Global Dimensions of Policy

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Understanding the GlobalDimensions of Policy

Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

London School of Economics and Political Science

AbstractBeyond wide agreement that many areas of contemporarypolicy making are unintelligible if processes that transcend theboundaries of individual states are not taken into account,analysts often disagree on how various global and local factors

interact to produce policies and policy outcomes. Thedisagreement stems in part from the use of different analyticlenses, and specifically from the choice between state-centricand polycentric lenses. This article examines the fundamentalassumptions of these general perspectives with regard to thepolity, politics and policy dimensions of global policy making,and surveys some of the research questions and findings thatresulted from their use. It concludes that scholars and policymakers should treat the two analytical lenses as complementary,as each of them stimulates the analyst to ask questions and lookfor entities and causal connections that the other lens may miss.

Policy Implications Analysts and policy makers need to be aware of the some-

times implicit assumptions underlying global policy studies. State-centric and polycentric lenses provide complemen-

tary and valuable perspectives on the global dimensions ofpolicy making.

Systematic data collection and analysis of nonstatemechanisms of policy making should be encouraged andsupported.

There is wide agreement that many areas of contemporarypolicy making are unintelligible if observers do not take into

account processes that transcend the boundaries of individualstates: financial regulation, food safety standards, environ-mental management systems, taxation, intellectual property,telecommunications, infectious disease control, accountingstandards, to name but a few policy domains where globalfactors can be expected to be influential, and sometimes deci-sive. Beyond that basic insight, though, there is little agree-ment among analysts on the relative importance of global asopposed to more local factors (however defined) and onhow global and local factors interact to produce policies andpolicy outcomes. To be sure, disagreements often stem from

differing interpretations of specific events or relationships:for instance, whether a particular policy choice was mademainly in order to protect the market share of a nationalindustry vis-a-vis competitors based in jurisdictions wherethat policy was already implemented; or whether govern-ments that are members of a particular international organi-

sation are more likely than others to adopt a certain policy.But sometimes interpretations of global dimensions of policymaking vary for a more fundamental reason: analysts use dif-ferent analytical lenses and hence see different things, even

when they are trying to understand the dynamics of the samepolicy domain.

This article considers two general analytical lenses, or per-spectives, that can be used to study global policy, which willbe called the state-centric and polycentric lenses. The aimof the article is to highlight the respective assumptions ofthese perspectives and to review some of the research ques-tions and findings that resulted from them. The terms ana-

lytical lens and perspective (which are employedsynonymously) are used to emphasise that state-centrism andpolycentrism are not theories, if theories are conceived ascoherent sets of hypotheses about causal and constitutiverelationships between phenomena. An analytical lens israther a set of general assumptions, which form the basis on

which a number of theories can be developed. Theoriesbased on the same state-centric or polycentric assumptionsmay well be pointing in opposite directions: for instance, astate-centric theory that expects a ruthless struggle for sur-

vival and dominance among self-interested states is clearlydifferent from a state-centric theory that expects states to bedeeply socialised in the respect for shared global norms. Sim-ilarly, a polycentric theory that assigns to multinational cor-porations a structurally dominant role in the global system isclearly different from a polycentric theory that expects a plu-ralistic balance of power between all kinds of nonstate actors.

It should be stated at the outset that the relationshipbetween the two lenses is not conceived here as intrinsicallycompetitive. In some cases it may be fruitful to contrasttheories derived from the two perspectives and comparetheir explanatory power in relation to certain policy cases.But in other circumstances the two analytical lenses are

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better seen as complementary: each of them stimulates theanalyst to ask questions and look for entities and causalconnections that the other lens may miss. In analogy tophysical lenses, each of them allows the observer to seesome objects more sharply while at the same time blurringthe context or cutting it out altogether.

The article consists of two main sections. The first sec-

tion begins by outlining the key assumptions of the state-centric perspective with regard to the polity, the politics andthe policy dimensions of policy making.1 It then shows thatthis perspective has led analysts to focus on three broadareas of research: global policy competition, global policycommunication and global policy cooperation. Some exem-plary studies conducted on those research questions arementioned. The second section outlines the key assump-tions of the polycentric perspective, again with regard to thepolity, the politics and the policy dimensions. It then dis-cusses some emerging research agendas among analystsusing this perspective, notably the theme of the inclusive-

ness and public accountability of private and hybrid gover-nance arrangements. The concluding section offers somethoughts on the relationship between the two lenses.

1. The State-Centric Perspective

Assumptions

Authors using a state-centric perspective make a simpleassumption with regard to the polity that is the object ofanalysis: it is the state. The policies under consideration arethus instances of public policy, to the extent that publicpolicy is equated with policy made by states, individually or

collectively (Section 2 considers this equation further). Inrelation to the dimension ofpolitics, the assumption is that itoccurs in two separate arenas: domestic and international.Domestic politics consists of the competition for influenceon state policy making among groups variously organised aspolitical parties, party factions, pressure groups, judicialbodies, semi-independent public authorities, etc. Dependingon the key institutional features of the polity, electoral poli-tics plays a larger or smaller role in shaping policies, but italways interacts with other mechanisms and channels ofinterest representation, such as corporatist arrangements, fac-tional bargaining within parties and contentious collective

action. International politics, on the other hand, consists ofinteraction among governments, and it also can take a varietyof forms: coercive diplomacy, bilateral and multilateral nego-tiations, reciprocal or unilateral policy adjustment, inclusionin and exclusion from policy arrangements, to mention justthe most common. Domestic and international politics maybe interpreted as functioning according to fundamentallydifferent logics. For instance, a very influential approachin international relations scholarship, structural realism, isbased on the assumption that domestic politics is based onthe political ordering principle of hierarchy whereas interna-

tional politics is based on the political ordering principle ofanarchy (Waltz, 1979). But the assumption of a fundamentalqualitative difference between the two domains is not a nec-essary component of the state-centric view. What is neces-sary is only that the two political domains are separate andthat they are connected almost exclusively through govern-ments. In other words, there is an outside and an inside

