Title: Mapping a Hidden World of International Regulatory Cooperation
Abstract: I INTRODUCTION Almost exactly one decade ago, Law and Contemporary Problems published a highly influential symposium entitled The Emergence of Global Administrative Law. (1) The articles in that issue described rapidly changing patterns of transnational regulation, identified an emerging administrative space, and explored normative questions raised by shifts in authority to transnational administrative processes. At roughly the same time, network scholars described a world order, in which transnational governance networks increasingly conducted functions across a wide variety of issue areas. (2) Both literatures introduced new conceptualizations of trends in and standard-setting. This symposium's focus on international cooperation revisits themes explored in the global administrative law and networks literatures. Broadly conceived, consists of arrangements to promote in the design, monitoring, and enforcement or ex post management of regulation, with a view to supporting the consistency of rules across national borders. The topic has returned to the center of the diplomatic and scholarly agenda, in part as a result of the failures that contributed to the global recession. Indeed, as this symposium goes to press, the European Union (EU) and the United States are engaged in EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations, which are focused on promoting coherence, (3) and a lively debate has emerged over how best to implement an executive order promoting cooperation. (4) Thus, this symposium could not be more timely. The contributions to this symposium substantially advance scholarly understanding of the strategies governments use to promote more consistent and coordinated rules. Notably, although the articles diverge on a number of critical issues, they share a common understanding of the phenomena under investigation. International cooperation, under this shared view, involves domestic officials from different jurisdictions jointly addressing issues of mutual concern. This activity is characterized as because it involves activities between or among officials from different states. Despite the important insights found in these articles, the focus on interactions among domestic regulators from different jurisdictions has the unintended and unfortunate effect of obscuring other important forms of cooperation, including, specifically, interactions among actors from different organizations and legal regimes. These activities, analyzed in more detail below, are regulatory in the sense that they involve sustained and organized efforts to modify the behavior of target actors to advance social or collective ends, through rules or norms and, often, mechanisms of implementation and enforcement. Moreover, these activities result from interactions, meaning they are a product of the myriad ways that actors and institutions engage with and react to one another. To be sure, organizations also interact with firms, nongovernmental organizations, and other civil society actors in ways that produce novel and important forms of regulation. However, in recent years, a large and sophisticated literature has analyzed both hybrid public-private bodies and private transnational regulation. (5) Ironically, the same amount of scholarly attention has not been devoted to regulation resulting from interactions involving more familiar actors, namely organizations. The inattention to cooperation, however, is particularly significant for several reasons. First, is commonly used to address a wide variety of issues. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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