Global Standards for National Societies
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Description
States have established, through treaty-based intergovernmental organizations and networks of specialized domestic government agencies, myriad global regulatory programmes to overcome the inadequacies of purely national policy measures and secure the welfare of their citizens under conditions of intensifying global interdependence and rivalry. These global regulatory programmes occupy three broad and often overlapping policy fields: security; promotion and regulation of markets; and moral objectives, including human rights, social development, and environmental protection. A great variety of private and hybrid public-private global regulatory bodies have also sprung up in the past three decades. In addition, international courts and tribunals have assumed important global regulatory functions. This chapter focuses on the reception and implementation by national administrations of the substantive, institutional and procedural regulatory norms generated by these various global actors, with particular attention given to the roles of Global Administrative Law (GAL) norms and practices of transparency, participation, reason giving, and review. Many intergovernmental regulatory regimes are aimed at regulating the conduct of states in areas as diverse as chemical weapons, refugees, human rights, development assistance, and payments to governments for resource exploitation. Other global regulatory programmes are directly or indirectly aimed at regulating the conduct of private actors. With some exceptions, global regulators generally lack the authority or capacity to directly implement and execute their regulatory norms and decisions. National administrations, as well as domestic courts, function as the primary implementing or distributed administrations of state-based global regulatory regimes and international courts and tribunals; they also sometimes assume this function for hybrid and private global regulators. Global regulatory programmes in the fields of military, markets and morals reflect three different types of approaches. First, many global regulatory regimes seek to solve global coordination and cooperation games among public or private actors. In order to successfully carry out objectives such as expanded trade and investment, security, and environmental protection, they require systematic, consistent, and effective implementation of and compliance with their regulatory norms and decisions. Achieving this objective is especially challenging in the context of global public goods, such as climate protection or international security, where states or other actors may be tempted to free ride on the efforts of others. The second category are global regulatory programmes that seek to protect the rights of individuals or discrete groups, be they refugees, foreign investors, holders of intellectual property rights, or local communities displaced by internationally funded development projects. Third, still other global programmes seek broadly to promote openness, regularity, accountability, and responsiveness in domestic administrative governance. GAL procedures play important but somewhat different roles in these three different types of global programmes and their implementation by national administrations. International courts, tribunals, and compliance bodies also play an increasingly important role in generating and promoting adoption of global regulatory norms by national administrations. These bodies are of two basic types. First, there are tribunals and compliance bodies that are integral components of global regulatory regimes, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement bodies, which elaborate and secure compliance by national administrations with specialized substantive and procedural regulatory norms in order to solve global cooperation games and protect rights. Examples include the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Aarhus Compliance Committee. Second, there are independent international courts, including the International Court of Justice and the various international human rights courts. The remainder of this chapter first discusses the different types of global regulatory bodies and their distributed administrations. It then reviews the different types of substantive and procedural global regulatory norms and the incentives and means for their adoption by domestic administrations. Using principle-agent analysis, the chapter next examines various measures that global bodies take to ensure loyal and effective implementation of their regulatory norms by their distributed administrations, and the roles played by GAL norms of transparency, participation, reason giving, and review. Finally, it discusses domestic contestation and resistance to global regulatory norms and related issues of accountability. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of the current state of affairs.
Source Publication
Research Handbook on Global Administrative Law
Source Editors/Authors
Sabino Cassese
Publication Date
2016
Recommended Citation
Stewart, Richard B., "Global Standards for National Societies" (2016). Faculty Chapters. 1687.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1687
