Formal transparency policies are increasingly prevalent in global governance institutions, partially attenuating the influence in these institutions of practices of secrecy inherited from interstate diplomacy. This article assesses the incidence and specific characteristics of formal transparency policies across a select group of institutions and outlines some of the justifications given for these policies-including justifications based on the publicness of these institutions-and for the more controversial exceptions to transparency, such as the exception for deliberative materials. It examines three drivers affecting the adoption, form, and content of transparency policies and other transparency measures in these institutions: spillover from national transparency laws and policies, growth in the reach and significance of authority exercised in and through global institutions, and criticism of global institutions by influential states and nongovernmental organizations. Twelve hypotheses are proposed about the effects, for states, nonstate actors, and global governance institutions, of transparency measures-formal policies and other steps to increase transparency-in global governance institutions. Finally, the article considers some implications of transparency measures for structures of political power and authority beyond the state and for global administrative law.

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This chapter explores the ideas embedded in Simma's notion of a move toward ‘a true public international law’ or ‘a contemporary international legal order which is strongly influenced by ideas of public law’. It argues for two distinct but overlapping meanings of ‘public’ in this context. The first is an international law that is ‘inter-public’ law, being made by and for a set of entities (primarily States) that are not merely ‘actors’ (in the jargon of international relations), but public entities operating under public law. The second is a quality of publicness in law that is also becoming part of understandings of international law of the sort Bruno Simma has enunciated. Neither of these ideas — inter-public law and publicness — are commonplace or widely accepted in international law. However, they represent important dimensions in current and future international law.

The Sykes–Picot agreement embodies a certain style of diplomacy: an assumption of European predominance, given expression through cartographic line-drawing, terms of art (“protection,” “independence,” “interests”), and a structural secrecy which kept agreements from rival European powers, on the one hand, and from the peoples most affected, on the other. It is this element of secrecy that constitutes the focus of the present contribution. I situate the Sykes–Picot agreement in a prewar pattern of secrecy as diplomatic technique, explore its role in spurring a new regime of publicity for treaties, and take it as a touchstone for exploring whether this new regime could achieve a fundamental transformation of prevailing modes of diplomacy.