and governments are the only gatekeepers between them.One example of a theory based on state-centric assump-

tions is liberal intergovernmentalism, which has beendeveloped by Andrew Moravcsik (1998) and other authors,mostly with reference to European rather than global inte-gration. Liberal intergovernmentalism combines a liberalapproach to the formation of state preferences (based onthe issue-specific economic interests of powerful domesticconstituents) with a bargaining theory of internationalnegotiations (based on the relative power of states stem-ming from asymmetrical interdependence) and a functionaltheory of institutional choice (based on the role of interna-

tional institutions in increasing the credibility of interstatecommitments).The state-centric perspective has generated several

research programmes that have greatly enriched our under-standing of the global dimensions of policy making. Theseresearch programmes have clustered around three themesthat can be called global policy competition, global policycommunication and global policy cooperation.2 The orderin which these themes are discussed in the remainder of thissection reflects the minimum levels of interaction density,and hence opportunities for socialisation among policymakers, that are required for the relevant causal mechanismsto operate. In principle, competition requires very little

interaction among decision makers in different countries toproduce an effect on policy, as a natural selection mecha-nism may eliminate unsuccessful policies and allow success-ful policies to survive and be replicated. In practice,however, decisions about which policies to adopt or aban-don are often made after ascertaining which policies areimplemented in other countries. Similarly, in principle,communication may consist of the limited interactioninvolved in gathering information about foreign policyexperiences, but in practice government officials exchangeinformation on a much more regularised and institutiona-lised basis. Finally, cooperation almost always requires

extensive interaction during pre-agreement negotiation andpost-agreement verification of compliance. The followingsubsections present some exemplary findings.

Global Policy Competition

In academic and public debates it is often remarked thatstates design regulative and redistributive policies in sucha way as to strengthen the competiveness of domestic com-panies in global markets and the attractiveness of their own

jurisdiction as a location for investments. Once a govern-

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ment changes its policies to protect its companies or toattract capital, this results in a policy externality for othergovernments, which are under pressure to change their poli-cies as well. According to some authors, global competitivepressures are so strong that contemporary states have becomecompetition states (Cerny, 1997). Analysts often also pre-dict the kind of policies that competition promotes: a general

convergence towards policies that minimise costs for compa-nies exposed to foreign competition and for transitionallymobile economic actors. In other words, competition is saidto produce a race to the bottom (RTB). From the point of

view of the governments, the equilibrium outcome is subop-timal, since none gain any competitive advantage while theirpolicies are more business friendly than they would other-

wise be a classic instance of a prisoners dilemma.The competitive regulation hypothesis has generated

much theoretical and empirical controversy. With regard toenvironmental regulation, for instance, there is considerabledisagreement over the extent to which polluting industries

relocate or expand in response to differences in regulatorystringency the pollution heavens hypothesis. While ear-lier research found no such effect, more recent researchsuggests that investment decisions are sensitive to differ-ences in regulatory stringency, but the question is far fromsettled (Brunnermeier and Levinson, 2004; Spatareanu,2007). More relevant for the purposes of this article is thequestion of whether governments perceive a problem of

jurisdictional competition and change their policies in theexpectation that industries will respond accordingly. Somestudies have found that exposure to competition affects thelikelihood that certain policies are adopted. Simmons andElkins (2004), for instance, examined 182 states from 1967

to 1996 and found that countries were much more likely toadopt a liberal capital account policy if their direct compet-itors for capital had done so. In some cases, competitiontriggers reforms based on efficiency considerations.

Thatcher (2007) found that regulatory competition was animportant cause of the reform of French, German and Ital-ian sectoral economic institutions in the areas of securitiestrading, telecommunications and airlines. Some of theextensive literature on the impact of globalisation on the

welfare state finds that, in some circumstances, increasedparticipation in international trade and finance tends toreduce government spending and social welfare pro-

grammes (Brune and Garrett, 2005; Mosley, 2007).On the whole, however, scholars tend to be more impres-

sed by the relative scarcity of empirical evidence supportingthe RTB hypothesis. For instance, Flanagan (2006) analysesdata from a large sample of countries at various levels ofeconomic development and finds no evidence that countriesthat are more open to international competition have weakerstatutory labour protection. Holzinger et al. (2008), whoexamined 24 industrialised countries between 1970 and2000, attempt but fail to find a significant effect of bilateraltrade openness on environmental policy convergence.

The logic of the RTB is intuitively compelling, and itsempirical weakness calls for an explanation. At least sevenpossible explanations can be advanced. Some of them arebased on the assumption that competitive pressures operateas posited, but that they are overridden by other factors.One explanation is that the global competitiveness of com-panies is only weakly affected by cross-national differences

in environmental, labour, social and fiscal policies, and thatthe stringency of regulation or the tax burden is not a majordeterminant of investment decisions. A second explanationis that economic actors are sensitive to costs imposed bypublic policies, but many governments are held back fromcompetitive regulation by domestic political and institu-tional constraints. Basinger and Hallerberg (2004) have pre-sented a sustained argument to this effect in relation to taxcompetition. A third explanation suggests that there is littleevidence of regulatory competition because governmentsanticipate its possibility and prevent it through internationalregulatory cooperation. A fourth explanation suggests that,

in certain economic sectors, one or two countries have sucha dominant position that they are unlikely to respond tocompetitive regulations enacted by lesser jurisdictions. Sim-mons (2001), for instance, argues that the market size andefficiency of US financial services allowed the US regulatorsto avoid a downward competitive spiral with foreign juris-dictions in financial market regulation.

