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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?

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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of


Law?
By HARRIS GLECKMAN
| MARCH 22, 2013

CREDIT: World Economic Forum (CC).

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?

during 2009 and 2010.

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.

The resulting GRI report, Everybody's Business: Strengthening International Cooperation


in a More Interdependent World, was launched in May 2010 at a high-level meeting in
Doha, Qatar involving 1,200 reviewers. It reaches well beyond financial matters into
broad redefinition of the actors and institutions of the global international system.

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.

From WEF's perspective, voluntarism in governance solves a number of practical issues.


First, it dispenses with long, drawn out negotiations for binding international agreements
and their subsequent country-by-country adoption. What GRI proposes is that a self-
selected group of actors, some of whom may have a financial self-interest in the
formulation of a particular solution, will now be welcomed to generate standards which
WEF hopes will be seen as new forms of internationally recognized rules. With this
approach in place, it would be increasingly difficult to gain agreement on
intergovernmental binding legal standards, as opponents can block consensus and then
"adopt" their own more lenient standard since the international undertaking "failed."

In a Davos-style multi-stakeholder governance arrangement, participants are not


necessarily from the relatively weak foreign affairs ministries but can be individually
selected representatives of departments outside of foreign relations. Identified problems
can be addressed more quickly without, in their view, recalcitrant government agencies,
old fashioned narrow-minded business executives, and divergent views from civil
society. Those who find the right combination of partners can move ahead, so long as
the other key institutions of international governance do not overly object. Crucial to
WEF's multi-stakeholder governance approach is the idea that all the participants
volunteer their time, energy, and capital to solve a given problem.

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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?

Voluntarism in governance also means building on the informality of project-based


public-private partnerships (PPPs), which most often do not have a formal legal basis.
Key actors can join or abstain from a public-private partnership, as and when it best
suits them. Find the right combination of government offices, the most interested global
corporations, and the best informed civil society experts and let them find the right
solution for a regional or local problem. Others from international, regional, and local
communities, businesses, and governments can join the volunteer team over time,
providing the current participants agree.

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.

In a similar manner to project-based public-private partnerships, MNCs can join a multi-


stakeholder governance process if and when it looks lucrative or provides other benefits
to the firm. In both cases, there tends to be quiet recruitment of participants in multi-
stakeholder processes or, as WEF sometimes calls them, "coalitions of the willing and
able."

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:

1. Rather than all countries being welcomed in a process, multi-stakeholder


participants are selected by the dominant initiating actors (usually multinationals)
and in this sense are self-excluding;

2. The temporary nature of the governance arrangement means that effectiveness of


the outcome is uncertain as it generally depends on voluntary actions by the
members of the multi-stakeholder governance group, not on a self-standing
international organizational structure; and

3. The constituent members of a multi-stakeholder group need to make up the rules


of procedure and decision-making process for each new alliance as there are no
agreed standards that are even roughly equivalent to one-country-one-vote.
WEF asserts that voluntarism on a global level can make things happen faster and with
greater effectiveness than the universal decision-making of UN, since an opt-in-opt-out
system would be less hindered by those small or ideologically different nation-states
whose presence would be required by a full global agreement. WEF also argues that the
outcome of the process may well have greater legitimacy as the key multinational
corporations are seen as working together with other interested constituencies. (See, for
example the sequence of steps GRI recommended for Rio+20.)

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?

binding international conventions. In the globalized economy, conflict in the form of


competition for market share, return on investment, and quality workers and executives
is the name of the game.

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.

GRI makes this assumption of an inherent spirit of cooperation even in post-conflict


situations. GRI's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States advocates that voluntary dual-
oversight agencies, comprised of public and private donors and the official local
government, manage the political process in fragile states. Most fragile states are
plagued by the resource curse. The battle for control of a natural resource often involves
multiple domestic forces, and a combination of competing foreign investors and their
allied home governments. In these circumstances the international extractive industries
are very likely to be part of the original problem.

Consequently these partisan firms cannot reasonably be expected to be neutral


governing partners in the post-conflict fragile state. GRI's recommendation does not
exclude these self-interested firms, nor does it explain on what basis firms would be
selected to participate in assisting fragile states. Without these specifications, the effect
of GRI's recommendation would be to enhance significantly the ability of specific
resource-extraction firms to continue to operate under a new post-conflict governance
arrangement without having to acknowledge any prior malfeasance. As all of these
arrangements are on an opt-in-opt-out basis, any of the dual-oversight bodies can leave
at any time, even if this is to the disadvantage of the stability of the local government.

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.


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Will Global Voluntarism Supersede Rule of Law?

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