The Shifting Sands of Regional Governance: The Case of Inter‐American Democracy Promotion

Abstract

This article evaluates the limits and possibilities of Inter-American democracy promotion through the application of a five-part governance framework: the nature of the problem, governance architecture, the actor set, the construction of a sphere of authority, and contextual factors. I argue that the ability of the Organization of American States (OAS) to promote and defend democracy effectively has been hampered by a series of important changes in context: the structure of power, material conditions, regionalism, and ideology and discourse. The conditions that originally fostered the creation of an Inter-American defense of democracy regime during the 1990s have been largely replaced in the new millennium by strong impediments to the consolidation of this issue area as a sphere of authority. Unless the OAS acquires more stable contextual foundations, the future of Inter-American democracy promotion will remain highly problematic.

Killing Democracy Softly: Executive Privilege and the Defense of Democracy in the Americas

“…Despite the various explanations provided above, the role of each country's executive in encouraging or discouraging responses to democratic crises should be discussed. This argument builds off of the work on executive sovereignty and presidentialism, which argues that the OAS has traditionally represented what has been termed "club multilateralism," which is a "top-down, vertical form that privileges and upholds the prerogatives of national executives and their diplomatic representatives" (Cooper & Legler, 2006, p. 19; see also Cooper & Legler 2001;Legler, 2007Legler, , 2012Malamud, 2005). Cooper and Legler (2001, p. 117) note that, "individual leaders clearly make a difference in either pushing or holding back the movement toward democratic solidarity in the Americas."…”

Governance and Democratization since the 2008 Financial Crisis

“…As noted in my longer article for this special issue (Luckhurst ), IMF chief Dominique Strauss‐Kahn and his chief economist Olivier Blanchard had accepted the benefits of fiscal measures to counter economic recession before it became more widely practiced (Farrell and Quiggin , 17), especially through the “post‐Lehman” policy responses to the economic crisis after September 2008. The articles from Hartmut Lenz () and Thomas Legler () in this special issue further analyze the international institutional context during recent years. The former indicates how the economic crisis has influenced economic negotiations between industrialized and developing states; the latter notes that while the crisis has had less direct impact on Latin America than elsewhere, it has contributed to the broader trend of diminishing influence of the United States in the region.…”

“…This issue of asymmetries could be exacerbated by the relative lack of expertise and resources in developing countries, for which Lagunes' () claim concerning the negative effects of corruption in developing states on the quality of public policy making could be significant. However, Legler () argues that the Organization of American States underpins a regional, multilateral framework that actually has helped to consolidate norms of democracy in the region, thus pointing to the potential normative benefits of multilateral institutionalization.…”

“…Legler () demonstrates that in Latin America, despite the consolidation of democratic norms, national governments have sometimes lacked mutual trust due to information asymmetries, which has limited multilateral policy coordination in their responses to the world economic crisis. By contrast, Cerda Becker and Cuevas Valenzuela () show how trust between Chilean domestic actors has been constructed over two decades of the country's democratization, enabling them to enact a national strategy to protect employment.…”

Leadership and Governance Tools for Village Sustainable Development in China

“…Since the 1990s, the governance-network frame (GNF) has become the dominant theoretical paradigm in analyzing the complexity of collaborative governance in the context of the decreasing influence of bureaucratic authorities and the increasing dependence on partnerships [1][2][3][4]. Strands of literature have built and combined their conceptual lenses with empirical knowledge, leading to wide advocacy for the merits of governance networks in metropolitan and rural development [5,6]. However, compared to a large number of studies on metropolitan centers, less research has focused on rural-villages.…”