CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
1.1 R ESEARCH B ACKGROUND AND R ESEARCH Q UESTION
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Chapter I: Introduction
1.1 Research Background and Research Question
Global governance has become a major catchphrase of many researches and studies in international politics over the past decade. Given the realist conventional understanding in international relations—the anarchic characteristics of the international system, states are the only major actors, security of the state and its survival as the core objective of state actions—the emergence of global governance related studies posed a great challenge to existing theories.1 Since the 1990s, many factors have contributed to the rise of certain phenomena that scholars and practitioners alike find new and interesting—retreat of the state, weakened sovereignty, scores of new actors in the international arena, interdependence of interstate relations, globalization, and democratization.
With the end of the Cold War, fall of the Soviet Union, and democratization of East European and other countries around the world, the bi-polar power struggle has ceased to be the simple structural background of the world. In the United Nations, more Security Council backed peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention tasks have been passed, and economic liberalist policies have become a major trend sweeping across national level policy implementation as well as in the supranational level organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In short, state sovereignty have been challenged reoccurringly and the old state-versus-market/ Keynesian-versus-Neoliberalism debate is hotter than ever.2
These changes gave way to many discussions about the role of the government and its function of governing. After finding widespread exceptions between what “ought to be” and
1 Deborah D. Avant, Martha Finnemore & Susan K. Sell. 2010. “Who Governs the Globe?” in Who Governs the Globe?, eds. Deborah D. Avant, Martha Finnemore & Susan K. Sell.( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 2
2 Thomas G. Weiss, “Governance, Good Governance and Global Governance: Conceptual and Actual Challenges,” Third World Quarterly 21, no. 5 (2000): 795-814.
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what actually “is”, the concept of “governance” appeared. The concept of governance at the state level, as defined by James Rosenau, is “not synonymous with government”.3 It
“encompasses the activities of governments, but also includes the many other channels through which ‘commands’ flow in the form of goals framed, directives issued, and policies pursued”.4 It “also subsumes informal, non-governmental mechanisms whereby those persons and organizations within its purview more ahead, satisfy their needs, and fulfill their wants”.5 Thus, Rosenau clearly points out that governments do not necessarily govern, and the need for governance may be filled in by other actors, just like how he termed his edited volume Governance Without Government.
Global governance, on the international level, is not an aggregate sum of sovereign government actions put together.6 Two things stand out to be mentioned here. First, the types of actors involved in “governance” are many. They include intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and transnational corporation (TNCs), as well as subnational actors such as local governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), communities, and individuals. Sovereign states are no longer the sole player. Second, the notion of “good” governance has been edging towards what can be called as more “human-centered” focuses, as compared to “state-centered” ones.
This notion includes “accountable, efficient, lawful, representative and transparent”,7 and thus enabling “the human development idea” of—“equality of opportunity, sustainability and empowerment of people”8 It also ties in with Rosenau’s observation that authority is in
“bifurcation”—people give authority no longer according to “tradition”, but based on
3 James N. Rosenau, “Governance, Order and Change in World Politics,” in Governance Without Government:
Order and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel. (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4.
4 James N. Rosenau, “Governance in the Twenty-first Century,” Global Governance 1, no. 1 (1995), 14.
5 Rosenau, Change in World Politics, 4.
6 Peter Willets, Non-governmental Organizations in World Politics: The Construction of Global Governance.
(London; New York : Routledge. 2011).
7 Thomas G. Weiss, “Governance, Good Governance and Global Governance: Conceptual and Actual Challenges,” Third World Quarterly 21, no. 5 (2000): 808.
8 Weiss, Conceptual and Actual Challenges, 807.
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coercive in nature; it is carried out by an array of actors on many levels in the form of formal and/or informal rules, norms, mechanisms, and activities; it is concerned with solving issues of collective action regarding public goods and services on multi-levels; it is an aggregation of cooperation from state government, intergovernmental authorities, the civil society, and the private sector.12However, as good as it sounds, global governance is not without criticism. Issues of transparency, legitimacy, representation, participation, and democratic deficiency have constantly been brought up concerning intergovernmental regimes.13 We find this apparent in many issue areas like international trade at conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO),14 international and national finance at Group of 20 meetings,15 and especially in the global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).16
Moreover, we are witnessing a slowdown in the progress of multilateral intergovernmental/supranational level negotiations in the recent decade. WTO’s Doha round has achieved no significant breakthroughs since 2001. Right now bilateral and regional free
9 James N. Rosenau,. 1995. “Sovereignty in a Turbulent World.” In Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention, eds. Michael Mastanduno and Gene Lyons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 191-227.
