Transnational Institutions and Networks

Abstract

This chapter reviews the literature on transnational institutions and networks in earth system governance research over the past decade. We organize our review around the issues of emergence, effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational governance and outline key debates and controversies surrounding the shifting authority between public and private actors. We also identify major research lines and open questions and provide an outlook towards the most promising directions in future research. Our review is based on a set of articles selected by using keyword search from an original dataset containing all 2,521 articles (co)authored by fellows of the Earth System Governance Project up to November 2016 (found in Web of Science). This approach rendered around 200 articles in total. To include publications from the last two years (2017 and 2018) we extended our search by examining the research output of those fellows who identify transnational governance as a key area of their interest, yielding an additional 15 articles. In this review, we highlight key insights from this burgeoning literature. ConceptualizationWe define transnational governance as the transboundary institutional arrangements emerging from the interaction among private actors or between private and public actors that steer actors' behaviour in an issue-specific area (Falkner 2003). We consider private actors to include civil society organizations as well as business actors and their associations, and public actors to include states, international organizations and substate actors, such as cities and regions. Transnational governance is characterized by two main aspects. First, the state is not the main actor involved in rule making; instead, it is especially private actors that develop rules (Auld, Renckens and Cashore 2015). Second, transnational governance is voluntary and relies on market forces and public scrutiny to exert pressure on the target group and generate public benefits (Kalfagianni and Pattberg 2013). In the 75 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

Institutional interplay in global environmental governance: lessons learned and future research

“…Over the past few years, numerous scholars have analyzed the emergence of transnational institutions in the field of global environmental governance (e.g., Hale, 2020;Kalfagianni et al, 2020). In this context, some authors have focused on the relationship between intergovernmental institutions and the wide array of transnational initiatives.…”