Networked Planetary Governance

Interview

Anne Slaughter is interview by the Bergruen Institute:

* Jonathan Blake: One of the themes in your work is the disconnect between sovereignty, which is held exclusively by national governments, and the actual work of governing, which is often done by many different actors working at multiple scales. Can we reconcile the gulf between the theory — nation-state sovereignty — and the practice, where governance comes from all sorts of institutions?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: It’s not good enough to do what we’ve always done, which is to treat the state as a black box. We have to find ways to recognize the different parts of states — to think and act in terms of horizontal disaggregation (among departments or ministries) as well as vertical disaggregation (cities, provinces, etc.). Legitimate, recognized status is important for the system to function — international organizations need legal status to be able to participate formally in global institutions and conclude agreements as official actors on the world stage.

What we need to do now is to enable official action at more levels. For example, we could formally recognize the role of sub-national actors. It’s telling that the Paris Agreement included the category of “non-party stakeholders.” Some of these were billionaires and foundations, but a lot of them were sub-state actors, like governors and mayors. That matters because when President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the agreement in 2017, California Governor Gavin Newsom and the mayors in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, as well as a number of CEOs and foundations heads, stepped in and committed to continue working toward the agreement’s goals.

* Nils Gilman: At a practical, legal level, what kinds of institutional work needs to be done to achieve that?

Slaughter: We must be able to work in a networked way as well as in a hierarchical way. You have to be able to identify the different actors who are going to be in your network. Consider, for example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a committee of central bank governors, or the International Organization of Securities Commissions. These groups have no formal legal status but are crucial for generating norms and developing ties among central bank officials.

We need both function and legitimacy. Institutions have to be functional — they have to deliver the goods — but they also have to be seen as legitimate. Every time I give a talk on my vision of world governance, someone says something like, “Bill and Melinda Gates are just as important as the U.N. secretary-general!” What they mean is that both the Gates Foundation and the U.N. serve an important function — they both deliver the goods — and as a result have some form of “output legitimacy.”

At the same time, it’s important for subnational governmental actors and international organizations to have a formal legitimacy gained via legal recognition by national governments. States are the best representatives of large communities of people, and given norms of popular sovereignty, they remain the best vehicles for providing legitimacy. So on the one hand, we have to be able to solve problems through transnational and nongovernmental networks, but on the other hand, we cannot deny the status of states, which remain crucial nodes in the network."

(https://www.noemamag.com/networked-planetary-governance/)

More information

• Planetary Realism

• Global Impact Hubs