10 Avant, Finnemore & Sell, 2010.
11 See Stephen D. Krasner, 1999. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press).
12 Weiss, 2000; Willets, 2011; Margaret P. Karns and Karen A. Mingst. 2004. International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner..
13 Jan A. Scholte, 2002. “Civil Society and Democracy in Global Governance”, Global Governance 8 (3):
281-304; Fisher, Dana R., and Jessica Green. 2004. Understanding Disenfranchisement: Civil Society and Developing Countries’ Influence and Participation in Global Governance for Sustainable Development. Global Environmental Politics 4 (3): 65–84.
14 Michael Strange. 2011. “Discursivity of Global Governance: Vestiges of ‘Democracy’ in the World Trade Organization.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36(3): 240-256.
15 Fen Osler Hampson and Paul Heinbecker. 2011. The "New" Multilateralism of the Twenty-First Century.
Global Governance 17 (3):299-310.
16 Fisher and Green, 2004; Dana R. Fisher. 2010. “COP-15 in Copenhagen: How the Merging of Movements Left Civil Society Out in the Cold.” Global Environmental Politics 10 (2): 11-17.
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trade agreements are filling in the gap. UNFCCC’s climate negotiations have been stuck in the post-Kyoto framework on binding-or-not emission reduction targets since 2007, and just postponed this job last year at COP18 until 2015. It is the European Union, individual states and local cities that are going ahead with real action. All in all, it seems that the top-bottom approach has met major setbacks on various pending contemporary issues. Seemingly, they might not clear up in the near future.
Scholars have long supported some sort of bottom-up approach. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink paved way for a difference pathway to look at non-state actors in the international arena, enabling more systematic analysis of the agency of transnational advocacy networks, and explaining how and why it works.17 Dana Fisher and Jessica Green hoped for a better participation of the civil society (and developing countries) in global governance, thus they developed a model to explain and typify why certain groups are weaker than other in policy influence. They believe that as long as these “disenfranchisement”
exists, global governance for sustainable development will be limited.18 Thomas Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly went even further to invent a “Third” United Nations to emphasize the importance of non-state, non-secretariat(the “Second” UN), policy-influencing, professional individuals and experts from NGOs, think tanks, and the academia.19 Fisher, after the events of COP15 at Copenhagen, even criticized how the civil society was “left out in the cold” (2010).20
However, there are more radical genres in “bottom-up” approaches. In my own attendance of the UNFCCC 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico, I
17 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.
18 Fisher and Green, 2004.
19 Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly. 2009. “The ‘Third’ United Nations.” Global Governance, Vol., 15, No. 1, pp. 123-142; on the “First” UN, see Inis L. Claude Jr., "Peace and Security:
Prospective Roles for the Two United Nations", Global Governance, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1996), pp. 289-298.
20 Fisher pointed reasons due to over registration, poor conference planning and a paradox of civil society conference “outsiders”, the radical protestors, causing conference “insiders”, the pacifists, unable to participate in the conference. Therefore, it wasn’t exactly fault on the governments’ side.
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witnessed a gathering of the famous transnational grass-root social movement called “La Via Campesina”. La Via Campesina is consisted of small to middle-sized farmers, poor peasants, rural women, and indigenous communities from America, Africa, Asia, and Europe seriously concerned about their farming rights, community rights, and food sovereignty being attacked by the local/national governments and/or corporate interests. They “defend small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice” and “strongly oppose corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature”.21 They view all solutions brought up by UNFCCC as fraudulent and false promises. They only believe in the people and people’s solutions to their collective action and public goods problems. The approaches mentioned before talk about how actors in the civil society can influence policy making with the authorities. But this approach hopes to reclaim the authority in its own affairs and make its own decisions.