Other explanations for the lack of empirical evidencequestion or modify the internal logic of the RTB hypothe-sis. A fifth explanation agrees that regulatory competitionmatters and promotes policy convergence, but argues that itdoes not necessarily lead towards less stringent standards.On the contrary, it can produce a race to the top. Vogel

(1995) famously noted that many US states adopted Cali-fornias more stringent automobile emissions standards,since the benefits of accessing the Californian market werelarge enough to justify a general improvement of standards.Vogel has called this dynamic the California effect, whichforms the conceptual counterpart to the Delaware effect,named after the most eager participant in the competitionamong US states to offer business-friendly corporate char-tering requirements. A sixth explanation maintains that, ifsome countries start out better endowed than others withfeatures that make them attractive to investors, then capitalmobility will increase rather than decrease policy heteroge-

neity (Rogowski, 2003). Finally, the absence of clear evi-dence for regulatory competition may be a result of theinadequate methodologies used to detect it (for a discussionsee Franzese and Hays, 2008).

Global Policy Communication

Policies implemented abroad can be not only a source ofexternalities, but also a source of information. Policy mak-ers often use information about experiences in othercountries in the process of designing or reviewing policies


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in their own jurisdiction. Modes of communication andinformation transmission differ widely in terms of intensity,regularity and formalisation. At one extreme is the case ofofficials in national administrations who learn about foreignexperiences by means of publicly available sources and havelittle or no interaction with policy makers of the countries

where those experiences originated. An intermediate level

of intensity, regularity and formalisation is represented bycommunication flows within transnational epistemic com-munities, which are usually defined as networks of profes-sionals with recognised expertise in a particular domain and

who share normative beliefs, causal beliefs, notions of valid-ity and a common policy enterprise (Haas, 1992, p. 3).Members of such epistemic communities provide informa-tion to policy makers or may be directly involved in design-ing regulatory policies. At the more institutionalised end ofthe transnational communication spectrum are formalisedbenchmarking and peer review exercises. Prominent exam-ples of transnational benchmarking exercises are Organisa-

tion for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)regulatory reviews, which started in 1998 and are based onself-reporting by national administrations, assessments byOECD staff and peer review among member states (Lodge,2005). The review process is entirely voluntary, since statesare neither obliged to undergo a review nor obliged toimplement the recommendations they receive.

If it is relatively easy to agree on what channels of com-munication are available to policy makers, there is moredisagreement among scholars about which causal mecha-nisms are more likely to operate in cases of policy transfer.As a way of summarising the mechanisms that have beenhighlighted in the literature it is useful to refer to March

and Olsens (1989) distinction between the logic of con-sequentialism and the logic of appropriateness and, as sug-gested by Risse (2000), to add arguing and deliberation asa distinct logic. An explanatory approach based on the logicof consequentialism would assume that policy makers haveclearly defined policy goals but imperfect information aboutcauseeffect relationships. Gathering information aboutforeign experiences is thus a rational way to improve thelikelihood that policies are designed in such a way thatthey attain the intended goals, in a process of Bayesianlearning (Simmons et al., 2008. p. 26).

By contrast, explanatory approaches based on the logic of

appropriateness focus on the social construction of normsof appropriate behaviour. The goals of the policy makersare not considered to be exogenous to the interaction withtheir foreign peers, but are developed with reference toforeign models that are considered as legitimate withinthe reference group. Simmons et al. (2008) refer to thismechanism as emulation. In principle emulation can occurat a distance, but often it is the result of socialisation pro-cesses that take place through interaction within institu-tional contexts. In international relations, emulation hasbeen examined in depth by the world polity approach

developed by John Meyer with numerous colleagues (e.g.Meyer et al., 1997). In this version of sociological institu-tionalism, state officials orient their behaviour to globalnorms about what constitutes a legitimate polity and whatgoals it should legitimately pursue.

Risse (2000) suggests that the logic of arguing is distinctfrom both the logic of consequentialism and the logic of

appropriateness. Decision makers who adopt this logicwhile interacting with one another do not aim merely atupdating their knowledge about causeeffect relationships,nor do they follow predetermined norms of appropriatebehaviour for a given situation, but are willing to modifytheir goals as a result of persuasion. While of course noreal-world setting corresponds to the ideal situation identi-fied by discourse ethics theorists such as Jurgen Habermas(1981), a number of scholars maintain that certain transna-tional forums can and do function according to a delibera-tive mode. Participants in these forums are seen as makinga genuine effort to find solutions that can be accepted by

others on the basis of a process of mutual reason givingand openness to learning about current best practices. Co-hen and Sabel (2005) call such settings deliberative polyar-chy. Slaughter (2004, pp. 204205) also argues thatgovernment networks among national regulators, judgesor legislators can meet the conditions required for open,genuine and productive discussion.

There is some empirical evidence confirming the impactof transnational communication on regulatory policies.Raustiala (2002), for instance, discusses a number of casesin which US regulators successfully exported theirapproaches in the areas of securities regulation, competi-tion and antitrust law and environmental policy. As noted

above, transnational communication may trigger bothrational learning and normative emulation, but estimatingthe relative importance of these mechanisms is a difficulttask for researchers. In an important study of governmentdownsizing from 1980 to 1997 among 26 OECD mem-ber countries, Lee and Strang (2006) found that countrieslearn from each other but that this learning process isheavily influenced by prior theoretical expectations.Reductions in government employment by a trade partneror neighbour lead to reductions in the size of the publicsector, whereas increases in government employment bythe same partners or neighbours have negligible effects.

This suggests that downsizing is contagious but upsizingis not. Countries appear to be sensitive to evidence thatdownsizing works, since they tend to reduce publicemployment when recent downsizers experienced rapidgrowth and improving trade balances and when recent up-sizers faced slow growth and worsening trade. But theydo not react to information about strong economic perfor-mance by upsizers nor weak performance by downsizers.Lee and Strang (2006, p. 904) conclude that [e]mpiricaloutcomes that confirm expectations reinforce behavior,

while outcomes that contradict expectations are




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discounted. In short, when theories and evidence comeinto conflict, theories win.

