Any theoretically informed predictions about the future of international order and global governance must reckon with the power and intentions of the United States. We argue that fundamental changes in the nature of domestic audience constraint within many democracies, and the United States in particular, undermine both the willingness and the capability of the United States to continue its role as the underwriter of international order and global governance. A US government unbound by domestic constraint will have difficulty building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems because it will have reduced incentives to invest in public goods, including national defense, science and technology, and future economic prosperity; reduced barriers to corruption that undermines the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduced state capacity, including the capacity to finance wars and other long-term international commitments. We argue that three trends were especially relevant in reshaping domestic audience constraint: information fragmentation, extreme polarization, and a global threat environment that facilitated executive power concentration. Together they reduce the costs and risks for leaders to escape domestic audience constraints, weakening the institutional and accountability mechanisms that give democracies advantages in the international system. Though these trends affect many democracies, the undermining of US domestic constraint is particularly consequential because the United States shaped and buttressed the current system. An unconstrained United States likely means a less cooperative and less predictable global order, irrevocably altering the post-1945 system.

Many global norms are currently facing substantial contestation by various actors. While contestation is a regular practice in norm dynamics, it can potentially result in the destabilisation of norms. At the same time, international city networks (ICNs) are increasingly positioning themselves in global governance. While research in International Relations has not analysed how ICNs respond to norm contestation and whether they stabilise existing norms and normative orders, this article demonstrates that ICNs are relevant actors in norm dynamics by focusing on their activities. To examine how ICNs stabilise norms, we employ a theoretical framework based on existing approaches in norm research, which assumes that norms must be as robust, resilient and legitimate as possible to maintain their functions in facilitating individual orientation and collective order. Empirically, we analyse the stabilising activities of three ICNs – Mayors for Peace, Rainbow Cities Network and Fast-Track Cities Initiative – as contributions to preventing norm decay in security, human rights and health. We show that these ICNs stabilise norms by supporting them in discourse and practice, by connecting norms in clusters, and by including affected stakeholders. In sum, we present ICNs as relevant actors in global governance due to their stabilising activities and networked capacities.

The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

The political representation and agency of young people in international politics is still poorly understood, notwithstanding sustained interest in the pluralisation and diversification of transnational civil society and the ‘opening up’ of IOs in international relations (IR) scholarship. In this article, we put forward a theoretical framework for the study of youth representation in IR that is at once responsive to the specificities of youth and, at the same time, contributes to theory-building on political representation of newly recognised constituencies in international institutions overall. Theoretically, we build on constructivist and performative theories of representation, and we use our empirical insights to extend and qualify these theories. Empirically, we provide the first in-depth study of youth representation in global health governance. Based on an interpretive analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews with youth participants at three major global health events, our study explores prevalent portrayals of youth as a constituency and problematises the legitimising effects of these portrayals. Moreover, we expose how multiple barriers and intersecting inequalities constrain young people’s encounters with exclusive spaces of global health policy-making and we point to the reflective and ambiguous ways in which young people embrace, enact, and question ‘youth’ as a political category.

This article addresses critical gaps in the literature on crisis-driven policy change in international organisations. While existing studies focus on elite decision-making and institutional resilience, the role of frontline crisis managers remains under-explored in International Relations. Using the European migration and refugee crisis as a case study and drawing on insights from organisation studies and the sociology of the professions, the article introduces a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds improvisation by first responders and the ex-post stabilisation of their spontaneous policy solutions at headquarters. In addition to reconstructing and illustrating the mechanisms that link frontline action to changed policies, the article identifies theoretical conditions shaping the likelihood and direction of informal policy change from the ground up. By highlighting bottom-up dynamics in crises, it not only advances theoretical debates on crisis politics, but also proposes a new research agenda for analysing the transformative role of field-level practices in global politics.

