union has already done so. In contrast, policies focused on the protection and improvement of human health are led by individual EU states with coordinating influence, as needed, from the Union (Orebach, 2003). In the former, administra-tive sovereignty is low while in the latter, administrative sovereignty is altered albeit within a regional union.
Nonetheless, because the deconcentrated loci of TA (and global policy) are less gravitationally bound to the administrative state need not imply that interac-tions among and between administrative actors, scales, and directionality cannot be mapped. The next sections turn their attention to the structural mechanisms by which transnational administration and global policy are moved from state-driven action to a deconcentrated global governance.5 These mechanisms include decen-tralization, devolution, dispersal, and delegation. The four mechanisms or four “d’s” need not be mutually exclusive. The output is a heuristic for transnational adminis-tration studies (see Table 1).
The four “d’s” are explored via five case studies: CITES, ICANN, the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Social Forum. Each is an example of transnational administration. Each are exam-ples of de facto private regulatory authority with institutionally depoliticized spaces. The Table 1 heuristic also includes a column that distinguishes the transnational administration from each case with the typical administrative state. This adminis-trative comparison provides public administration scholars a familiar “base” from which to understand five cases of transnational administration. Before engaging each case, the next section defines each ‘d’ within the heuristic: decentralization, devolu-tion, dispersal, and delegated.
5 This paper is focused on the structural act or mechanisms within our deconcentrated global govern-ance. The processes (also common to public administration) or cultural influences (via organizational sociology or international relations’ constructivism) upon such structural shifts are beyond the scope of this paper.
188 K. Moloney
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance via decentralization, devolution, dispersal, and delegation
Our global community has global governance, not global government. Global governance actors transnationally administer global policies. Policy creation is no longer concentrated within a centralized administrative state. Power and authority are increasingly deconcentrated from state control at the global governance level. Deconcentration implies that global policy creation and its TA need not come from nor reflect administrative state or even IO prerogatives. If one or more deconcen-trated arenas at the supranational level engage a global policy problem, suggest solutions, and encourage states and other global governance actors to respond, this is transnational administration. Involved actors may act alone or may coalesce to engage a policy process, add or subtract involved global actors or even alter actor purposes as time progresses. One actor’s influence at one point in time within a global policy topic or its transnational administration need not be mirrored at later dates.
Deconcentration should not be confused with its decentralization and devolu-tion cousins. While there are different French and Anglo-Saxon understandings of each concept (WorldBank, 2009), this paper uses the latter. In the sovereign-focused literature, decentralization is the movement of an administrative policy, task, or responsibility from the central government to local government (Kaufman, 1969; Litvack et al., 1998). Devolution, in contrast, is the transference of policy and or task power (and often revenue-raising capacities) from the national to local government (Kettl, 2000; Martinez-Vazquez & McNab, 1997).6 Like decentralization, the origins of any devolved movements normally arise from the central government. Both con-cepts are extensively utilized in natural resource scholarship and in particular, for-estry management studies (e.g., Birner & Wittmer, 2004; Fisher, 1999). Research on decentralization and devolution is also prominent in fiscal policy discussions (e.g., Ezcurra & Pascaul, 2008; Musgrave, 1997; Rodríguez-Pose & Gill, 2003).
Similarly, deconcentration should also not be confused with dispersion or del-egation. Both dispersal and delegation have significant intellectual histories within international relations (e.g., Cortell & Davis, 1996; Hawkins et al., 2006). Such lit-eratures often discuss a dispersal of norms (often from international organizations) with the potential of being institutionalized via transnational actors. This transna-tional actor of attention is most frequently a state. Dispersed norms might include, but are not limited to, the dispersion of human rights norms, environmental protec-tion, and gender equity. Norm dispersion is not new. Early examples include norms on wage labor, working conditions, and abolitionist ideals in the 1800s and early 1900s. Just as with such earlier national and international advocacy stances, norm dispersion need not be led by a state or IO.
With global governance studies, delegation is traditionally centered within inter-national relations’ liberal-institutionalist theory and the state’s delegation of global
6 Martinez-Vazquez and McNab (1997) refer to devolution and delegation as “decentralization by devo-lution” and “decentralization by delegation” (2).
189
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
public good problem-solving to international organizations (Abbott et al., 2016). Despite studies of transnational delegation being relatively new (Green, 2018; Paie-ment, 2019), what we do know is that delegation need not just be from an IO or state to each other and/or even to/from a civil society actor. Transnational delegation exists across a spectrum of global actors who engage in global policy and transna-tional administration (Stone & Moloney, 2019b).
Five cases of transnational administration
This section shares five examples of transnational administration (see Table 1). The case studies were chosen via a most similar (acts not institutionally centered within a state) and least similar (four “d” differences and actor differences) comparative case design (George & Bennett, 2005). Given no singular database7 of the world’s international organizations, civil society, social movements, foundations, regulatory regimes, scientific and expert networks, case choices may encounter external valid-ity concerns. But as noted by Yin (2009, 43), case studies generalizations “rely on analytic generalizations” while survey research engages “statistical generalizations” (author’s original emphasis). As long as theory frames which case studies are cho-sen, other cases may be identified (Yin, 2009). But with a topic where theory crea-tion is nascent and the universe of known organizations is unclear, a most similar and least similar research design is appropriate. This research design choice allows us to create a heuristic (see Table 1) in which analytic generalizations are possible. Such generalizations may potentially anchor future work in which theory develop-ment arises.