The assessment of the importance of deliberative modesof communication has proven even more difficult thangrasping processes of rational learning and emulation.Cohen and Sabel (2005) see elements of deliberative poly-archy especially in the institutions of the European

Union, but they detect embryonic forms of it also in glo-bal forums such as the Codex Alimentarius Commission(CDC).

Global Policy Cooperation

A third way in which the global context can affect publicpolicies is through cooperation, that is, the commitment toimplement certain policies in the context of agreements

with other governments. International cooperation oftenconsists of reciprocal commitments to harmonise policiesacross countries, but it can also consist of highly asymmet-

rical agreements, such as the promise to implement a struc-tural adjustment programme in order to receive loans fromthe International Monetary Fund (IMF). Studies on inter-national policy cooperation tend to focus either on thecauses of international commitments or on their conse-quences, notably whether and why governments comply

with them and actually adjust their policies (of course someapproaches notably rational choice analyses treatexpected consequences as causes). The causes of cooperationcan roughly be divided into those related to transnationalinterdependencies and externalities and those related todomestic politics.

Among those state-centric approaches to international

cooperation that stress the role of transnational interdepen-dencies, rationalist institutional theory has been particularlyinfluential since the early 1980s, and the following discus-sion will focus on it.3 Rationalist institutionalists want toexplain when and how states succeed in cooperating formutual advantage despite international anarchy, that is, theabsence of a supranational government capable of enforcingagreements in the international sphere (e.g. Keohane,1984). The starting point of rationalist institutionalism isthe existence of significant physical or policy externalitiesthat create a situation of strategic interdependence amonggovernments. With the help of basic game-theoretical con-

cepts, institutionalists identified several types of strategicsituation, among which the prisoners dilemma and a coor-dination game known as battle of the sexes are particularlyprominent. The race-to-the-bottom hypothesis, forinstance, is often modelled as a prisoners dilemma causedby policy externalities. Genschel and Plumper (1997) applythis logic in their argument that the central banks of the

worlds main financial centres resorted to multilateral actionwith regard to capital ratio requirements because keepinghigh standards unilaterally might have undermined theinternational competitiveness of national banks. A crucial

tenet of institutionalism is that states can increase the like-lihood of successful cooperation by manipulating the infor-mational context in which they act, most notably bycreating international institutions. The basic idea on thelink between cooperation problems and institutionalarrangements is that form follows function. Institutionscan contribute to solving coordination problems by provid-

ing a favourable context for bargaining and, crucially, bypresenting focal points to negotiators. Examples of thisfunction are many of the technical standards developed bythe International Organisation for Standardisation. Thedefinition of common standards for, say, the dimensions offreight containers may involve intense distributional con-flicts, but the institution does not need an extensive moni-toring mechanism since it is generally not in the interest ofgovernments, port authorities and companies to deviatefrom the standard dimensions once they have been agreed.By contrast, institutions dealing with collaboration prob-lems, such as the prisoners dilemma, must be designed in

such a way that the incentive to defect from agreements isminimised: to do so, they must help trust building amongstates, define obligations and cheating, improve the moni-toring of compliance and facilitate the decentralised sanc-tioning of cheaters. An example is the decision to facilitatethe monitoring and enforcement of intellectual propertyrights (IPR) protection by bringing IPR under the rela-tively robust dispute resolution mechanism of the GATT

World Trade Organisation.There is a lively debate among authors working within

a state-centric rational choice approach on various aspectsof rational institutionalism. Authors such as Krasner(1991) and Simmons (2001), for instance, stress the

importance of power asymmetries in shaping the processand the content of policy cooperation. One aspect of thisis the attempt by states to shift the locus of negotiationand implementation to those institutions that are mostlikely to produce a distribution of gains that is particularlyfavourable to them. An example is the successful attemptby the US and other states to shift international negotia-tions on the regulation of intellectual property rights fromthe World Intellectual Property Organisations to the

WTO (Helfer, 2004). A more inclusive institution interms of membership can be the result of the capacity ofa stronger state to remove the status quo from the set of

options available to weaker states (Gruber, 2000). Withregard to the domain of banking regulation, Genschel andPlumper (1997) argue that when in 1987 the British andUS regulators reached an agreement on a common capitaladequacy standard and Japan joined it, all other memberstates of the Bank for International Settlements had nochoice but to join as well and agreement on a commonstandard was quickly reached. Simmons (2001) examinedseveral cases of financial market regulation in the 1980sand 1990s and, consistent with her theoretical framework

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innovation in the dominant financial centre, she arguesthat most of the regulatory harmonisation resulted lessfrom mutual adjustment than from unilateral decisionsimposed by the United States.

As noted above, the existence of transnational policy orphysical externalities is not the only reason why govern-ments may choose to cooperate with one another. Interna-

tional policy cooperation may be a rational response toconstraints stemming from the domestic politics of individ-ual countries. If parliaments and executives often delegateregulatory authority to independent agencies to remove itfrom pressure-group politics and lengthen the time horizonof decisions, they may also be willing to shift regulatorytasks to international arenas in order to increase their pol-icy influence vis-a-vis other domestic actors or to make itmore difficult for future governments to reverse policy deci-sions made by the present government (Moravcsik, 1994).Governments sometimes find that international cooperationis useful to gain influence in the domestic political arena

and to overcome internal opposition to their preferred poli-cies, and in some circumstances international governancemay be the outcome of collusive delegation (Koenig-Archibugi, 2004a). For instance, after controlling for other

variables that may explain the probability of entering intoIMF arrangements, countries with a larger number ofdomestic veto players are more likely to enter an IMF pro-gramme (Vreeland, 2007). This suggests that governmentsmay want IMF conditions to be imposed on them inorder to help them overcome domestic political constraintson economic reform. To the extent that this mechanismreveals a political cleavage that cuts across state borders,however, it is more compatible with a polycentric than a

state-centric perspective, as is argued below.Recent rationalist institutional work has emphasised

