Reimagining participation in international institutions.

AuthorAbbott, Kenneth W
  1. INTRODUCTION 2 II. THE DIVERGENCE OF GLOBAL HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTIONS 5 1. CORE INSTITUTIONS 6 A. WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION 6 B. UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME 6 2. POLICY AND CO-ORDINATION BODIES 78 A. UNAIDS 9 B. COMMISSION ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 3. 1990S FINANCING MECHANISMS 10 A. GAVI 10 B. GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT FACILITY. 11 4. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FINANCING MECHANISMS 13 A. GLOBAL FUND 13 B. ADAPTATION FUND AND CLIMATE INVESTMENT FUNDS 14 5. SUMMARY 16 III. EXPLAINING DIVERGENCE 17 1. CIVIL SOCIETY DEMAND 19 2. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT 20 3. PATH DEPENDENCE 20 4. THE THREE FACTORS ILLUSTRATED 21 IV. EVALUATING PARTICIPATION 25 1. LEGITIMACY 25 2. DELIBERATION 29 3. EFFECTIVENESS 30 4. LONGER-TERM RISKS AND REWARDS 33 V. CONCLUSION 34 Kenneth W Abbott is Professor of Law and Global Studies and Willard H Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at Arizona State University, and David Gartner is Associate Professor of Law at Arizona State University. We would like to thank William Aceves, Kenneth Anderson, Daniel Bodansky, Daniel Bradlow, Kristen Boon, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, Lorenzo Casini, Sabino Cassese, Jacob Cogan, Laura Dickinson, Gregory Fox, Francois Gemenne, Michael Newton, Daniel Rothenberg, Michael Scharf, Richard Stewart, Jonathan Wiener, David Zaring, and all of the participants in the Vanderbilt International Legal Studies Roundtable, the seventh Global Administrative Law Seminar, the Center for Law and Global Affairs Workshop at Arizona State University, and those who attended our panels at the International Studies Association Annual Convention and the Resilience 2011 Conference for their helpful comments related to this project.

    [c] 2012 Journal of International Law and International Relations

    Vol 8, pages 1-35. ISSN: 1712-2988.

  2. Introduction

    It is by now well recognized that civil society organizations (CSOs) have become important global actors over the past four decades, shaping international law and politics and substantially restructuring traditional relationships among states, non-state actors, and international institutions. (1) It is uncertain, however, whether twenty-first-century international institutions will maintain the predominantly state-centric models of governance they have inherited or whether they will further transform civil society participation.

    International environmental institutions have been among the most celebrated leaders of what has been called a "participatory revolution." (2) Both the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 Rio Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) saw unprecedented civil society involvement--organizations such as the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) pioneered arrangements for civil society input into international decision-making. Yet civil society input remains merely consultative, and some more recent environmental organizations have abandoned expanded participation, challenging the leading accounts of civil society's role. (3)

    At the same time, a new generation of global health institutions is transforming the landscape of participation, incorporating civil society representatives and other non-state actors directly into formal decision-making bodies. (4) As a result, the nature of participation in these two fields has sharply diverged--global health is now the innovator, while the environment has become a relative laggard. Explaining this divergence and exploring its normative implications are essential not only for these two important fields but also for the design of institutions capable of responding effectively to other pressing global challenges.

    To be sure, CSOs play important roles in international regimes without directly participating in decision-making. CSOs frequently act as advocates, seeking to influence the agendas, positions, and decisions of states and international organizations. (5) CSOs also play significant operational roles. For example, under the current International Health Regulations (IHR), the World Health Organization need no longer rely only on state reporting of infectious disease outbreaks. (6) It can now utilize information provided by CSOs and other non-state actors as well. (7) CSOs also co-operate with international officials in numerous informal ways. (8) We focus in this article, however, on CSO participation in international decision-making--an issue of substantial importance and one in which dramatic differences have emerged.

    Building on the Charter of the United Nation's (UN Charter) provision for CSO "consultative status" with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), many international institutions--including those addressing environmental issues--have established procedures for consulting with civil society, including arrangements by which CSOs act as observers. (9) Consultations are often held in connection with governing body meetings, and authorized observers actually attend such meetings. However, none of these procedures provides for membership in governing bodies or for direct participation in decision-making. Environmental organizations including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the CSD, the GEF, and the Adaptation Fund (AF) remain fundamentally inter-governmental, despite consultative processes that are more (the CSD, the GEF) or less (the AF) extensive.

    In contrast, recent global health institutions have embraced a multi-stakeholder model in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector, private foundations, and other constituencies within civil society--including populations directly affected by health threats--participate directly in governance structures, deliberation, and decision-making. For example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) allots a quarter of its board seats to non-state stakeholders, while the board of the GAVI Alliance (GAVI) includes representatives of CSOs, businesses and foundations, as well as private individuals.

    The broad multi-stakeholder character of institutions such as the Global Fund and GAVI demands an equally broad understanding of "CSOs." The term encompasses advocacy, service, and other NGOs as well as NGO coalitions and networks. (10) But it also encompasses other organizations "that have a presence in public life, expressing the interests and values of their members or others, based on ethical, cultural, political, scientific, religious or philanthropic considerations." (11) We include private foundations, scientific and technical bodies, indigenous peoples associations, and communities suffering the effects of particular international phenomena--all of which participate in the institutions discussed in this article. CSOs may be transnational, national, or local. In practice, transnational groups are more likely to participate in international decision-making, while national or local groups are more likely to participate in local decision-making.

    In this article, we document the growing divergence in civil society participation between global health and the environment, suggest explanations for this divergence, and analyze the implications of direct participation for responding to global challenges. The first section briefly compares civil society participation across four pairings of health and environmental institutions. To maximize comparability, we analyze pairings of institutions that have similar missions and that were established at similar points in time. The second section offers an explanation for the divergence in participation. We identify three significant causal factors: civil society demand for participation; the nature of the forum in which an institution is established; and path dependence within an issue area. We also show how these factors have influenced the development of specific institutions. The third section considers the normative implications of civil society participation in international decision-making. We argue that direct participation has important advantages over mere consultative processes. The article concludes by considering the implications of our analysis for the future design of effective international institutions.

  3. The Divergence of Global Health and Environmental Institutions

    This section compares four pairings of institutions from the fields of global health and the environment. While complete symmetry is not possible, we pair organizations from the two fields in terms of both their function--for example, policy-making or financing--and the general timing of their establishment. This approach allows us to at least partially control for explanatory factors that are associated with function (for example, that states might maintain particularly tight control over financing bodies) and with the development of norms and practices over time (for example, that a broad norm of civil society participation may have developed in recent decades). Table 1 identifies the four pairings discussed in this section.

    TABLE 1: COMPARISONS OF GLOBAL HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT INSTITUTIONS Function Global Health Environment Core Institution Who {1946} Unep {1972} POLICY AND COORDINATION Unaids {1994} CSD {1993} Financing GAVI {1999} GEF {1991/94} Financing Global Fund {2002} AF {2007} Climate Investment Funds {2008} 1. Core Institutions

    The core institutions for health and the environment were created before civil society participation had permeated international governance. (12) Both establish the baseline participation arrangements from which more recent developments have grown. Non-state actors may act as observers, but they have no direct roles in decision-making. Over time, additional consultation mechanisms have been established.

    1. World Health Organization (WHO)

      The WHO, an inter-governmental organization created in 1946, based its relations with civil society on the model of consultative status that was initiated with ECOSOC...

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