Global Private Governance: Lessons from a National Model of Setting Standards In Accounting

Walter Mattli, Official Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford University, and Tim Buthe, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Duke University

11/10/2008
(Original Publish Date: 1/30/2006)

Numerous recent studies have documented the increase of global governance by international organizations, formal and informal transgovernmental networks, hybrid public -private institutional arrangements, and entirely private transnational institutions. These bodies establish general rules and make specific decisions with which other actors comply, based on the recognition by the latter of the authority of the former. In the domestic context, such rule- and decisionmaking authority is embedded in a system of administrative law, that is, a system of institutionalized procedural and substantive norms. It assures those who are affected by the regulator's decisions that they will enjoy "procedural participation" (that is, that their views will be heard and considered, for instance through notice-and-comment procedures); that decisions will be taken in a transparent manner on the basis of disclosed reasons and in compliance with norms of proportionality, means-ends rationality, and the like; and that the decisions are subject to review by a judicial or another independent body on request. In short, administrative law mechanisms ensure accountability. They have a long history and tradition at the domestic level without an apparent counterpart at the international or global level. Yet globalization of rulemaking need not necessarily entail losing such safeguards: based on an extensive and detailed mapping of current administrative practice of global governance organizations and networks, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart suggest that a global administrative law is not only possible but in the process of being created, and they open a normative prescriptive debate over the forms that global administrative law might take.