that, while the power of international organisations resultsfrom delegation of authority from member states, theeffect of those organisations cannot be reduced to theinterests of the states, given the significant potential foragency slack (see, e.g., Hawkins et al., 2006). In additionto fruitful specific research questions, this emphasis has

wider implications in terms of the general analytical lensto be used to observe and explain global policy. Muchmore than was the case in the first wave of rationalistinstitutionalism, international organisations emerge as dis-

tinct actors which, while constrained by their role asagents of states, possess and pursue autonomous goals andresources in world politics. This signals that an extremelyinfluential IR theory is replacing its state-centric lenses

with polycentric lenses.In sum, state-centric analyses have contributed greatly to

our understanding of global policy cooperation, but ration-alist scholars are progressively abandoning the notion thatsuch cooperation can be explained exclusively throughstate-centric lenses. The next section explores the added

value of using polycentric lenses.

2. The Polycentric Perspective

Assumptions

The state-centric perspective never lacked challengers, butsince the end of the cold war there has been an increasingnumber of attempts to develop alternative conceptualframeworks.4 Jan Aart Scholte (2008, p. 18) has recently

listed some of the labels used to capture the nature of con-temporary governance: plurilateralism, polylateralism, net-

worked governance, complex multilateralism, empire,new medievalism, global issues networks, cosmocracy,mobius-web governance, complex sovereignty and disag-gregated world order. Scholte himself has provided a par-ticularly clear elaboration of the idea that a fundamentalchange in the nature of governance is under way, which heconceptualises in terms of six shifts: (a) from country unitsto what he calls trans-scalar spaces; (b) from state actors tomultiple types of actor, such as local governments, regionalinstitutions, global agencies, business consortia and civil

society associations; (c) from unitary states to states that aredisaggregated into multiple relatively autonomous policydecision points; (d) from centralised decision making todecision making that is dispersed across multiple anddiverse institutions and networks; (e) from discrete to over-lapping jurisdictions; and (f) from sovereignty to a post-sov-ereign system of divided authority. Scholte summarisesthese shifts as an ongoing transition from statist to polycen-tric governance (Scholte, 2008, pp. 1319).

If polycentrism is seen as an analytical lens rather thanas a mode of governance, it can be described as resting onthe following assumptions with regard to polity, policy andpolitics. The polity to be analysed is not necessarily the

state: in principle it can be any entity that is able to pro-duce governance and formulate and implement policy.Rosenau, for instance, argues that the study of global gov-ernance should focus on myriad spheres of authorityobservable in the contemporary world, which may or maynot be coterminous with a bounded territory and are dis-tinguished by the presence of actors who can evoke compli-ance when exercising authority as they engage in theactivities that delineate the sphere (Rosenau, 2006, p.117). Ferguson and Mansbach (2004, p. 24) focus on a setof somewhat more tightly delimited entities: Polities arecollectivities with a measure of identity, hierarchy, and

capacity to mobilize followers for political purposes (that is,value satisfaction or relief from value deprivation).

Clearly these and other definitions to be found in the lit-erature encompass a wide range of entities. Some authorshave attempted to manage conceptual complexity by devel-oping typologies of governance-producing entities or poli-ties. In Koenig-Archibugi (2002), for instance, I argue thatgovernance arrangements can be seen as varying along threemain dimensions publicness, delegation and inclusiveness and as conforming to a larger or smaller extent to eightideal types. However, the key heuristic assumption of the




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polycentric perspective is that observers should remainopen-minded as to where policy making may emerge anddevelop methodological tools that can identify and assessgovernance arising from unexpected sites.

The polycentric perspective does not assume a funda-mentally different understanding of politics from the state-centric perspective: it can still be interpreted as the process

by which actors and coalitions of actors use material andideational power resources to engage in cooperation, com-petition and conflict with one another, with the aim ofbringing about policies that promote their interests and val-ues. What is different is the pattern of conflictual andcooperative interactions that the analyst expects to see, andspecifically the kinds of political cleavages that are possibleand probable in global politics. As noted above, the state-centric perspective assumes that societal cleavages withinstates determine the policy preferences of governments andthen the resulting cleavages between governments generatepatterns of international interaction, which may be more or

less competitive and cooperative. In other words, domesticpreferences, bargaining power and institutions combine togenerate state preferences over policies; then state prefer-ences, bargaining power and international institutions com-bine to generate international policy cooperation andcompetition. The polycentric perspective, by contrast,makes the crucial assumption that some important politicalcleavages cut across state borders. Some issues pit coalitionscomposed of actors based in different states, that is, trans-national coalitions, against other actors which are primarilybased in a particular state or which are themselves part oftransnational coalitions. These actors can be governments,other public bodies such as independent regulatory authori-

ties, international bureaucracies and various types of pri-vate (i.e. nonstate) actor, such as companies and businessassociations, civil society organisations and social move-ments and epistemic communities. The following are someof the political cleavages revealed by polycentric lenses onglobal politics, which would be obscured by an exclusivereliance on state-centric lenses.

A transnational coalition of private actors versus anotherprivate actor. Examples of this cleavage are transnationalnetworks of labour rights activists that span developed anddeveloping countries and that put pressure on large compa-

nies, for instance by promoting consumer boycotts, in orderto improve labour standards in those companies globalsupply chains (Koenig-Archibugi, 2004a).

A transnational coalition of private actors versus a singlegovernment. Examples of this cleavage are campaigns bytransnational human rights associations, such as AmnestyInternational, aimed at stopping the use of torture andother human rights violations by specific governments(Risse et al., 1999). Other examples are transnational coali-tions of environmentalists and indigenous peoples aimed at

resisting tropical deforestation and other environmentallydamaging government policies (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).

Yet another example of this type of cleavage is members ofethnic communities residing in various countries whomobilise politically against the governments of their homecountry, as happened with parts of the Kurdish, Kosovarand Tamil diasporas, who supported political and armed

opposition to the Turkish, Yugoslav and Sri Lankangovernments, respectively (Adamson, 2006).

