Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance

The Private-Public Policy Nexus in the Global Agora

D. Stone

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137022912
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Diane Stone addresses the network alliances or partnerships of international organisations with knowledge organisations and networks. Moving beyond more common studies of industrial public-private partnerships, she addresses how, and why, international organisations and global policy actors need to incorporate ideas, expertise and scientific opinion into their 'global programmes'. Rather than assuming that the encouragement for 'evidence-informed policy' in global and regional institutions of governance is an indisputable public good, she queries the influence of expert actors in the growing number of part-private or semi-public policy networks.

1

The Global Agora: Privatising Policy Processes in Transnational Governance

A global agora is emerging. The global agora is partly configured by new policy actions and partnerships where the idea of ‘public’ and ‘public sector’ is remade. However, the concept of transnational or ‘global public policy’ is neither an institutionalised nor accepted understanding of governing beyond the nation-state. Accordingly, this chapter asks: What is global public policy? Where is it enacted? Who executes such policies? The first section sets out to delimit the discussion to transnational policy spaces where global public policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the ‘agora’. This section also addresses what is ‘global public policy’ and some difficulties with the use of the term as well as the way in which some higher education institutions are responding.

The second section conceptually stretches the conventional policy cycle heuristic to the global and regional levels. This is used as an analytical device, not as a portrayal of decision-making realities. It is done to reveal the higher degree of pluralisation of actors as well as the multiple and contested modes of authority than is usually the case at national levels of policy making.

The last section asks: Who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The activities of transnational policy communities reveal the dual dynamics of new public spaces carved out in tandem with privatising modes of decision-making. The intermeshed character of the global agora and the co-mingling of private and public actors in the delivery or financing of public goods make publicness more problematic. Governance is re-configured around various ‘new architectures’ that ‘recreate the public either at a higher level or through a more complex network structure’ (Cerny, 2010: 107).

Public spheres and private policy practice in the global agora

If global public policy is distinct and to some extent delinked from national processes of policy making, the venues in which such policy action occurs need not be tied to sovereign structures of decision-making, that is, the state. This is not to suggest a divorce between global and national policy processes. However, national public institutions no longer serve as the sole organising centre for policy. Instead, the playing field itself has been re-structured through historical and structural changes to the ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’ (Cerny, 2010). Through the reinvention of a Greek political concept, this re-structured playing field will be referred to as the ‘global agora’.

The notion of ‘agora’ is a familiar concept in studies of Athenian history and politics. ‘Agora’ means a marketplace or a public square. While it is commonplace in the contemporary era to see the ‘marketplace’ and the ‘public square’ as distinct domains, such boundaries were neither hard nor fast in the Greek agora. Importantly, the ‘agora’ was not only a marketplace but the heart of intellectual life and public discourse. The space could be used for an election, a dramatic performance, a religious ceremony, military drills or sports. The agora was:

… the natural venue for the greatest of gatherings, and business transactions would take place there as a matter of course. It was a place where people could exchange gossip and views as well as goods, and flock to hear the latest rumours. They could catch sight of those who decided the course of political events. Not least the latter could make themselves visible there and get some sense of the strength of support of their projects or of the different factions among the people. … (The agora) was thus a public space. (Hannay, 2005: 12)

In short, the Greek agora (or equally the Roman forum) was the centre of civic activity.

The agora was a physical place as well as a social and political space in the Greek city-state (Wycherley, 1942: 21). The public landscape included landmarks such as the Mint, shrines and statuary, shops and law-courts, the market hall and the council house, and the Assembly. Artifacts from archaeological digs – public documents inscribed on stone, weight and measure standards, and jurors’ identification tickets and ballots – reflect the administrative nature of the site.¹ As is apparent, the agora was a fusion of social, economic and political interaction. Public-private boundaries were ill-defined. Political activity was as likely to take place inside private shops (cobblers, barbers) as it was in public buildings. That is, the ‘commercial impinged upon the public buildings and shrines of the central agora at many points, and probably on every side’ (Wycherley, 1956: 10). It could also be a heavily militarised space.

