Frameworks for Understanding the ILO
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Description
The organizers of this centennial conference suggested that I consider how jurisprudential approaches common among international law scholars apply to the ILO. The request calls to mind the Indian parable about blind men who are asked to define an elephant but are allowed to touch only part of the animal. Predictably, each of them comes up with seriously misleading descriptions based on their impressions of its tail, ears, skin, trunk, and so on. Perhaps, in line with the moral of this story, ILO insiders recognize that they may be too close to the ILO’s discrete parts and need the distance provided by external perspectives to better understand their complex employer. Alternatively, maybe they fear that their professional stake in the Organization’s success makes them less then dispassionate about the Organization’s past and less than ideal prognosticators of its future. Or maybe they think that this ‘academic’ exercise will suggest how this particular ‘elephant’ fits into its broader species, namely other international organizations (IOs). Whatever the reason, we need to acknowledge at the outset some practical hazards. International legal frameworks have their own blind spots. Scholars associated with each may attempt, like blind men, to extrapolate too much from their limited expertize or data. As Jan Klabbers has noted, many schools of thought—especially those having a U.S. academic pedigree—extend the insights of political scientists (who famously know little about law) into the legal domain (where arguably they threaten to undermine precisely what makes lawyers valuable to policy makers). Other frameworks, such as law and economics, have been subjected to their own powerful critiques—namely that its core concepts (such as efficiency, free markets, competition, rational actors, costs and benefits, the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner’s dilemma, the presence of transaction costs) are interpretative screens that filter out legal values in favour of the economists’ trade. Scholarly frames pose risks of distortion. Each may provide a partial view, no more accurate than a car’s rearview mirror where ‘objects may be closer than they appear’. There is, moreover, the risk that surveying competing frames ends up producing a toolkit from which observers can choose, pragmatically, their preferred ‘truth’, even if it happens to validate pre‑conceived normative (and political) judgments. Despite these concerns, surveys of select international law frameworks—functionalism (and its close cousin, legal positivism), realism, liberal theory, law and economics, constructivism and other ‘deliberative’ approaches, constitutionalism, and critical theories—have been undertaken and applied to the world of international organizations, even if not, as such, to the ILO. This essay rectifies that gap.
Source Publication
ILO100: Law for Social Justice
Source Editors/Authors
George P. Politakis, Tomi Kohiyama, Thomas Lieby
Publication Date
2019
Recommended Citation
Alvarez, José E., "Frameworks for Understanding the ILO" (2019). Faculty Chapters. 54.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/54
