Frontiers of Global Administrative Law in the 2020s
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Description
Global administrative law (GAL) has many pertinent antecedents, but the framing and labelling of what is now regarded as GAL began with academic initiatives in the early 2000s. In 2005 it was proposed that there was emerging a body of GAL, defined as comprising “the mechanisms, principles, practices, and supporting social understandings that promote or otherwise affect the accountability of global administrative bodies, in particular by ensuring they meet adequate standards of transparency, participation, reasoned decision, and legality, and by providing effective review of the rules and decisions they make.” The initial approach was explicitly a normative intervention: although mindful of pathologies in GAL, it asserted the broad desirability of seeking to render the rule-making and decision-making of these global regulatory bodies accountable and responsive to the diverse publics significantly affected by their decisions. The aim of this chapter—written for a general readership more than as a specialist contribution to the scholarly debates on GAL—is to consider how GAL now stands in relation to some of the major conceptual and contextual issues that might be thought likely to affect the nature and even the viability of this 2000s project in the 2020s. It will begin, in section I, by introducing the range of practices with which GAL has been concerned. In section II it first notes the contexts in which ideas about, and the practice of, GAL obtained some valence and rapid uptake in the period c 1990–c 2015, and then turns to some major contextual shifts that, from about 2015 onward, have seemed to alter the landscape for GAL quite dramatically. Building on this, section III examines some conceptual issues bearing on the nature and viability of GAL. Section IV takes a single set of GAL proceedings against a private global sports governance institution relating to eligibility to compete in the female category in elite athletics, to illustrate reasons for the continued and likely expanded role of GAL in the 2020s in some areas of private governance. Section V concludes.
Source Publication
The Frontiers of Public Law
Source Editors/Authors
Jason N. E. Varuhas, Shona Wilson Stark
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Kingsbury, Benedict, "Frontiers of Global Administrative Law in the 2020s" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 968.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/968