The merging and the blurring of the commercial and the public domains is nonetheless apparent in the modern global era (Touaf and Boutkhil, 2008). Today, the manner in which the commercial sector or businesses ‘impinge’ on global politics and recipient publics has also been called ‘market-multilateralism’ (Bull and McNeill, 2007).

The agora embraces much more than the market and much more than politics. As a public space it invites exchanges of all kinds … Although the agora is a structured space, it is wrong to attempt to subdivide into sectors like markets, politics or media. (Nowotony et al., 2001: 209)

The idea of ‘agora’ identifies growing global public spaces of fluid, dynamic and intermeshed relations of politics, markets, culture and society. This public space is brought about by the interactions of its actors – that is, the sociability of multiple publics and plural institutions. Of course, some actors are more visible, persuasive or powerful than others. In these dynamics, traditional views on the role of experts, and of trust in scientific knowledge, are contextualised and challenged by the intermingling that has become intrinsic to the agora (Nowotony et al., 2001: 205 passim).

The global agora is a social and political space – an ‘imaginary’ generated by globalisation – rather than a physical place. Unlike the Greek agora, contemporary publics cannot flock to a civic centre. Nevertheless, some have already adopted the term to speak of the agora as an electronic or digital global commons (Arthurs, 2001: 97; Alexander and Pal, 1998). Likewise, the FutureWorld Foundation (discussed again in the Conclusion) has picked up the term and describes its information portal as a ‘global agora’ that ‘will be a virtual town hall and community library for inhabitants of the global village’ (2013). More generally, this type of ‘intertwingularity’ captures the idea of ease of connection and communication. The global agora is also a domain of relative disorder and uncertainty where institutions are underdeveloped and political authority unclear, and dispersed through multiplying institutions and networks. It is a challenge to the ‘myth of 1648’, that is, ‘of a world of mutually recognizing, non-interfering sovereign state’ emerging with the Peace of Westphalia (Armitage, 2013).

The ‘agora’ concept is useful for highlighting the ‘co-mingling’ of communities, and specifically in the contemporary global era, for disrupting the centrality of sovereignty. In the scene that opens Plato’s Republic, the dialogue that ensues takes place in a metic household, that is, the home of a resident alien, the patriarch Cephalus and his son Polemarchus. Metics typically shared the burden of citizenship but with few of its privileges. Similar to Plato’s Athenian agora, where political discussions took place in the dwelling of a resident foreigner, the sovereignty-challenging features of global decision-making in semi-private or quasi-public networks or public-private partnerships are increasingly apparent today. The idea of citizenship in the global agora has little or no resonance. While the global agora encompasses not only the traditional market for commercial products, but also the political market for negotiations, the public sphere for recognition and the scientific market for expert reputation, the public sector remains ill-formed and policy making limited to a few.

The concept of the global agora is normatively neutral. This is in contrast to a growing body of literature that advocates the need to democratise global governance and to enhance the legitimacy of international organisations (for example, the decade-old special edition in Government and Opposition, 2004). Without disavowing the value of such advocacy, nevertheless, the call for global accountabilities puts the normative cart before the conceptual and empirical horse.

Social scientists have used a series of vague metaphors to identify this realm. The vagueness is symptomatic of difficulties in finding a new vocabulary to grasp new policy structures. Well-known phrases include ‘transnational public sphere’ (Eckersley, 2007; Nanz and Steffek, 2004; Dryzek, 2006). With less traction, the idea of the ‘transnational state’ has been used to signify the ‘deterritorialization’ of political and economic relationships (McMichael, 2001: 201). An early analysis looked for signs of an emerging ‘global polity’ (Ougaard and Higgott, 2002). Likewise, the term ‘global policy arena’ is common place. More complicated descriptions include ‘a polycentric or multi-nucleated global political system, operating with an increasingly continuous geographical space and/or overlapping spaces’ (Cerny, 2010: 98), or in departure from the idea of a sovereign head in hierarchical governance, ‘An acephalous … modern global polity’ (Drori, Meyer and Hwang, 2006: 14).