It is also important that chosen case studies should have clear units of analysis and boundaries (Yin, 2009, 27–35). For this paper’s case studies, the unit of analysis is the identified organization but its boundaries extend the organization’s interac-tion away from the typically studied actors within global governance: states and IOs. This boundary extension is necessary to empirically explain not only the presence and importance of non-state and non-IO global governance actors but as impor-tantly, to indicate the resulting global policy and transnational administrative influ-ence of the identified organizations.
The exploratory design utilized within this paper creates opportunities for pos-iting an initial heuristic for understanding the deconcentration processes in which global policy and its transnational administration arise. This includes indicating when one of the four “d’s” may occur from state influence and/or IO influence. The state and IOs were the primary actors within global governance for its first 70 years. Since the early 1990s, as noted in the first two paper sections, the global governance arena has become even more deconcentrated (from state and/or IO control) with
7 Scholars have observed a dramatic uptick in the numbers of formal and informal IOs, NGOs, think tanks, foundations, and transnational public–private partnerships since the late 1980s even if there is no globally agreed upon list of such actors (e.g., Clarke 2019; Davies 2013; McGann 2020; Pevehouse et al., 2020; Roger 2020; UIA 2013).
190 K. Moloney
1 3
ever-increasing numbers of non-state actors with global policy and transnational administration influence. The rest of this section focuses on the five selected case studies.
Convention on the international trade in endangered species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
Entered into force on 1 July 1975, CITES has 183 state parties and after a 1983 to amendment to the Convention, regional bodies such as the European Union could join. If the originating anchor for CITES was simply states, CITES would mirror other international environment conventions. However, in CITES’ case, its foremost early proponent was the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). IUCN is a global network of civil society organizations (national and international), states (national and local governments), scientists, international organizations, and nearly 20 groups of indigenous peoples. While not a typical international organiza-tion, IUCN is a transnationally administrated network of actors engaged in endan-gered species protection.
CITES is institutionally centered within a Secretariat at the United Nations Envi-ronment Programme (UNEP). The Secretariat coordinates, advises, and services the Convention and as well as acting as a repository for CITES information. Each are acts in which information dispersal and pertinent norms are conveyed to State Par-ties and other involved actors. This includes the Secretariat’s role as an “impartial third party” in endangered species criteria discussions (Gehring 1998, p. 134).
Despite CITIES administrative functions being concentrated within the Secretar-iat, CITES’ implementation has been decentralized from the Convention to its State Parties and in particular, national and/or local governments. In Australia, for exam-ple, the decentralized body is the Department of Environment and Energy while in the US, the implementing agencies include the Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Department of Agriculture. While there is delegated authority from states to UNEP to administer CITES via legal arrangements specified within the Convention, its actualization decentralizes administrative acts to member-states even if other IOs (or for that matter, other global governance actors) may also influence each state’s endangered species administration.
This decentralization does not equate to a devolution of authority. For power to be devolved to implementing State Parties (and their state-based agencies), the State Parties must have the power to alter (individually, as states, using their administra-tive sovereignty) agreed upon protections. In practice this is not the case. No CITES implementing State Party can individually roll back protections contained within CITES. CITES is an international hard law agreement among its State Parties. That being said, individual State Parties may choose to not implement a particular provi-sion or as in a notable case involving elephants, they may disagree on how to pro-tect the species. This includes questions about whether “CITES is overdue in aban-doning its drift toward greater national sovereignty, and would do better to adopt a scaled-up continental thinking about elephants” by encouraging implementing states to engage transboundary issues (Lindsay et al., 2017, 266).
191
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Although CITES is legally binding for its State Parties, there are few sticks to enforce compliance (Reeve, 2014; Wijnstekers, 2003). With limited role given to the Secretariat along with limits on the power of transnational administrative actors to observe and to track state compliance, arenas for (dis-) engagement with CITES’ attempt at norm dispersal are created. This may lead State Parties to pass national or local legislation that discourages CITES protections via limited budgetary appro-priations for endangered species protection. Or, as in a case in Jamaica, delay CITES implementation so long that a legal case is filed by an aggrieved corporate actor seeking clarification on the state’s policy stance (Anderson, 2001). While such state-driven acts of disapproval (whether purposeful or not) are examples of states using their sovereign administrative power, CITES remains an example of transnational administration in which decentralization, delegation, and dispersal occur.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is neither a government agency, international organization, nor a corporate actor. With its headquarters in San Francisco, ICANN’s “parents are a group of Internet pioneers who established the early working rules of the Internet” (Koppell, 2005, 100). Cre-ated in 1998, ICANN regulates the internet’s technical backbone. In an attempt to resolve disputes between its “parents” and US government contractors about top-level domain names (among other issues), the Clinton administration intervened and ICANN was the output (Koppell, 2005). Despite such intervention, ICANN was not legislatively mandated into existence by the US Congress. Today, ICANN is a quasi-associational entity with public–private interactions that give the organization sig-nificant transnational administrative influence.