A transnational coalition of governments versus a privateactor. An example of this cleavage is the alliance between areform-minded government and foreign governments, oftenthrough institutions such as the IMF, against domesticopponents of economic reform, for example on the issue ofreduction of public spending (Koenig-Archibugi, 2004b).For instance, Vreeland (2003) shows that in 1990 the Uru-guayan president signed an agreement with the IMFmainly because he wanted IMF conditionality to be

imposed, in order to help him overcome the resistance toeconomic reforms that was mounted by Uruguayan tradeunions, pensioners organisations and the main oppositionparty. A rather different example of this cleavage is the col-laboration of governments against pirates, which consider-ably reduced the role of nonstate violence in the past twocenturies but is still ongoing in some parts of the world(Archibugi and Chiarugi, 2009; Thomson, 1994).

A transnational coalition of sectoral state actors versus othersectoral state actors. As emphasised by Slaughter (2004) andScholte (2008), different sectors of the state such as min-istries, regulators, judges and parliamentarians may not

only have their distinct goals, but may also pursue thesegoals by collaborating with their counterparts in othercountries. A sectoral state actor may even enlist like-minded foreign counterparts or international agencies asallies in order to gain influence in negotiations with othersectors of its own state. For instance, in Somalia in 1984the finance minister and other economic ministers tried touse negotiations with the IMF on an extended loanarrangement to promote economic liberalisation against theopposition of party and military members of the council ofministers (Kahler, 1993). Similarly, Pakistans finance min-ister is said to have specifically requested the managing

director of the IMF to include in the routine surveillancereport on his country a reference to the need to cut militaryexpenditures (Pauly, 1997, cited in Vreeland, 2007, p. 65).

These and other examples show that state actors mayengage in international collusion not only against privateactors but also against other sectors of their own state.

A transnational coalition of private actors versus anothertransnational coalition of private actors. Following the call ofthe founders of the European labour movements (workersof all lands, unite!), transnational union organisations are




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increasingly engaged in cross-border campaigns against,and collective bargaining with, transnational companies andtheir subsidiaries, which often results in internationalframework agreements (Bronfenbrenner, 2007). Capitallabour interaction is formally institutionalised in the Inter-national Labour Organisation, where labour representativesfrom 183 countries negotiate with employers representa-

tives and government delegates to create and monitorinternational labour standards (Haas, 1964).

A transnational coalition of private actors against a transna-tional coalition of governments. An example is the collabora-tion between like-minded terrorist groups aimed atdestabilising and influencing governments, and the collec-tive action taken by those governments with regard tointelligence sharing, restrictions of financial transactions,political pressure and military intervention against terroristnetworks.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the most complex con-stellation: a transnational coalition of private and state actorsversus another transnational coalition of private and stateactors. One example of this cleavage is the conflict betweenactors promoting stricter tobacco control and those oppos-ing it since the 1990s. The broad pro-regulation coalition

was institutionalised in bodies such as the Policy StrategyAdvisory Committee of the Tobacco Free Initiative, which

was set up by the World Health Organisation and includedrepresentatives from the World Bank, Unicef, World SelfMedication Industry, International Nongovernmental Coa-lition Against Tobacco, the Campaign for Tobacco FreeKids and the US Centers for Disease Control and Preven-

tion. The anti-regulation coalition included the worldsmain tobacco companies, and various governments joinedthe anti-regulation or the pro-regulation coalition duringthe negotiation process that led to the Framework Conven-tion on Tobacco Control (Collin et al., 2002; Yach et al.,2006). Another example is the campaign promoted by theCoalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC), to

which over 800 organisations adhered. The CICC includedmost of the 237 NGOs officially accredited at the 1998Rome conference on the international criminal court andplayed a major role in spurring and supporting pro-courtgovernments in their difficult negotiations with those gov-

ernments that preferred a weak court or no court at all(Glasius, 2006).

These examples illustrate patterns of conflict and cooper-ation that cut across state boundaries and require polycen-tric analytical lenses to be identified. This does not meanthat cross-cutting political dynamics are more importantthan situations in which domestic political processes aredistinct from international processes and governments actas gatekeepers between the two domains (e.g. governmentsaggregate domestic preferences on trade policy and negoti-ate with one another on that basis). The relative plausibil-

ity of state-centric and polycentric explanations is anempirical question that needs to be ascertained case by case.But a case can be made that analysts should start byemploying the wider perspective, that is, polycentric lenses,and avoid exclusive reliance on research designs that makeit difficult to capture cross-cutting dynamics, such as thecommon use of a country as unit of quantitative analysis

(methodological statism).Polycentric assumptions about policy stem directly from

the preceding argument. To the extent that analysts areinterested in the policies that result from important politi-cal processes and are likely to be consequential, they shouldnot limit themselves to examining public policy, if thisexpression is taken to be equivalent to state policy. How-ever, this is not the only possible interpretation of publicpolicy. Terry Macdonald, for instance, has suggested thatpower should be designated as public and subject todemocratic control whenever it impacts in some problem-atic way upon the capacity of a group of individuals to lead

autonomous lives (Macdonald, 2008, p. 35, emphasisremoved). By extension, public policy might be defined aspolicy that has that kind of effect on individual lives.Examining whether this conceptual shift would bring realanalytical advantages is however beyond the scope of thisarticle.

Research Agendas

As has been argued above, the state-centric perspective tothe global dimensions of policy has generated a set ofclearly defined lines of inquiry that allow a fruitful interac-tion between progressively refined hypotheses and the accu-

mulation of evidence. For instance, the assumption of thestate as the basic unit of analysis facilitated the creation ofdatabases that made possible sophisticated statistical analy-ses of international competition, communication and coop-eration. The polycentric perspective has not yet matchedthose achievements, in part because research programmesin this tradition cannot rely on a predefined unit of analy-sis, but must devote considerable attention and energyto the definition and empirical identification of theirobjects.

