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In the multilateral arena, new international conventions and other forms of hard law are
getting rarer and rarer. They are largely being replaced by voluntary undertakings,
public-private partnerships, and guidance documents. What occurred in Copenhagen in
2009 with the de facto abandonment of an internationally binding agreement and its
replacement by the voluntary Copenhagen Accord is occurring more frequently in
international relations. The same thing tends to happen whenever multinational
corporations are involved.
This trend has been advocated by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in their Global
Redesign Initiative (GRI) project on the future of global governance. WEF developed its
views on international cooperation in a global, internal, multi-stakeholder dialogue
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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?
They were prompted to take on this project by two factors: first, the inability of the
international market and global banking authorities to contain the international financial
crisis, and second, a related anxiety with the loss of legitimacy for globalization itself.
The Davos process involved more than 750 experts working in 60 separate taskforces.
At the thematic level, WEF's proposals covered an extraordinary range of public policy
areas including educational systems; systemic financial risk; philanthropy and social
investing; emerging multinationals; fragile states; global investment flows; social
entrepreneurship; energy security; international security cooperation; mining and
metals; the future of government; ocean governance; and ethical values.
In the report's overview, the Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) presents an alternative
conceptual model for the future of global governance which, if it were to be accepted,
would significantly reorder international governance, at least as it is understood through
the Charter of the United Nations. One of the four key structural recommendations is to
institutionalize voluntary commitments as a preferred system or as a partial replacement
for decisions by UN governing bodies, and most of their major framework
recommendations can be put into place without a formal decision by any existing United
Nations organization.
Given the importance of the GRI report, the Program on Governance and Sustainability at
the University of Massachusetts Boston published an online Readers' Guide to the World
Economic Forum's proposals to provide an easy introduction to the key proposals and to
encourage a healthy debate on the future of global governance. The interactive website
provides a series of commentaries on selected extracts of the GRI report, a detailed
summary of the arguments made by the WEF community, and a critical assessment of
the key ideas advanced by the World Economic Forum.
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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?
If a commercial partner walks away, it can leave the remaining state bodies,
international organizations, or the civil society groups with the political liabilities for a
perceived failure. If a significant civil society group withdraws, it can change the balance
of power within a PPP, but it does not necessarily mean that the PPP will collapse or
immediately lose legitimacy with local authorities or the wider community. See, for
example, recent developments with the Kimberley Process.
A civil society group may join a multi-stakeholder process and then subsequently decide
that their financially constrained organization has other priorities. A government body
may choose to participate in starting a multi-stakeholder process to gain public visibility
but not have the energy or resources to engage actively in the process. As all
participants are voluntary actors, all of them can withdraw whenever they wish.
Three features of this ad hoc selection and withdrawal process delimit this form of
governance sharply from that of multilateral relations:
But this voluntary engagement of selected actors presumes that international relations
do not entail significant conflicts. Nation-states often have sharply different views and
interests, some of which cause the difficulties in gaining agreement on new legally
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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?
The WEF call for a voluntary system of global governance masks this reality by seeking to
provide legitimacy for a small sub-group of MNCs, nation-states, and CSOs to stake out
the terrain of an agreement so as to exclude their competitors.
The GRI approach may also lower public expectations of nation-states and MNCs.
Currently governments at various UN forums adopt declarations or standards for
particular policy areas. While these resolutions are not legally binding, they do provide
the public with explicit criteria by which to judge the performance of nation-states or
other actors. GRI says that it wants to strengthen the nation-state but then makes
absolutely no recommendations for doing so in international or domestic governance.
An opt-in-opt-out global governance system would move the world away from one of
ever-expanding stability based on the rule of law to one that is increasingly based on ad
hoc and temporary arrangements. The net effect would be to transform what was a
consultative mechanism into a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't governance structure
when it suits the nonstate actors because, in most cases, the political obligations and
responsibilities in international affairs still remain with the nation-states.
The World Economic Forum's Global Redesign Initiative project has advanced some
challenging new ideas about a future global governance system, yet it is clear that
significant additional research and much broader public engagement on the evolution of
multilateralism and multi-stakeholder processes is needed.
Harris Gleckman is a senior fellow at the Center on Governance and Sustainability at the
University of Massachusetts-Boston and director of Benchmark Environmental
Consulting. This article draws from his 20 years as a UN staff member and his Readers'
Guide to the Global Redesign Initiative.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Please read our usage policy.
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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?
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