Despite a broad organizational purpose with implications for TA, global telecom-munications, and domain name designation, US influence over ICANN had rarely been insignificant. This was altered in 2016 when the United States delegated its prior direct oversight to ICANN. It was, as Becker (2019) stated, a moment when a “public principal” (US) gave up “control over private agents” (Becker, 2019, 572) and where ICANN was “privatised” even if before and after 2016, ICANN did not (and still does not) fit neatly into IO, state, NGO, or corporate actor definitions (Becker, 2019). Nonetheless, debates remain about whether ICANN remains infor-mally influenced by the US even as its unelected Board of Directors interacts with a purposefully disempowered Government Advisory Committee (GAC). This is not unimportant since technical issues on internet management are irremovable from jurisdictional issues. GAC’s creation was a partial (if still contested) solution to an ongoing contestation among involved actors.
One analysis of GAC-ICANN relationships characterized it as “incoherent and problematic” (Weinberg, 2011, 189). GAC’s structure was purposefully created to “deliberately cut world governments out of the policy development process” (Wein-berg, 2011, 195). While several states tried to get ICANN to allocate one-third of Board seats to be filled by states, this objective was not obtained. Instead, since 2002, governments sitting within the GAC can simply advise the ICANN Board. If
192 K. Moloney
1 3
the Board does not wish to follow GAC advice, ICANN can overlook such advice if, as per ICANN bylaws, the Board explains in writing why they did not follow GAC recommendations (Becker, 2019).
ICANN has global policy power. Its Board members are corporate and associa-tional actors with links to governments, international organizations, and civil soci-ety even if no Board member is neither a representative of a government nor an IO. ICCAN’s transnational administration is decentralized into a quasi-associational body that disperses norms and technical information to transnational actors. As such, internet domain policy is neither created by nor run by states or IOs.
Inspection Panel of the World Bank
The third example is the Inspection Panel of the World Bank. While this transna-tional activity is located at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington DC, Panel origins were influenced by external stakeholders and in particular, NGOs like the Bank Information Center and the International River Network (Moloney, 2011). With the Bank’s first-ever independent commission (Morse Commission) created in 1992 to evaluate a World Bank project (Narmada/Sardar Sarovar Dam in India), NGOs learned “the Bank largely disregarded its social and environmental policies and tolerated its borrowers’ violation of the policies, [which] were soon confirmed more generally by an internal review of Bank projects. The Narmada policy viola-tions were not an aberration, but a systemic part of the Bank’s culture” (Clark, 1999, 3). In the Bank’s own words, its dam project failure indicated “[a] prevailing culture of volume lending at the expense of project execution” (Umaña, 1998, 1).
The Inspection Panel is an outcome of the Morse Commission report and asso-ciated NGO-led advocacy. The Panel can review approved Bank projects that may have violated the Bank’s operational or bureaucratic procedures and in doing so, may harm project recipients (Moloney 2011; Pereira et al., 2017; WorldBank, 2003). This Panel affects TA in three ways. The first is that Panel is the first of its kind for any international organization. The Panel creates a model at the global admin-istrative level and within IOs to create administrative processes for handling citizen and NGO complaints about an IO’s work. These complaints bypass the state and the Bank as an IO to be objectively evaluated by the Panel. The norms created by this Panel could be dispersed to other IOs through emulation, via NGO pressures upon IOs, or even become delegated by member-states to another IO in which there is no Panel.
Second, the Panel’s review process is a TA activity. Panel rules ask aggrieved cit-izens impacted by a Bank project to petition the Panel to review the project. If they are successful, the Panel can change or even cancel an approved project. It is a dele-gation by the Bank (and de facto from the Bank’s member-states who did not oppose Panel creation) to citizens and NGOs of a complaint mechanism. Recipient states of a Bank project may neither initiate a complaint nor be party to such complaints.
Thus, the third way in which the Panel affects transnational administration is that its devolution implies citizens and NGOs are not just commenting on the Bank’s pro-jects but also commenting upon the administrative state which agreed to implement
193
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
the project. If complainants can show that a Bank project violated Bank bureaucratic and operational procedures, the Panel creates space for citizens and NGOs unable to engage in open dissent against their state and/or who may come from marginal-ized communities overlooked by state elites to use a Bank project as a vehicle to criticize their government. This may not be an uncommon complaint motivation. In one analysis of Inspection Panel cases, nearly 60% of the cases came from projects implemented within non-democratic states (Pereira 2017). This transnational admin-istrative act bypasses the World Bank and the implementing state. The Panel has created a direct quasi-judicial interaction between itself and an affected populace.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Gates Foundation origins are well-known: billionaire software entrepreneur pledges to spend 98% of his accumulated wealth before he dies, he identifies an under-served sector of development in which his philanthropy might make a difference, the organization produces a good track record, and the Foundation becomes an actor with power to set global health agendas. Established at the start of a “golden era” in global health governance (Huckel-Schneider, 2019, 547), the Gates Foundation would soon become ‘the’ stakeholder behind two new transnational public–private health partnerships: (a) The Global Fund to Fights AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and (b) Gavi—The Vaccine Alliance. Each new organization was an output of a three-decade historical trend whereby member-states of the World Health Organisa-tion (WHO) increasingly preferred to fund specific health programs that were oper-ationally separate from the WHO instead of fully funding the WHO’s operational budget.
