This article presents a discourse approach to the study of legitimacy of governance beyond the democratic state. It starts from the empirical question of how international organizations legitimate their own activities and how they create perceptions of legitimacy in the absence of democratic participation and control. In answering this question the article draws on elements from Max Weber's theory of rational legal domination and on Jürgen Habermas's idea of legitimation through justificatory discourse. This article claims that the legitimacy of international governance hinges upon popular assent to the justifications of its goals, principles and procedures. It thereby also challenges much of the existing literature on legitimacy above the state that regards a democracy deficit a priori as a core problem of international governance.

We argue that the democratization of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an appropriate public sphere that connects decision‐making processes with transnational constituency. The emergence of such a public sphere would require more transparency in international organizations as well as institutional settings in which policy‐makers respond to stakeholders’ concerns. Organized civil society plays a key role by exposing global rule‐making to public scrutiny and bringing citizens’ concerns onto the agenda. We illustrate the prospects and difficulties of building a transnational public sphere with the example of the WTO.

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Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210512000393How to cite this article: JENS STEFFEK (2013). Explaining cooperation between IGOs and NGOs -push factors, pull factors, and the policy cycle.Abstract. The ever closer collaboration between intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is empirically well described but poorly theorised. In this article I develop a general theoretical framework for analysing emergent patterns of cooperation between IGOs and NGOs, which may be used to generate hypotheses or guide comparatives studies. The starting point is a conception of organisational actors as purposeful but resource-dependent. The article then combines a 'resource exchange perspective' from organisational sociology with the model of a policy cycle from comparative politics. The result is a theoretical framework that allows to identify incentives for, as well as obstacles to, IGO-NGO cooperation along all phases of the policy cycle. In a concluding section the limits of this model and the underlying assumptions are discussed.

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In much of the current literature on global and European governance, “public accountability” has come to mean accountability to national executives, to peers, to courts, and even to markets. I argue that such a re‐conceptualization of “public accountability” as an umbrella term blurs a crucial dimension of the original concept: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of government through public debate. In this article I critically discuss the advance of managerial and administrative notions of accountability that accompanied the steep rise of the governance concept. I advocate a return to a conception of public accountability as accountability to the wider public. I investigate the prospects for such public accountability beyond the state, which depends upon the emergence of a transnational public sphere, consisting of media and organized civil society. The function of such a transnational public sphere is to put pressure on governance institutions in case of massive maladministration, and to make sure that emergent political concerns and demands are recognized in the process of international policy making.

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