Researchers have identified a large number of areaswhere transnational nonstatist governance arrangements

create and implement policies, either of a regulative or anallocative kind: environmental management systems, carbontrading, sustainable forestry, maritime transport, onlinecommerce, financial transactions involving swaps and deriv-atives, jurisprudence, accounting standards, credit rating,technical product standards, development aid, health ser-

vices, labour standards, arms control (landmines), fairtrade, medical research, commercial arbitration, to nameonly some of the most prominent areas.5 In addition topursuing the general aim of identifying the variety of gov-ernance arrangements that produce policy in particular




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domains, analysts using polycentric lenses also ask questionson the causes and the consequences of nonstate policymaking.

Research on the causes often proceeds from the questionof why policy making in a particular area is dominated bynonstate actors rather than state actors, or vice versa. Anaspect of this question is whether that predominance is sta-

ble or whether (and why) there has been a shift from onepolicy-making mode to the other. Broadly speaking, inter-pretations tend to be located somewhere between a societaland a statist pole. According to the societal interpretation,publicintergovernmental governance emerges when and

where there is demand from powerful private actors, and itis designed to serve their interests. According to the statistinterpretation, privatetransnational governance emerges

when and where it is stimulated by powerful states, and itis designed to serve their interests. An example of a societalexplanation is provided by Mugge (2006). He assumes thatthe choice is determined mainly by the demands of produc-

ers located in key jurisdictions, since usually regulators willbe most sensitive to their preferences. He argues that thechoice between private and public regulation in a particulareconomic sector depends on the intensity of the competi-tion among the main companies in that sector. If the com-petitive struggle is intense, the market incumbents willsupport public regulation as a means to stave off the chal-lengers. If those struggles have settled and the populationof companies is stabilised, the companies in the sector con-cerned will prefer and achieve transnational private regula-tion. According to Mugge, the case of derivative listingsillustrates the first scenario, while the Eurobond marketillustrates the case of a stable population of incumbent

companies that banded together to fend off public gover-nance.

To be sure, polycentric analysts stress that the choice isnot simply between statist and nonstatist governance. Theypoint out that civil society organisations, companies,national public agencies and intergovernmental organisa-tions often form what have been called multistakeholderpolicy networks that seek to agree on consensual policysolutions for specific sectors. For instance, the KimberleyProcess on diamonds from conflict zones created a hybridregulatory framework that combines an intergovernmentalregime, which sets standards on the import and export of

rough diamonds and the tracking of illicit diamonds, and aself-regulatory system that obliges companies to adoptstringent standards with regard to purchases and sales ofdiamonds and jewellery containing diamonds, includingindependent monitoring (Kantz, 2007). The KimberleyProcess is a prominent example of a transnational regula-tory regime that originated from an NGO campaign andfrom the response by industry and governments in thiscase the market-leading De Beers Corporation and theSouth African government, which were concerned aboutpossible consumer reactions triggered by the campaign.

Polycentric analysts are interested in why the policyresponse to the problem of conflict diamonds took thishybrid institutional form.

Polycentric research also investigates the consequences ofnonstatist arrangements on policy. One research agendafocuses on the policy process. For instance, Porter and Ro-nit (2006) examine the different stages of the policy process

in private self-regulation and highlight the similarities anddifferences in relation to the corresponding stage in publicpolicy processes. Another research agenda focuses on thepolicy output. It is often argued that private self-regulationis mainly a way to prevent public regulation and thus thestandards emerging through nonstate policy can be expectedto be less strict than those that would emerge from a publicpolicy process, all else being equal. For instance, Kolk et al.(1999) compared 132 codes of corporate conduct created byfour different types of actor individual companies, busi-ness associations, social interest groups and international or-ganisations and find that codes issued by business

associations have the weakest scores with regard to focus,measurability and compliance mechanisms.An important line of research examines the consequences

of polycentric policy making for democracy. One commonposition is that polycentrism is inherently unable to ensurethe degree of inclusiveness and participation that genuinelydemocratic governance requires (e.g. Marchetti, 2008).Other analysts maintain that democratic forms of authorisa-tion and accountability can in principle be realised in non-state governance arrangements, even if existing instancesstill fall short of democratic criteria (e.g. Macdonald, 2008;Macdonald and Macdonald, 2006; Scholte, 2008). Oneimportant dimension is the ability of transnational civil

society to promote new forms of democratic politics (DellaPorta, 2009). Several theoretical and empirical contributionsmake this bundle of issues one of the most interesting areasof investigation within the broader polycentric research pro-gramme.6

Conclusions

A vast amount of research has been conducted on the globaldimensions of policy and there are reasons to believe thatresearch in this field will grow at a faster rather than slowerrate in the next few years. Scholars, and even more so policy

makers, may find it increasingly difficult to absorb all thefindings that may be relevant to their areas of interest. As aresult, they may be tempted to focus their attention on clus-ters of research that share similar ontological and methodo-logical assumptions. This article has illustrated some reasons

why such a temptation should be resisted. State-centriclenses on global policy have generated a wealth of significantand policy-relevant findings. This is due not only to theundeniable substantive importance of states as authors ofpolicy and as targets for other policy-seeking actors, butalso to the methodological advantages of using states as




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predefined units of analysis. Polycentric lenses on globalpolicy, on the other hand, have revealed policy-making enti-ties, political cleavages and policy outcomes that would havebeen obscured by an exclusive reliance on state-centricassumptions. Recent progress in devising theoretical andmethodological tools for the analysis of nonstatist gover-nance suggests that this perspective may one day match the

achievements of state-centric analyses.Is it possible and desirable to aim for some form of theo-

retical integration of state-centric and polycentric perspec-tives? As stressed at the beginning of the article, state-centrism and polycentrism are not theories in themselves,but rather clusters of assumptions about polity, politics andpolicy that may constitute the basis for a range of differenttheories. It is likely that many analysts adopt certainassumptions not because of a deep-seated belief in theirontological truth, but because they capture empirical situa-tions well enough to possess heuristic value and providecertain methodological advantages, such as well-defined

units of analysis and availability of corresponding data sets.In other words, in the practice of global policy studiesoften ontology follows methodology, rather than the other

way round. But the fact that commitments to certainassumptions may be more pragmatic than substantial raisesthe question of whether attempts at theoretical integrationmay be a particularly promising route to make further pro-gress in global policy analysis.