This delegated donor-to-program approach gave states greater control over the operational design and output than via funding an international organization (Huckel-Schneider, 2009).8 This approach also led, according to some analyses, to improved program efficiency, value for money, and outcomes. In contrast, others suggest such programs only “disrupt[ed] the policy and planning processes of recip-ient countries, for instance, by distracting governments from coordinated efforts to strengthen health systems” (Storeng, 2014, 2 citing Biesma 2009). With a GAVI Board consisting of states, businesses, and the Gates Foundation, GAVI is unique when compared to typical donor state to recipient state or state-to-IO relationships. This also holds true for the Global Fund Board in which representatives of donor agencies have equal representation with the NGOs and others who implement such funds.
Specific to the Gates Foundation, the answer on whether this delegated power also creates norm dispersion depends on whom you ask. The so-called “Gates Approach” emphasizes the power of science and technology to solve health prob-lems. For the Foundation, this emphasis is a non-normative choice since science,
8 Similar efforts but via a different organizational form include increased state use of trust funds within IOs. The contributing state’s role in choosing Fund recipients is often greater than via a state’s normal IO contributions.
194 K. Moloney
1 3
in their view, is not a normative pursuit. Others disagree and suggest Foundation’s approach is not only a normative choice but it is an approach that views health gov-ernance as less culturally or context-dependent than as a tech-dependent issue. The view that culture, context, and system-wide approaches matter was noted by the for-mer WHO Director-General Margaret Chan who suggested it is poor health systems which are the “greatest impediment to better health in the world today” (Storeng, 2014). Other questions arising from the “Gates Approach” include whether a devel-oping country’s ownership (and by extension, their administrative sovereignty) is possible given Gates Foundation influence over their health system choices.
One outcome is that with Bill Gates’ significant financial power, prestige is given to actors (states, NGOs, IOs) able to attract Foundation funding. It is hard to ignore that the WHO’s $4.421 billion biennium program budget for 2018 and 2019 is smaller than the Foundation’s US$4.718 billion annual grantee support for 2017 (GatesFoundation, 2017; Liden, 2014; Storeng, 2014; WHO, 2018). Such an incred-ible power to set global health policy agendas influences which policies are prior-itized as well as its transnational administration. It also creates a mixed story when it comes to devolution. There is a contested devolution of such agenda-setting power from states and IOs to the Gates Foundation. Questions arise over whether such agenda-shifting power should sit within a Foundation. As importantly, there is no devolution from the Foundation to poorer country states unable to push back against its wishes. Loss of administrative sovereignty is one output.
World Social Forum
The World Social Forum (WSF) was created in 2001 as a response to the World Economic Forum’s gathering of global capitalist elites (Whitaker et al., 2006). Jointly initiated by a French NGO (ATTAC: Association pour la Taxation des Trans-actions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne) and a left-leaning political party in Brazil (Partido de Trabajadores), its first meeting was in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This choice was partially inspired by Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting model (e.g., de Sousa-Santos, 1998) and its citizen-led emphases. The first Forum attracted 5000+ NGOs from around the world.
With its “another world is possible” mantra, the WSF is deconcentrated by design. It is an annual arena for idea and norm dispersal among NGOs, citizen activ-ists, and other interested actors. It is neither created by nor run by states, IOs, or cor-porations. The WSF’s commitment to its mantra is such that the Forum has no des-ignated “headquarters” like the World Economic Forum (Hammond, 2003, 2006) or even like the other four cases profiled in this paper. Instead, interested activists acti-vate their networks to determine when and where the Forum will be held. This can lead to the Forum being held in one country or as was tried in its 6th Forum, three countries at same time or as per its 10th Forum, 35+ simultaneous sessions around the world. The typical Forum attracts nearly 100,000 participants with a high-water mark of 150,000 in 2005.
This deconcentrated Forum design allows participants to create meetings where equity and active listening are emphasized. This purposefully non-structured and
195
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
non-hierarchical Forum has also faced criticism too (Whitaker et al., 2006). This includes when a world leader addressed attendees from a podium (thus indicating hierarchy), whether involvement from political leaders was appropriate, for inviting corporate money (7th Forum in Nairobi), questions about whether the WSF was a debating society or space to create actionable outputs, concerns about a preponder-ance of male speakers, and after 2005 questions about whether the Forum’s desire for no central coordination was sustainable. Recent concerns have arisen about the Forum’s future given Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil (Whitaker, 2020). None-theless, Forum outputs have included informal network creation, community activ-ism inspiration, strategy-sharing, partial capturing of media attention away from the World Economic Forum, and perhaps the dispersal of a norm that another world is possible.
Each of the five cases illustrate a complex flow of administrative action and infor-mation-sharing across transnationally administered arenas. The originating anchor and institutional center vary by case. In all cases, state- or IO-led influence ranges from limited to non-existent. This contrasts with the first 70-plus years of global governance in which supranational spaces were dominated by the states and second-arily, IOs. Each case also differs from typical Western public administration schol-arship in which a state’s sovereignty to create policy and to administrate coexisted with an assumed nonpermeable boundary (or administrative sovereignty) between itself and other global governance actors. Each case and its “d’s” provide opportuni-ties for further theorization on transnational administration and its interaction with global governance.