Some argue that the realisation of a democratic global order ‘ultimately depends on the creation of an appropriate public sphere’ (Nanz and Steffek, 2004: 315). Yet, the emphasis is on what is ‘appropriate’, that is often taken to mean a ‘deliberative global politics’ (Dryzek, 2006) and the presumed progressive potential of global civil society in forging this sphere whereby the transnational public sphere is conceived as a Habermasian ‘communicative network’ (Nanz and Steffek, 2004: 322). Others stress the growing diversity of policy actors above the nation-state as a healthy ‘transnational pluralism’ (Cerny, 2010; also Macdonald and Macdonald, 2010).

Unlike such normative literature, the concept of a ‘global agora’ as it is developed here makes no presumptions about the communicative, progressive or deliberative character of transnational public-private partnerships or network interactions. Instead, it is an open question as to ‘the emancipatory potential of public spheres at the transnational level, where there is no common language or life-world, no cohesive global society and only a very weak global media’ (Eckersley, 2007: 332). The prospects of private seclusion of policy deliberation to decision-making elites may well take shape. The global agora may become an accessible participative domain for plural expressions of policy input. The idea of a ‘global agora’ could be inspired by liberal democracy. It is equally feasible, however, that developments could be informed by coercive arrangements of authoritarianism or a reactionary anti-egalitarianism.

The Greek agora was ‘patrician’ (Hannay, 2005: 13) and the global agora may be no less characterised by lack of participation and by elite rule. The majority of Athenian citizenry did not participate directly in politics. Instead the Athenian agora of ancient Greece was made up of three kinds of citizen:

… the passive ones’ who did not go to Assembly; the standing participants who went to the assembly but listened and voted, and ‘did not raise their voice in discussion’; and the ‘wholly active citizens’ (a small group of initiative takers who proposed motions). (Hansen quoted in Urbinatti, 762–63)

It is the ‘wholly active citizens’ in internationally active NGOs, in international organisations, and in transnational public agencies who drive transnational policy processes. While the global agora may have dimensions of ‘publicness’, the capacity for, and character of, public action is much more varied.

In the Athenian agora, the Mint, religious building, shops and law-courts, the market hall and the council house, and the Assembly were all in physical proximity even if women, slaves or resident foreigners had little participation in these forums. Even so, the agora was a site for the exchange of information or sharing of gossip. In the global agora, the international institutions are dispersed between Washington DC., The Hague, Geneva and Paris. The nodes of global finance are found in exclusive venues in New York, London, Tokyo and a few other global venues such as Basle or Davos. There is no centre. Instead, there are multiple dis-connected arenas for policy making. The agora is acephalous, that is, without a sovereign head. And the flow of information is more uni-directional downwards to the masses.

The idea of agora accords with the ‘epistemological position that borders around global policy are variable and are being created and recreated in response to globalizing processes and global problems’ (Coleman, 2012: 680). The concept is ‘not infected with an unhealthy dualism in state/market, and global/national terms’ (McMichael, 2001: 201). As discussed in the next chapter, policy networks and private regulatory standard setting have the outcome to privatise or, at the very least, qualify the publicness of decision-making. As noted elsewhere, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organisations. The internationalisation and privatisation of rule-making surrounding bodies like the International Accounting Standards Body or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realisation that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks (Büthe and Mattli, 2011). Consequently, the institutional locations are dispersed and the boundaries of the global agora are indeterminate and opaque. Policy activity is as likely to take place inside private associations among non-state actors as in inter-governmental conferences. The vast majority of citizens of nation-states are uninformed about these policy venues and, even if interested, face significant obstacles ‘to raise their voice’. Only recently has policy studies started to adjust to these new realities by interrogating the idea of ‘global public policy’.