Jupille, Caporaso and Checkel (2003) identified fourmodels of theoretical dialogue in political science: compet-itive testing; additive theory based on complementarydomains of application; sequencing of theories; and sub-sumption. While competitive testing cannot be considered

a form of synthesis, determining domains of applicationand sequencing are two synthetic strategies based on com-plementarity, and subsumption is a form of synthesis thatinterprets one theory as a special case of another. Sincestate-centrism and polycentrism are not theories, thesemodels cannot be applied directly to them.7 However, it ispossible to consider some examples of dialogue in the lightof the two analytical lenses. Drezner (2007) performs acompetitive test of explanations of regulatory outcomes,some of which stress the role of global civil society andothers stress how state power is used to promote domesticinterests. He analyses regulation in the field of the Inter-

net, financial markets, genetically modified foods and intel-lectual property and concludes that, if their domesticpolitics allows great powers to agree among themselves,then global regulatory coordination will occur regardless ofthe support or opposition of transnational NGOs, IGOsand peripheral states. At most, NGOs can play a marginalrole as lobbyists, protesters, monitors of compliance anddelegated standard setters. What is notable for our pur-poses is that, while Drezner finds empirical support for astatist theory, he reaches that conclusion by using analyticallenses that are at least partially polycentric, since otherwise

comparing the influence of state and transnational nonstateactors would make little sense.

Another attempt at theoretical dialogue was made in theclassic book by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye Jr, Powerand Interdependence (1977). They presented their analyticalconstructs realism and complex interdependence as idealtypes which conditions in the real world may resemble more

or less. One of the differences between the two ideal typesis that in complex interdependence multiple channels ofcontact connect societies (i.e. states do not monopolise thosecontacts), which is compatible with polycentric assumptions.Keohane and Nyes case studies implement a form of com-petitive testing and show, for instance, that negotiationsover the law of the seas came closer to complex interdepen-dence than negotiations over international finance. Thesefindings can be seen as supporting a synthesis based on thedomains of application model, which tries to determineunder which conditions one or the other theory is moreplausible. As with Drezner, the possibility of such a synthe-

sis depends on using polycentric lenses, if only to discoverthat complex interdependence is empirically weak in manycontexts. A final example: Rosenau (1990, pp. 9798)argued that [t]he universe of global politics had come toconsist of two interactive worlds with overlapping member-ships: a multicentric world of diverse, relatively equal actors,and a state-centric world in which national actors are stillprimary. Also in this case the possibility of seeing both

worlds depends on the use of polycentric lenses.In sum: it often makes sense to subject to competitive

testing theories that emphasise the influence of transna-tional nonstate actors on policy and theories that discountit; and it is often fruitful to try to define the respective

domains of application of those theories. But both exercisesdepend on a prior adoption of polycentric lenses. Progressin global policy studies is thus likely to derive from aspecific form of synthesis, namely the subsumption ofstate-centrism under polycentrism. Such a synthesis wouldbe based on the awareness that the preponderance of statesin global policy making would be a special case of a situa-tion in which several types of actor are capable of creatingand implementing policy; and that the political cleavagesconsidered by state-centric studies (domestic cleavages onthe one hand and international cleavages on the other) canbe seen as a subset of the political cleavages that can occur

according to the polycentric perspective. But this is a long-term project. Until such a synthesis is achieved, the fruitsof both perspectives deserve the full attention of scholarsand policy makers interested in making global policy moreresponsive to the needs of the worlds population and morelegitimate in its eyes.

Notes

I would like to thank Eva-Maria Nag and the anonymousreviewers for Global Policy for their very helpful comments.




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1. Polity refers to the boundaries and basic institutional features ofthe policy-making unit; politics refers to the process of interactionamong actors and actor coalitions possessing various material andideational resources and to the prevalent modes of interaction, suchas fighting, arguing, bargaining and voting; policy refers to theparticular combination of goals and means selected by the politicalprocess.

2. Because of space constraints, the article focuses on research on the

interaction of policies and ignores the impact of other processes,such as the transnational diffusion of new technologies or policy-independent changes in the international flow of goods, servicesand capital. Some of the arguments made and examples given inthis section draw on Koenig-Archibugi, forthcoming (b).

3. For a broader survey including nonrationalist approaches seeKoenig-Archibugi, forthcoming (b).

4. On the broader debate about statism and territorialism in globalpolitics see for instance: Agnew and Corbridge, 1995; Fergusonand Mansbach, 2004; Held et al., 1999; Krasner, 1999.

5. A small selection of studies on these governance arrangements is:Bernstein and Cashore, 2007; Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000; Cut-ler et al., 1999; Falkner, 2003; Koenig-Archibugi and Zurn, 2006;Ronit and Schneider, 2000; Slaughter, 2004; Vogel, 2009.

6. A small selection: Borzel and Risse, 2005; Dingwerth, 2007; Heldand Koenig-Archibugi, 2005; Koenig-Archibugi, forthcoming (a);Meidinger, 2008; Papadopoulos, 2007.

7. For an example of how different models of dialogue can be appliedto the relationship between two theories, see Andreatta andKoenig-Archibugi, forthcoming.

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Author Information

Dr Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Lecturer in Global Politics, Depart-ment of Government and Department of International Relations,

London School of Economics and Political Science.


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