Conclusion and next steps
The profiled case studies highlight how the decentralization, devolution, dispersion, and delegation of global policies and its transnational administration may occur out-side of, and need not be directed by, the administrative state. In a world with tens of thousands of civil society actors, dozens of transnational public–private partner-ships, and complex interactions among multinational corporations, states, and IOs as well scientific networks and global citizen activists, the public administration dis-cipline can no longer assume an impermeable boundary around the administrative state. This applies to wealthy and non-wealthy administrative states. In deconcen-trated global governance, this boundary is porous.
Deconcentrated arenas operate beyond state boundaries and require public admin-istration scholars to adopt flexible understandings of policy creation, to absorb the implications of porous jurisdictions, to engage new administrative responsibility dis-cussions, and to understand that accountability is more complex with transnationally operating actors (Boström & Garsten, 2008). With the administrative state (and the IOs they create) no longer the only global actors of importance, the public adminis-tration discipline must understand each transnational actor and its interactions with what had been previously been assumed as administratively sovereign states. This includes cases where influence is viewed as benign (climate change) or where it may be less benign via self-interest (corporate actors) and/or other objectives (ISIS).
196 K. Moloney
1 3
There are significant disciplinary research opportunities. Such studies may be anchored by policy (sub-)sector, actor, and/or methods of (non-)interaction with the state or IOs. This includes understanding when transnational administration is largely a voluntary effort versus administration by fiat, where culture influences the structural outputs, and which policy and administrative processes dominate. Addi-tional empirical work will extend this paper’s four-d heuristic to include frequency of “d” interactions with specific actors, nature and type of interaction, if and when a “d” is halted or altered and why, along with how implementation alters transnational administration and the state. Scholars may wish to focus on a regional or sub-region of the world and to ask how transnational administration differentially influences one or another administrative state and its associated stakeholders.
At the same time, we must caution that this paper’s heuristic should not be uti-lized as a start for an old-style functionalist exercises (Mitrany, 1948) uninformed by theory. Instead, the heuristic was created simply to assist traditional domestically focused public administration scholars to consider the structure- and actor-specific implications of a state’s weakened administrative sovereignty in our era of global governance. Such research will rightfully challenge the methodological national-ism of typical public policy and public administration—a long overdue challenge—most especially for scholarship located outside studies of the European Union. In addition, if public administration scholars are also open to disciplinary engagement with scholars of international relations and international organizations (Bauer et al., 2017b; Knill & Bauer, 2016; Moloney & Rosenbloom, 2020), improved discipli-nary outputs are likely. This may eventually include offering a public administration perspective on how to close international relations’ “middle range” theoretical gap (e.g., Checkel, 1998).
Transnational administration matters. Transnational administration will alter how the public administration discipline understands itself. We cannot ignore that a state’s administrative sovereignty is no longer absolute. The benefits (and draw-backs) of a deconcentrated global governance arena which is transnationally admin-istered should be investigated. Global governance alters administrative sovereignty, increases its porousness to non-state outside influences, and encourages institutional depoliticization in transnationally administered arenas. Calls for conversation about global administrative actors and their policy influence are growing (Stone & Ladi, 2015). This paper’s heuristic on transnational administrative interaction with decon-centrated governance is a potential way forward.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The author states that there is no conflict of interest.
197
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
References
Aaronson, S. (2011). Limited partnership: Business, government, civil society, and the public in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Public Administration and Development, 31(1), 50–63.
Abbott, K. W., Genschel, P., Snidal, D., & Zangl, B. (2016). Two logics of indirect governance: Delega-tion and orchestration. British Journal of Political Science, 46(4), 719–729
Abbott, K. W., Kauffmann, C., Lee, J. (2018). The contribution of trans-governmental networks for regu-lations to international regulatory co-operation. In OECD regulatory policy working papers. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Aldecoa, F., & Keating, M. (Eds.). (2000). Paradiplomacy in action: The foreign relations of subnational governments. Routledge.
Alesina, A., & Dollar, D. (2000). Who givens foreign aid to whom and why? Journal of Economic Growth, 5(1), 33–63
Anderson, W. (2001). Implementing MEAs in the caribbean: Hard lessons from seafood and ting. RECiEL, 10(2), 227–233
Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2007). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 1–29
Banks, N., Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (2015). NGOs, states, and donors revisted: Still too close for com-fort? World Development, 66(February), 707–718
Bauer, M. W., Eckhard, S., Ege, J., & Knill, C. (2017a). International public administration: A new type of bureaucracy? Lessons and challenges for public administration research. In M. W. Bauer, C. Knill, & S. Eckhard (Eds.), International bureaucracy: Challenges and lessons for public adminis-tration research. (pp. 179–198). Palgrave Macmillan.
Bauer, M. W., Eckhard, S., Ege, J., & Knill, C. (2017b). A public administration perspective on interna-tional organizations. In M. W. Bauer, C. Knill, & S. Eckhard (Eds.), International bureaucracy: Challenges and lessons for public administration research. (pp. 1–12). Palgrave Macmillan.
