The Political Legitimacy of Global Governance and the Proper Role of Civil Society Actors

Abstract

In this paper, two claims are made. The main claim is that a fruitful approach for theorizing the political legitimacy of global governance and the proper normative role of civil society actors is the so-called 'function-sensitive' approach. The underlying idea of this approach is that the demands of legitimacy may vary depending on function and the relationship between functions. Within this functionsensitive framework, six functions in global governance are analyzed and six principles of legitimacy defended, together constituting a minimalist account of political legitimacy. This account suggests that civil society actors may strengthen political legitimacy by performing five of these functions under certain conditions and insofar as the proposed normative political principles are fulfilled: problem identification, agenda-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring, and evaluation. The second claim is critical and is chiselled out against the backdrop of this function-sensitive account, through which I demonstrate that much vagueness and confusion with regard to the proper role of civil society actors for strengthening the political legitimacy of global governance could be traced to the so-called 'transmission belt' model, which has gained popularity in international political theory. This model depicts civil society as a transmission belt between the public sphere and decision-making loci, where it is assumed that civil society actors contribute to the strengthening of political legitimacy by transmitting peoples' preferences, beliefs, and opinions from the former to the latter space by indirectly or directly influencing the decision-making. It is argued that this picture is misleading and generates erroneous prescriptions of how civil society actors should act to increase political legitimacy.

The Democratization of Global Governance through Civil Society Actors and the Challenge from Political Equality

“…First, it has led to erroneous conclusions about global democracy, where every instance of civil society involvement in the decision-making has wrongfully been interpreted as an instance of democratization. Second, it has neglected the many functions that civil society actors may rightfully perform to strengthen global democracy, not only with regard to pre-decision functions such as problem identification and agenda-setting, discussed in this article, but also post-decision functions such as evaluation and monitoring (Erman, 2018a(Erman, , 2018b. My hope is that the theoretical contribution made here can be useful for formulating new empirical questions about transnational civil society in global democracy, which utilizes a more robust conceptual and normative framework.…”

“…Let me conclude this article by bringing up a possible defence of the transmission belt model, which nourishes from an argument about feasibility (Erman, 2018a). In the last decades, the theoretical literature on global democracy has grown drastically, engendering a range of different proposals and models bringing democratic principles to bear on global governance (Archibugi, 2000(Archibugi, , 2002Held, 2002).…”

Interpreting Legitimation Through Participation: The ASEAN Civil Society Conference

“…Second, that civil society participation provides legitimacy to policymaking by mitigating the 'democracy deficit' of delegated agencies and transnational governance arrangements, where there is not a clearly defined demos holding policymakers to account (Dryzek, 2012;Fung, 2007Fung, , 2015; Steffek and Ferretti, 2009). This article investigates the latter claim for civil society participation, in response to recent calls for further research into the relationship between participation and legitimacy (Bernauer and Betzold, 2012;Birnbaum, 2016;Erman, 2018). Democratic theorists have focused on specifying the ideal conditions under which participatory innovations increase legitimacy (Fung, 2006;Dingwerth, 2007;Yang, 2016).…”