Governance, as opposed to governments, has received a great deal of attention in recent years. To some degree, it has even featured into the recent presidential debates. Senator John Kerry's now infamous allusion to a "Global Test" raised the issue of unelected, non-American entities influencing American policy. Those entities include not only other countries under the guise of the so-called "international community," but presumably also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs).
Prior to the 1990s, governance and governments were treated as inextricable concepts. Simply put, the former was a function of the latter. In the 1990s, theorists extended the mantle of governance to non-governmental groups and institutions. This involved a broadening of the definition of governance. Previously, the definition of governance had a limited scope and meant the act of or the authority to govern, administrate or regulate. Its meaning was broadened through the interpolation of the amorphous concepts of justificatory discourse, inter-subjectivity and interpretative communities.
In his article "Security Council Deliberations: The Power of a Better Argument," Professor Ian Johnstone of the Fletcher School argued that justificatory discourse is the process of interrelating international law through discussion and argument undertaken by interpretative communities, made up of interested parties such as governments, lawyers, civil society advocates and international institutions. This interpretation exists in the context of inter-subjectivity, defined as the engagement in a collectively meaningful activity. Through such a lens, he argues, it becomes possible to conceive of individuals, civil societies, international institutions and transnational corporations all playing legitimate and crucial roles in global and regional governance.
Ngaire Woods of Oxford University has distinguished between international governance - which refers to interstate relations within international organizations - and global governance - which refers to links between individuals and organizations on a global scale. She has identified participation, ownership and accountability as components of good governance. The question to ask, then, is whether non-governmental institutions have the capacity to manifest those virtues and to do so with the same or almost the same ability of governments.
While NGOs and IOs may enhance participation through advocacy and political agitation, it is difficult to ascribe to any non-governmental entities the authoritative ownership of a particular issue. Accountability is also hard to assign, possibly because the concept is often vaguely defined. In sharp contrast, governments are participatory because of their nature, usually have the prerogative of ownership and are subject, particularly in democracies, to the test of accountability.
Anne Marie Slaughter's book "The State Strikes Back" has countered that what is in fact occurring is less a loss of power by states than a new distribution of power between states through the practice of "trans-governmentalism." In this system, the state maintains its viability as the primal actor of governance only through the function of interstate cooperation and collaboration, which she refers to as "networking." Slaughter, building upon the pretext of neo-functionalism and complex interdependence, as developed by the Kennedy School's Joseph Nye and others, describes how governments network and form linkages that characterize international regimes.
Slaughter points out the "democratic deficit" of non-government actors, concluding that "citizens of liberal democracies will not accept any form of international regulation they cannot control." Government networks, in her vision, represent the future of regional and global governance.
Non-governmental entities suffer from questions of legitimacy, a paucity of means to validate their significance, a lack of operational means to own issues in an authoritative way and an almost complete reliance on governments to translate their findings into meaningful action. It may be impossible to dismiss completely the contribution of non-governmental entities.
Yet, it is equally impossible to deny that their role, while often loudly acclaimed, is vague in its place, unclear in its degree of significance and dubious in its claims to democratic legitimacy. States in their operational form as governments remain the best structured, legally valid and politically legitimate form of governance. While we may look beyond them to fully understand the processes of international governance, we need not look very far. The bottom line is that governments serve as the independent variable upon which any credence to the fiction of international governance is dependent.
Some will ask whether it is desirable for governments to function as such. The answer must turn on the emphasis placed on the democratic legitimacy of wielding influence over others. Only the democratic state exists as the legitimate platform of representing its population's convictions. This fundamental organizing political precept should not be easily smothered by idealistic rhetoric of the "collective community."
Until NGOs and IOs mature into equally democratic forms of representation, their influence cannot be treated as benign, even where their initiatives are shared by states. States must chart their course according to their own lights. They must use international governance as much as they can for the ultimate benefit of the people, upon whose mandate government legitimately rules. Anything less would be at best an admission of impotence and, at worst, a function of negligence.
Devadas Krishnadas is a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