Becker, M. (2019). When public principals give up control over private agents: The new independence of ICANN in internet governance. Regulation & Governance, 13(4), 561–576
Birner, R., & Wittmer, H. (2004). On the efficient boundaries of the state: The contribution of transac-tion-cost economics to the analysis of decentralization and devolution in natural resource manage-ment. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 22(5), 667–685
Boström, M., & Garsten, C. (Eds.). (2008). Organizing transnational accountability. Edward Elgar.Cafaggi, F. (2019). Compliance in transnational regulation: A global supply chain approach. In D. Stone
& K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 599–618). Oxford University Press.
Cassidy, T., Inglis, G., Wiysonge, C., & Matzopoulos, R. (2014). A systematic review of the effects of poverty concentration and urban upgrading on youth violence. Health & Place, 26(March), 78–87
Chalk, F., Dallaire, R., & Matthews, K. (2012). The responsibility to react. In F. Egerton & W. A. Knight (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the responsibility to protect. (pp. 36–49). Routledge.
Checkel, J. T. (1998). The constructivist turn in international relations theory. World Politics, 50(2), 324–348
Chimni, B. S. (2006). Co-option and resistance: Two faces of global administrative law. International Law and Politics, 37, 799–827.
Clark, D. (1999). A citizen’s guide to the world bank inspection panel. Center for International Environ-mental Law.
Clarke, G. (2019). The new global governors: Globalization, civil society, and the rise of private philan-thropic foundations. Journal of Civil Society, 15(3), 197–213
Coen, D., & Pegram, T. (2015). Wanted: A third generation of global governance research. Governance, 28(4), 417–420
Coleman, W. (2019). Scales and network Societies: The expansion of global public policy. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 223–239). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cortell, A. P., & Davis, J. W. (1996). How do international institutions matter? The domestic impact of international rules and norms. International Studies Quarterly, 40(4), 451–478
Davies, T. (2013). NGOs: A new history of transnational civil society. C. Hurst & Co.
198 K. Moloney
1 3
de Sousa-Santos, B. (1998). Participatory budgets in Porto Alegre: Toward a redistributive democracy. Politics and Society, 26(4), 461–519
Easterly, W., & Pfutze, T. (2008). Where does the money go? Best and worst practices in foreign aid. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(2), 29–52
Eberlein, B., & Newman, A. L. (2008). Escaping the international governance Dilemma? Incorporated transgovernmental networks in the European Union. Governance, 21(1), 25–52
Eckhard, S., & Ege, J. (2016). International bureaucracies and their influence on policy-making: A review of empirical evidence. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(7), 960–978
Ege, J., Bauer, M. W., & Wagner, N. (2019). Improving generalizability in transnational bureaucratic influence research: A (Modest) proposal. International Studies Review, 22(3), 551–575
Elbers, W., & Arts, B. (2011). Keeping body and soul together: Southern NGOs’ strategic responses to donor constraints. International Review of Administrative Science, 77(4), 713–732
Ezcurra, R., & Pascaul, P. (2008). Fiscal decentralization and regional disparities: Evidence from several European Union countries. Environment and Planning A, 40(5), 1185–1201
Fisher, R. J. (1999). Devolution and decentralization of foreign management in Asia and the Pacific. Food and Agricultural Organization.
Garrett, G., & Tsebelis, G. (1996). An institutional critique of intergovernmentalism. International Organization, 50(2), 269–299
GatesFoundation. (2017). Annual report 2017. Gates Foundation.Gehring, T. (1998). Bargaining, arguing and functional differentiation of decison-making: The role of
committees in European environmental process regulation. In C. Joerges & E. Vos (Eds.), Euro-pean committees: Social regulation, law and politics (pp. 195–217). Oxford: Hart.
George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. MIT Press.
Gould, D., & Kelman, H. (1970). Horizons of research on the international civil service. Public Adminis-tration Review, 30(3), 244–251
Green, J. F. (2013). Rethinking private authority: Agents and entrepreneurs in global environmental gov-ernance. Princeton University Press.
Green, J. F. (2018). Transnational delegation in global environmental governnace: When do non-state actors govern? Regulation & Governance, 12(2), 263–276
Green, L. C. (1954). The international civil servant: His employer and his state. Transactions of the Gro-tius Society, 40, 147–174
Gulrajani, N., & Moloney, K. (2012). Globalizing public administration: Today’s Research and tomor-row’s agenda. Public Administration Review, 72(1), 78–86
Hammond, J. L. (2003). Another world is possible: Report from Porto Alegre. Latin American Perspec-tives, 30(3), 3–11
Hammond, J. L. (2006). The possible world and the actual state: The world social forum in Caracas. Latin American Perspectives, 33(3), 122–131
Haufler, V. (2009). The Kimberley process certification scheme: An innovation in global governance and conflict prevention. Journal of Business Ethics, 89(4), 403–416
Haufler, V. (2010). Disclosure as governance: the extractive industries transparency initiative and resource management in the developing world. Global Environmental Politics, 10(3), 53–73.
Hawkins, D. G., Lake, D. A., Nielson, D. J., & Tierney, M. J. (Eds.). (2006). Delegation and agency in international organizations. Cambridge University Press.
