Global Public Policy and Transnational Administration

Abstract

There has been a proliferation of administrative practices and processes of policy‐making and policy delivery beyond but often overlapping with traditional nation state policy processes. New formal and informal institutions and actors are behind these policy processes, often in cooperation with national public administrations but sometimes quite independently from them. These ‘multi‐stakeholder initiatives’, ‘global public–private partnerships’ and ‘global commissions’ are creating or delivering global policies even though the geographic pattern of policy action can vary considerably. Implementation may occur at (trans)national or local levels in different regions more or less contemporaneously, or also in problem contexts that are cross‐border and co‐jurisdictional, hence our use of the term ‘transnational administration’. Traditional policy and public administration studies have tended to undertake analysis of the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies rather than to investigate transnational policy‐making above and beyond the state. This article extends the ambit of public administration and policy studies into what has traditionally been considered the realm of International Relations scholarship to identify and map new modes of global (public) policy and transnational administration and prospects for ongoing conceptualization.

How does knowledge circulate in a regulatory network? Observing a European Platform of Regulatory Authorities meeting

“…It would be inappropriate to speak in such a context of power as domination, but there are leaders and laggards with regard to the contributions to the debates. Although the members of a network such as EPRA can be seen as part of the “Eurocracy” (Kelemen & Tarrant ) and as “internationalized public sector officials” (Stone & Ladi , p. 845), they are by no means all equally “natural cosmopolitans” (Kennedy ): some are more active in accompanying the internationalization of regulation than others. For example, prior to starting a career in British Ofcom as the head of the section on international affairs, one of the EPRA board members studied law in Madrid, did her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence on “Regulation and Competition in European Broadcasting: A Study of Pluralism through Access,” was a researcher on comparative media law in Oxford, and a visiting lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest.…”

“…National regulatory agencies are frequently embedded in transnational “regulatory expert networks” (Eberlein & Newman , p. 46), whose establishment is often promoted by supranational bodies, such as the European Commission (EC) (Coen & Thatcher ; Levi‐Faur ; Mathieu ). A network can be defined as “a set of relatively stable relationships of a non‐hierarchical and interdependent nature which link a variety of actors” (Levi‐Faur , p. 813), and such regulatory networks have become “new transnational actors of administration” (Stone & Ladi , p. 839) that promote an “international policy culture” (Stone , p. 548). How does this form of “incorporated transgovernmentalism” (Eberlein & Newman 2008), which has become a popular form of “decentred” (Black ) governance and of the regulatory regime in Europe (Dehousse ; Eberlein & Grande ), work concretely?…”

Partial Two‐Way Mirror: International Organization Budget Transparency

“…This paper acknowledges the role of public administration scholarship in understanding national‐level administration and in particular, budget transparency. However, such research also benefits from a conceptual stretching from its prior sovereign‐level understandings to spaces beyond the cartographic state and into global governance (Stone and Ladi, ). This transnationalization of administration (Stone and Moloney, ) should encourage research into whether and how IOs are as transparent as the member states to which they provide governance advice.…”

Governing Disasters: Embracing Human Rights in a Multi-Level, Multi-Duty Bearer, Disaster Governance Landscape

“…Stone & Ladi, 2015), that governance does not equal government. The definition of disaster governance provided above clearly considers 'governance' to go 'beyond governmental settings, powers, processes and tools by encouraging collective actions through the engagement of all stakeholders' (Graham et al, 2003;emphasis added).…”