Global public policy

In the last decade, there has been increasing use of the term ‘global public policy’ (Coleman, 2012). Books have emerged under this title (Reinicke, 1999; Ronit, 2006) or in the related field of ‘global social policy’ (Deacon, 2007). University courses in development studies or political science have been launched with this label. Yet the term remains under-specified. Generally, ‘global public policy’ has little resonance among policy elites and the general public. The same applies to academic journals in policy studies. As late as 2011, a group of Asian scholars (Hou et al., 2011) were exhorting for a more global perspective in the persistently American-centric and state-focused Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Only recently, the new journal Global Policy complements the three decades of interest of Global Governance in themes of ‘international civil service’ and transnational administration. The editorial statement of Global Policy (2012) explains global policy as a process:

The field of global policy focuses on the global as a process (or set of processes) which creates transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity and interaction, and the new framework of multilevel policymaking by public and private actors, which involves and transcends national, international and transnational policy regimes.

Instead of ‘global policy’, other terms and concepts are better established in the lexicon. One of the most current terms derived from International Relations (IR) is ‘global governance’. At other times, ‘global policy’ is equated with the financing and delivery of global public goods (Kaul, 2005). Another synonym is the idea of global ‘public-private partnerships’ (Bull and McNeill, 2007) or the ‘global programs’ sponsored by the World Bank (2004). ‘Transnational constitutionalism’ is a phrase rarely encountered; indeed, these constitutional processes have emerged only in the European Union (EU) (Arthurs, 2001: 107).

In classical political science, public policy occurs inside nation-states. In IR theory, a ‘realist’ perspective has always and still holds that states are the dominant actor in the international system and that international policies are made between states. With its strong tendency to ‘methodological nationalism’ (Armitage, 2013), traditional comparative public policy has compounded this standpoint (Coleman, 2012: 685). Scholars in the field usually compare policy development within and between states where states remain the key policy-making unit. To a large extent, public policy has been a prisoner of the word ‘state’.

As a political space, the world is defined and divided between states as pre-eminent sources of public authority. Consequently, traditional IR still struggles to move out of the conceptual shadow of classical geopolitics (Kleinschmidt and Strandsbjerg, 2010). Traditional approaches to policy studies occupy the same Westphalian conceptual cage albeit constrained in a different fashion. The nation-state is a ‘spatial “protective cocoon”’ for making social and economic policy (McMichael, 2001: 2005). Nevertheless, both IR and public policy as fields of inquiry tend to portray states as being socially exclusive ‘containers’ with a sharp segmentation of territorial units in a cartographic understanding of global politics (Kleinschmidt and Strandsbjerg, 2010).

Moving beyond minimalist interpretations of a realist-rationalist variety that limits analysis to comprehending the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalise national policies does not entail jumping to maximalist positions of an idealist-cosmopolitan character that speak of deliberative world government. A complex range of state capacities, public action and democratic deliberation fall in between these two extremes. Scholars and practitioners alike are arguing that new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that co-exist alongside nation-state processes. Governance can be informal and emerge from strategic interactions and partnerships of national and international bureaucracies with non-state actors operating from the marketplace and civil society.

However, economic globalisation and regional integration are proceeding at a much faster pace in the agora than transnational policy processes. One outcome of this disjuncture is that the power of the nation-states has been reduced or reconfigured without a corresponding development of international institutional co-operation. This is one of the major causes of a deficiency of public goods at global levels. For example, the regulation of financial flows, environmental protection or intellectual property safe-guards are inadequately provided. Bodies such as the United N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Global Agora: Privatising Policy Processes in Transnational Governance
• 2 Knowledge Networks/Policy Networks
• 3 Think Tank Thinking
• 4 RAPID Knowledge
• 5 Translating Foundation Ideas
• 6 Informal Diplomacy of the ASEAN-ISIS Network
• 7 Bankrolling Knowledge Networks
• Conclusion: The Rise of Knowledge Networks and the ‘Turn’ of Think Tanks
• Notes
• Appendix
• References
• Index