Huckel-Schneider, C. (2009). Global health innovation in governance: The emergence of public–private partnerships. In S. A. Brown, S. J. Maclean, & P. Fourie (Eds.), Health for some: The political economy of global health governance.Palgrave Macmillan.
Huckel-Schneider, C. (2019). Governance and administration in global health organizations: Consider the legacies of the “Golden Era” of Global Health Policy? In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 547–564). Oxford University Press.
Kaufman, H. (1969). Administrative decentralization and political power. Public Administration Review, 29(1), 3–15
Kaul, I. (2019). Global public goods: Challenges, actors, mechanisms. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 257–273). Oxford Uni-versity Press.
Keohane, R. O., & Martin, L. L. (1995). The promise of institutionalist theory. International Security, 20(1), 39–51
199
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Kettl, D. (2000). The transformation of governance: Globalization, devolution, and the role of govern-ment. Public Administration Review, 60(6), 488–497
Kleine, M., & Pollack, M. (2018). Liberal intergovernmentalism and its critics. Journal of Common Mar-ket Studies, 56(7), 1493–1509
Knill, C., & Bauer, M. W. (2016). Policy-making by international public administrations: Concepts, causes and consequences. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(7), 949–959
Knill, C., Bayerlin, L., Enkler, J., & Grohs, S. (2019). Bureaucratic influence and administrative styles in international organizations. Review of International Organizations, 14(1), 83–106
Koppell, J. G. S. (2005). Pathologies of accountability: ICANN and the challenge of “multiple account-abilities disorder". Public Administration Review, 65(1), 94–108
Krisch, N. (2014). The decay of consent: International law in an age of global public goods. American Journal of International Law, 108(1), 1–40
Kryvoi, Y. (2015). The law applied by international administrative tribunals: From autonomy to hierar-chy. George Washington International Law Review, 47, 267–301
Kuo, M. S. (2019). Law-space nexus, global governance, and global administrative law. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford press handbook on global policy and transnational administration.Oxford University Press.
Legrand, T. (2019). Sovereignty renewed: Transgovernmental policy networks and the global-local Dilemma. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford press handbook of global policy and transna-tional administration. (pp. 200–222). Oxford University Press.
Liden, J. (2014). The World Health Organization and global health governance: post-1990. Public Health, 128(2), 141–147
Lindsay, K., Chase, M., Landen, K., & Nowak, K. (2017). The shared nature of Africa’s elephants. Bio-logical Conservation, 215, 260–267
Litvack, J., Ahmad, J., & Bird, R. (1998). Rethinking decentralization at the World Bank. World Bank.Martinez-Vazquez, J., & McNab, R. M. (1997). Fiscal decentralization. Georgia State University.McGann, J. (2020). 2020 Global go to think tank index report, think tanks and civil societies program.
University of Pennsylvania.Mitrany, D. (1948). The functional approach to World Organization. International Affairs, 24(4), 350–363Moloney, K. (2011). The World Bank’s Public Sector Management and Governance Agenda: Actors, ten-
sions and policy change (1983 to 2007). Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Public Administration and Policy, American University.
Moloney, K. (2020). Post-busan partnership in the pacific? An analysis of Donor-NGO relations. Pacific Review, 33(2), 287–304
Moloney, K., & Rosenbloom, D. H. (2020). Creating space for public administration in international organization studies. American Review of Public Administration, 50(3), 227–243
Moloney, K., & Stone, D. (2019). Beyond the state: Global policy and transnational administration. Inter-national Review of Public Policy, 1(1), 104–118
Moravcsik, A. (1998). The choice for Europe: Social purpose and state power from Messina to Maasstricht. Cornell University Press.
Mosquera, M., Evans, E., Walters, L., & Spreen, T. (2013). The US food safety modernization act: Impli-cations for caribbean exporters. Social and Economic Studies, 62(1/2), 151–176.
Musgrave, R. A. (1997). Devolution, grants, and fiscal competition. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(4), 65–72
Muth, K. (2019). The potential and limits of administrative sovereignty. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook on global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 59–74). Oxford University Press.
Nye, J. S., Jr. (2002). The American national interest and global public goods. International Affairs, 78(2), 233–244
Orebach, P. (2003). The EU competency confusion: Limits, extension mechanisms, split power, subsidi-arity, and institutional clashes. Journal of Transnational Law and Policy, 13, 99–151
Overdevest, C., & Zeitlin, J. (2014). Assembing an experimentalist regime. Regulation & Governance, 8(1), 22–48
Owens, A. (2015). Housing policy and urban inequality: Did the transformation of assisted housing reduce poverty concentration? Social Forces, 94(1), 325–348
Paiement, P. (2019). Transnational delegation, accountability and the administrative governance of biofuel standards. In R. Schmidt, S. Wood, E. Meidinger, B. Eberlein, & K. W. Abbott (Eds.),
200 K. Moloney
1 3
Transnational business governance interactions: Advancing marginalized actors and enhancing regulatory quality. (pp. 227–252). Edward Elgar.
