A Risky Business: Hybridization and Global Governance

That global governance has witnessed a progressive expansion in complexity and institutional reach is nowadays a well-established truism in both academia and practice. Much of this trend is due to the dialectic relationship of two major ‘realms’ of world politics: multilateralism and the civil society sphere. Yet, a third pervasive element has steadily risen to the forefront of international relations: private governance at global and transnational scales, centered on the dynamics of public-private partnerships (or PPPs) and corporate responsibility actions such as the Forest Stewardship Council, the ISO-14000 scheme or more localized initiatives like the CEOs for Cities program. However, this key element often remains overlooked: what is the role of these hybrid links in the development of structures and institutions for world politics? Once again, global environmental governance provides us with a poignant demonstration of this evolution.

Providing what is the dominant force in environmental politics, the multilateral arena has been aptly described by Robert Falkner and Nicholas Stern as a “global deal approach” characterized by states as major actors and pinpointed on UN-led operations. This take is generally led by a governmental agenda implemented through international summits (such as Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997 or Copenhagen in 2009), multilateral relations (as with the European Union carbon reduction schemes) and is aimed at developing common targets and binding obligations to offer concerted responses to environmental degradation. Typical players within this context are of course state governments, as well as international organizations such as the UN and the EU, as well as coalitions of allied nations such as the Alliance of Small Island States or the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Core to this approach is the attempt to develop international regimes through legally-binding instruments such as Protocols and top-down implementation schemes. Alongside this main goal, the ‘global deal’ take is also focused on increasing the awareness of the importance of domestic commitment and local action under the established frameworks.

The “global civil society” (GCS) approach, as many scholars termed it, offers an alternative take on the environmental question and climate change in particular. By relying on a bottom-up process led by non-governmental organizations and transnational advocacy coalitions such as the Climate Action Network, an umbrella organization for over 500 NGOs working on both governmental and individual action agendas, GCS approaches prompt parallel and cross-cutting political processes beyond the official ‘track-I’ diplomacy. In this take, actors rely mostly on campaigning and lobby instruments in order to prompt the ‘global deal’ track to adopt binding obligations as well as to raise civil awareness of the issue of environmental degradation. The twin task of GCS is thus performed through contemporaneous lobbying and monitoring of the activities of states and international organizations, which remain the hinges for global action. Typical policymaking arenas for this approach are therefore equally ‘side events’ to major conferences and social fora, as well as track-II initiatives bringing representatives from the global deal track in direct contact with an heterogeneous public of NGOs, private coalitions and local advocacy groups. Occasionally, the opposite might also occur when GCS representatives are invited to the table of high politics as either experts or ad hoc mediators. Yet, generally, the global civil approaches tend to remain largely referential to the “global deal” dynamics and mostly cluster around it.

However, environmental responses have also gone beyond the language of international politics: the global governance architecture concerned with this phenomenon has been expanding a further ‘aggregate’ dimension which stands partly as an alternative and partly as a complement to the “global deal” take. This complex policy realm is clustered around the core international process and is principally pinpointed on this latter’s hybridization with non-governmental entities that are no longer just occupying advocacy roles ‘on the side’ of the multilateral world, but also carrying out implementation and adaptation tasks. This, while embryonic in the 1980s-90s, stepped onto the center stage at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) convened in Johannesburg. Global environmental politics has since then steadily been developing policymaking fora beyond the UN structure, into the realm of public-private partnerships. The hybridization of climate policymaking structures kick-started in Johannesburg signaled to the wider global governance audience that, as in several other policy areas, the effectiveness of the international environmental effort was in large part dependent on both governmental and non-governmental agency. If the WSSD conference itself provided little more than a non-binding declaration of intents, the broader meeting of global environmental governance actors in South Africa produced nearly 300 public-private partnerships under UN auspices and registered under a UN-run Partnership Database. While under the UNFCCC’s Johannesburg Plan of Implementation a series of intergovernmental (‘type I’) agreements offered by the multilateral process, an exponentially larger set of PPPs was signed at WSSD. These constituted “voluntary, self-enforced and non-negotiated” (‘type II’) accords among different sets of governments, international organizations, NGOs and industry partners. As such, diplomats worldwide have been witnessing a third emerging presence in the global politics of the environment: private environmental governance (or ‘PEG’). In fact, civil society approaches could be further distinguished into at least two categories of non-governmental takes to global governance, broadly encompassing both interest groups motivated by ‘instrumental’ goals targeted to the promotion of the well-being of the members of the group, as well as advocacy networks seeking to lobby for a perceived common good - a distinction that, as International Relations Professor Thomas Risse highlighted, might roughly coincide with the ‘for profit/not for profit’ divide. Of course, this differentiation needs not to be interpreted as a strict separation, but rather as a possible continuum along which all GCS approaches, be they organizations or looser networks, tend to locate themselves. To this extent, it is analytically useful to distinguish these two takes as components of the broader ‘global civil society’ category sketched at the beginning of the article for comparative purposes.

Now, if ‘common good’ advocacy approaches tend to represent the bedrock of non-governmental (GCS) environmental politics, it is now well accepted among international scholars that a substantial and tangible privatization of environmental governance has been establishing a substantial presence on the international scene. Based on the need for business and industrial sectors to adapt to the changing global scenario, and the key challenges posed by the rise of climate change issues, these private actors have progressively undertaken an active role in environmental politics. PEG can in this instance be tagged as capable of promoting innovative forms of governance mostly based on transnational likeness with diverse actors (such as states, NGOs and IGOs) that, while not an entirely new phenomenon, have a lasting impact on global affairs and constitute more than a transient phenomenon.

The hybridization of governing practices is, in this sense, not just a matter of economic privatization: first, in the public-private partnerships constituting much of the bedrock of extensive climate change action at multiple scales, government entities such as cities remain ‘thin’ providers in the sense that they serve a central, but not independent, role in policymaking. In turn, the private sectors, represented not solely by corporations but also smaller firms, business councils and other civil society organizations, acquires a partial mandate to partake in policymaking processes. This raises questions of legitimacy and accountability at a multiplicity of scales not just domestically but also transnationally. This dynamic might, in fact, result in a ‘suspension’ of politics by removing spaces for contestation and public scrutiny, pushing towards the dangerous effects of a cross-cutting depoliticization trend that tends to take existing global power structures as a given. Yet, this runs the risk of transforming these hybrid links into what James Ferguson famously labelled an “anti-politics machine” - an apparatus that expands the exercise of power through depoliticization, technicalization and temporary exclusion of politics proper from even the most sensible political operations such as that of providing sustainable solutions to the continuation of life on our planet. In this case, and despite the drawbacks of civil society and global deal processes, global governance might still need all the politics that it can get.