Liquid authority in global governance

Abstract

Authority is a key concept in politics and law, and it has found greater attention in the global context in recent years. Most accounts, however, employ a model of ‘solid’ authority borrowed from the domestic realm and focus primarily on commands issued by single institutions. This framing paper argues that such approaches tend to underestimate the extent of authority in global governance and misunderstand its nature, leading to skewed accounts of the emergence of authority and the challenges it poses. Building on an alternative conception – the deference model – the paper calls for including in analyses of global authority also liquid forms, characterized by a higher level of dynamism and typically driven by informality and institutional multiplicity. Such a broader account can help us to redirect empirical inquiries and reframe central questions about authority, relating in particular to the way in which it is produced, the mechanisms through which it might be made accountable and legitimate, and its relation to law.

The new politics of global tax governance: taking stock a decade after the financial crisis

“…Harrington's (2016) book is an interesting example of a new wave of scholarship directing attention to the ways in which professionals and experts utilise normative, cognitive and relational strategies to control global political change (e.g. Ban, Seabrooke, & Freitas, 2016;Krisch, 2017;Seabrooke & Henriksen, 2017). Training as a wealth manager, she immersed herself within the 'offshore industry', gaining privileged access to the underbelly of the international tax system.…”

Global urban climate governance in three and a half parts: Experimentation, coordination, integration (and contestation)

“…There is, in other words, a pressing need to draw on extant discussions related to the nature and operation of power in domains of governance to help stimulate critical inquiry into the possibilities, potential, and pitfalls of efforts to govern climate change in, through, and by cities. Doing so, as Lena Partzsch suggests, involves the need for careful empirical scrutiny of the ways in which forms of power with , power to , and power over manifest and interact in sociopolitical spaces that are organized through what Krisch refers to as liquid (open‐ended, indeterminate, contingent, dynamic) authority (Krisch, ; Partzsch, ). This seems especially apropos in domain of global urban climate governance, where the power of cities acting with each other (in the form of collaboration and cooperation) is often treated as if ontologically distinct and separable from the experience of power over (which ultimately shapes the substance and aims of such efforts).…”

Legitimacy and Accountability in Polycentric Climate Governance

“…If we take authority to mean the legitimate exercise of power (Bernstein, 2011), polycentric governance systems consist of many sites of political authority. 'Liquid' authoritymeaning transnational, non-state, non-electoral authorityis replacing and/or supplementing traditional 'solid' sovereign authority (Krisch, 2017). Hickmann (2017) stresses that this does not necessarily mean a complete shift of authority away from the (inter)governmental level, but it implies a reconfiguration of the functions of central institutions in a changing authoritative landscape.…”