Pereira, A. E., Horochovski, R. R., & Cruz, M.M.dA., Rodrigues, N. (2017). Accountability in interna-tional organizations: The case of the World Bank Inspection Panel (1993–2015). Brazilian Political Science Review. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1590/ 1981- 38212 01700 010002
Pevehouse, J. C. W., Nordstrom, T., McManus, R. W., & Jamison, A. S. (2020). Tracking Organizations in the World: The correlates of War IGO Version 3.0 datasets. Journal of Peace Research, 57(3), 492–503
Raadschelders, J. C. N., & Verheijen, T. (2019). Globalization and internationalization: Impact Upon the state and the civil service. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford press handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 41–58). Oxford University Press.
Reeve, R. (2014). Policing international trade in endangered species: The CITES treaty and compliance. Routledge.
Rodríguez-Pose, A., & Gill, N. (2003). The global trend towards devolution and its implications. Environ-ment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 21(3), 333–351
Roger, C. B. (2020). The origins of informality: Why the legal foundations of global governance are shift-ing, and why it matters. Oxford University Press.
Rondinelli, D. A. (1981). Government centralization in comparative perspective: Theory and practice in developing countries. International Review of Administrative Science, 47(2), 133–145
Schäferhoff, M., Campe, S., & Kaan, C. (2009). Transnational public-private partnerships in interna-tional relations: Making sense of concepts, research frameworks, and results. International Studies Review, 11(3), 451–474
Schepers, D. H. (2010). Challenges to the legitimacy at the Forest Stewardship Council. Journal of Busi-ness Ethics, 92(2), 279–290
Smith, H. J. M. (2019). City networks and paradiplomacy as global public policy. In D. Stone & K. Molo-ney (Eds.), Oxford press handbook on global policy and transnational administration.Oxford Uni-versity Press.
Stone, D. (2008). Global public policy, transnational policy communities, and their networks. The Policy Studies Journal, 36(1), 19–38
Stone, D. (2013). Knowledge actors and transnational governance: The private–public policy nexus in the global agora. Palgrave Macmillan.
Stone, D. (2017). Global governance depoliticized: Knowledge networks, scientization, and anti-policy. In M. Flinders, P. Fawcett, C. Hay, & M. Wood (Eds.), Anti-politics, depoliticization, and govern-ance. (pp. 91–111). Oxford University Press.
Stone, D., & Ladi, S. (2015). Global public policy and transnational administration. Public Administra-tion, 93(4), 839–855
Stone, D., & Moloney, K. (Eds.). (2019a). Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational adminis-tration. Oxford University Press.
Stone, D., & Moloney, K. (2019b). The rise of global policy and transnational administration. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 3–22). Oxford University Press.
Storeng, K. T. (2014). The GAVI Alliance and the “Gates approach” to health system strengthening. Global Public Health, 9(8), 865–879
Trondal, J., & Bauer, M. W. (2017). Conceptualizing the European Multilevel Administrative Order. Cap-turing variation in the European Administrative System. European Political Science Review, 9(1), 73–94
UIA. (2013). The yearbook of International Organizations. (Vol. 2013)Union des Associations Internationales.
Umaña, A. (Ed.). (1998). The World Bank Inspection Panel: The first four years (1994–1998). World Bank.
Vabulas, F. (2019). The importance of Informal Intergovernmental Organizations: A typology of transna-tional administration without independent secretariats. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), Oxford handbook on global policy and transnational administration.Oxford University Press.
Van Waarden, F. (1992). Dimensions and types of policy networks. European Journal of Political Research, 21(1–2), 29–52
Volkmer, I. (2019). The transnationalization of public sphere and global policy. In D. Stone & K. Molo-ney (Eds.), Oxford handbook of global policy and transnational administration. (pp. 240–256). Oxford University Press.
201
1 3
Deconcentrated global governance, transnational…
Weinberg, J. (2011). Governments, privatization, and privatization: ICANN and the GAC. Michigan Tel-ecommunications and Technology Law Review, 18(1), 189–219
Weiss, T. G. (1982). International bureaucracy: The myth and reality of the international civil service. International Affairs, 58(2), 287–306
Whitaker, C. (2020). World Social Forum—Possible perspectives. Globalizations, 17(2), 183–194Whitaker, C., de Sousa Santos, B., & Cassen, B. (2006). The world social forum: Where do we stand and
where are we going? In M. Glasius, C. Kaldor, & H. Anheier (Eds.), Global civil society 2005/6. (pp. 64–86). SAGE.
WHO. (2018). Programme budget 2018–2019. World Health Organization.Wijnstekers, W. (2003). The evolution of CITES. CITES Secretariat.Woods, N. (2005). The shifting politics of foreign aid. International Affairs, 81(2), 393–409World Bank. (2003). Accountability at the World Bank: The inspection panel (ten years on). World Bank.World Bank. (2009). Decentralization and deconcentration in Morocco: Cross-sectoral status review.
World Bank.Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods. (4th ed.). SAGE.Yong, D. L., Jain, A., Liu, Y., Iqbal, M., Choi, C.-Y., Crockford, N. J., Millington, S., & Provencher, J.
(2018). Challenges and opportunities for transboundary conservation of migratory birds in the East Asian-Australasian flyway. Conservation Biology, 32(3), 740–743
Zeppel, H. (2013). The ICLEI cities for climate protection programme: Local government networks in urban climate governance. In T. Cadman (Ed.), Climate change and global policy regimes. (pp. 217–231). Palgrave Macmillan.