Structural changes like globalisation and technical change have empowered business actors in global governance. Yet to become leaders of global governance rather than mere participants, business actors need to legitimise themselves as working for the public good rather than for the maximisation of profit alone. This paper argues that business power becomes authority through the gradual diffusion of ideals of global governance that legitimate the leadership of business actors. We use the concepts of cultural capital and symbolic capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu to conceptualise the construction of business authority. However, we also expand on existing Bourdieusian accounts, which focus on authority construction within fields, by showing how business actors leverage globalisation and technical change to frame discourses that construct their authority across fields of governance. To demonstrate this, we focus on the case of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has accumulated enough cultural capital to deploy two particularly influential discourses – multistakeholderism and the 4th Industrial Revolution. We show that, by making sense of complex situations, these discourses functioned as symbolic capital and legitimised both the WEF’s own authority and that of business actors more broadly.

A widely made claim in academic scholarship is that the governance of solar geoengineering is characterised by gaps in international law and the absence of regulatory mechanisms. This article presents a more nuanced perspective on this claim. Instead of focusing on one comprehensive regime to govern solar geoengineering (whether its use or its non-use), we adopt a multi-dimensional impact approach to consideration of solar radiation modification (SRM) technologies and their governance. We outline the diverse array of adverse impacts that any SRM governance regime would need to contend with, and map how many of these impacts fall within the purview of existing international institutions and obligations. We conclude that any future SRM governance regime would need to build upon or at least not contravene these existing obligations. While our analysis thus modifies the claim of gaps in international law relating to SRM governance, it also suggests that the fragmented yet comprehensive coverage of diverse impacts does not mean that global coordination to govern deployment of SRM is already in place. Instead, the fragmented web of institutions and principles that exists provides room largely for restrictive SRM governance, in order to prevent adverse impacts within core areas of concern.

The global diffusion of state power has led to a decline in global governance; that is, in the attempt to build authoritative rules and institutions that represent the common goals of the international community. The rise of China and other powers has increased the heterogeneity of the international system, and the erstwhile hegemon has turned against the international order. The major powers today have vastly different domestic characteristics and pursue strongly divergent interests. This has gridlocked and marginalized multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization and seen a worrying disregard for international law. In response, the institutional ecosystem of global governance is adapting by lowering its scope, weakening its commitments, and splintering into partly competing institutional orders. Adaptation and decline are not mutually exclusive: Today, we can witness the adaptation of global governance to its own decline. Theoretically, this points to the enduring relevance of hegemonic stability theory for global governance. The result is a reduced normative ambition for global governance, signaling a retreat from the grand internationalist vision of organized cooperation among all the members of the international community.

With formal international organizations (IOs) facing gridlock and informal IOs proliferating, cooperation in the twenty-first century looks different than it did in previous eras. Global governance institutions today also face additional challenges, including a fragmented information environment where publics are increasingly vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation. What do these trends portend for international politics? One way to answer this question is to return to a core ingredient of a well-functioning IO—information provision—and ask how such changes affect efficiency. Viewed through this lens, we see decline in some arenas and adaptation in others. Formal IOs are struggling to retain relevance as their weak policy responses and ambiguous rules create space for competing signals. The proliferation of informal institutions, on the other hand, may represent global governance evolution, as these technocratic bodies are often well-insulated from many political challenges. Yet even if global governance retains functionality, the legitimacy implications of such trends are troubling. IO legitimacy depends in part on process, and from this standpoint, the informational gains of informal governance must be weighed against losses of accountability and transparency. Ultimately, evaluating the normative implications of these trends requires making judgments about the preferred legitimizing principles for global governance.

Recent times have been hard for global governance, not least for formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs). Given changing conditions and their inability to adapt, many observers argue that FIGOs are drifting and losing ground to low-cost institutions (LCIs). We argue that this widespread perception is incomplete and that it dismisses too quickly the durability of FIGOs. We begin by pointing out that not all FIGOs are drifting and that some may even thrive amid transnational crises and power shifts. We then highlight the possibility that in a densely institutionalized global environment, states can substitute one FIGO for another. Thus, even as one FIGO is drifting, other FIGOs, rather than or alongside LCIs, can take the mantle. We identify and exemplify three key motivations for FIGO substitution: overcoming gridlock, enhancing ideological alignment, and policy laundering. During crises and power shifts, some members might paralyze a FIGO, leading to gridlock and prompting other members to cooperate in another FIGO. Power shifts and crises can also motivate dissatisfied FIGO members to pursue parallel activities in a FIGO that better fits their ideological outlook. Policy laundering occurs when members use one FIGO over another to signal political intent. We conclude by exploring the normative implications of FIGO substitution.