Interestingly enough, this community’s/people’s view has academicals support with empirical evidence. Elinor Ostrom (1990) and her colleagues studied common-pool resource (CPR) management for years, and found that many community-based CPR institutions have successfully managed their common goods for over centuries. 22 Moreover, this community-based, bottom-up approach has been nothing new historically. The English medieval commonfield systems serve as interesting examples.
The English medieval commonfield was made famous by Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article
“The Tragedy of the Commons”. In the article, he leads the reader to “picture a pasture open to all”.23 In the economic sense of marginal utility of gains, it is in fact a good bargain to keep on adding to one’s own herd. Therefore, when all herdsmen act freely on self-interest, it
21 La Via Campesina. 2011. “The International Peasant's Voice.” In
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/organisation-mainmenu-44.posted. Last updated 09 February 2011.
22 Elinor Ostrom, 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York, NY.: Cambridge University Press.
23 Garrett Hardin. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162: 1243-1248. Reprinted in Managing the Commons 2nd ed. eds., John A. Baden and Douglas S. Noonan. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 3-16. The pages mentioned in this paper are all from this print and not the 1968 original print.
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causes overgrazing and thus the tragedy: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”.24 However, Susan Jane Buck Cox argued that the tragic logic proposed by Hardin never did happen in history.25 Not only did it not happen, the British commonfields actually operated for hundreds of years. Hence, Buck suggests that the communal courts of medieval England manors could be a “remedy” to the “ruins” of commons governance of today.26
More scholarly works build into the conventional wisdom of the British commons.
Barrington Moore in his famous book “Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy”
argued that due to the enclosure movements, the peasantry class in Britain was effectively dissolved, thus contributing to the development of democracy in England. The process of the enclosure movements and start of the industrial revolution was also linked by Douglass North and Robert Thomas in their book “The Rise of the Western World”—that the release of abundant and cheap labor from the countryside caused by the enclosure movements was a great contributing factor to the transformation of production during the “revolution”. What became of the lives of the mass proletariats was vividly depicted by social critics and writers alike, like Charles Dicken in his famous series “The Christmas Carol”.
Interesting enough, three similarities of enclosure movements during the late medieval to early modern periods and that of today ring loud to me: (1) there is plain peasantry agony and disillusion towards the governance structure, local, national and even intergovernmental alike; (2) we find strong structural constraints at work with the victims suffering greatly from weak agency and bearing great despair; (3) we find many a failure in the original governing/institutional design, in which if they were better designed in the first place may lessen or even avoid the horrendous situations of the affected people originally depending
24 Hardin. 1968.
25 Susan Jane Buck Cox, 1985. “No tragedy on the commons.” Environmental Ethics, Vol. 7 (Spring): 49-61. In the rest of the paper, I will mention Susan Jane Buck Cox as “Buck” due to the fact that in later publications she dropped “Cox” and used only “Buck”. See Buck’s affiliations page at
http://www.uncg.edu/psc/FacultyVita/Buck%202012.pdf.
26 Buck, 1985, p. 61.
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their livelihoods on these institutions that went wrong.
It is from personal experiences and academic encounters of class readings that I finally came to this research question. I share Buck’s take at the commons and ask the overall question of this paper: What light can historical long-enduring institutions shed on community-based institutions and even global governance today? In other words, what can be done to alleviate the agony in the impacted communities? What was the cause of the agony?
What can be done to change it?
For empirical evidence, I introduce my historical case for reference: the case made famous by Garret Hardin—The Tragedy of the Commons.27 I argue that not only was the British commons not a “tragedy”, but had lasted for centuries, and largely fits in with the 8 long-enduring CPR principles that Ostrom derived from her research of many case studies. I support this point by analyzing both internal and external factors contributing to continuity and change of the British commonfield systems using historical institutional analysis.
Moreover, I also argue that the fall of the British commons was not an “inevitable” result of the enclosure movement and industrialization,28 but infringement of certain foundational principles for the CPR to work self-sustainably. Examining the fall of a once successful community-based institution can bring forth lessons for today’s governance in the subnational level, and even for global governance itself.