International organisations (IOs) hold important governance functions and power. Yet, they are several steps detached from the constituencies that have entrusted them with functions and resources to carry them out, even as accountability expectations remain significant for their legitimacy. This article presents a broadly generalisable theoretical framework for understanding the variable accountability of IOs, seeking to advance the understanding of international accountability in three new ways. First, it elaborates on the concept of the scope of IO accountability, which can vary across organisations, over time, and across contexts. The idea of a scope of accountability moves beyond the dichotomy of accountable versus non-accountable power holders and advances an understanding of accountability as a multi-layered phenomenon, whereby both the expectations and practices of accountability can evolve over time and with respect to different audiences. Second, the article identifies three political factors – namely the formal and informal excercise of power, institutional structure, and public salience – that can shape, in important ways, the variable scope of IO accountability. Finally, it critically explores the tensions and contradictions between these political dynamics, and the implications for access to and the efficacy of accountability systems.

In the introduction to this roundtable, we argue that global governance currently faces hard times because it is affected by a set of significant developments revolving around the changing distribution of state power, the rise of nationalist populism, and the frequent occurrence of transnational crises, while seeking to facilitate collective action on complex cooperation problems. Against this backdrop, the essay identifies two major institutional dynamics of global governance in hard times: first, the drift of formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGOs) that is caused by them being gridlocked in a period of significant changes in their social, (geo)political, economic, and technological environment. Second, the proliferation of various types of low-cost institutions. To help us think systematically about how these two interrelated institutional dynamics affect global governance, the essay develops the innovation thesis and the decline thesis. The “innovation thesis” suggests that by transitioning from a rather exclusive and hierarchical system revolving around FIGOs into a more inclusive and heterarchical system revolving around institutional diversity, global governance is currently being adapted to its new environment. The “decline thesis,” by contrast, argues that the two institutional dynamics undermine rules-based multilateralism and may lead to a shift back toward traditional (great) power politics that does not respect institutional constraints.

In this commentary on Itamar Mann’s rich re-reading of Regina v Dudley and Stephens (1884), I want to draw attention to two issues. First, the salience of the distinction between abstraction and idealization for his argument. Second, the question of political form in relation to each of the three models of the lifeboat that Mann explore – the providential, the catastrophic, and the commonist. I do so in order to explore the implications of Mann’s proposal for the politics of global governance.

Beginning with the opening-up reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government has treated law as a central tool for regulating the economy and guiding institutional transformation. Over the decades, since 1949, China’s path to modernization has been marked by profound, experimental transformations that selectively combined foreign expertise with Chinese foundations. A key feature of this process has been China’s strategic adoption and adaptation of legal transplants. While initially a recipient of foreign legal models, China is now increasingly exporting its own approaches through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article examines how China’s engagement in shaping the legal and regulatory frameworks of host countries under the BRI differs from traditional models of legal transplants. Rather than imposing, China draws on its historical experience to adopt a pragmatic, adaptive strategy defined by three core characteristics: the combination of Chinese and Western practices; an emphasis on voluntariness tempered by asymmetrical power relations; and a prioritization of policy objectives over autonomous legal principles. While this strategy raises concerns about legal fragmentation and institutional coherence, it also fosters a space for legal pluralism, offering an alternative to the homogenization typically associated with Global North legal transplants.

Support for a high-ambition plastics treaty is gaining strength, particularly within global civil society and among lower-income developing countries. Still, opposition to binding measures – such as obligations to regulate petrochemicals or reduce global plastics production – remains intense and widespread. We propose the concept of a “petrochemical historical bloc” to help reveal the depth and extent of the forces opposing strong global governance of plastics. At the bloc’s core are petrostates and industry, especially producers of oil and gas feedstock, petrochemicals and plastics. Extending its influence are broader social forces – including certain political and economic institutions, consultancy firms and nongovernmental organizations – that reinforce and legitimize the discourses and tactics thwarting a high-ambition treaty. This bloc is driving up plastics production, externalizing the costs of pollution, distorting scientific knowledge and lobbying to derail negotiations. Yet the petrochemical historical bloc is neither monolithic nor all-powerful. Investigating differing interests and evolving politics within this bloc, we contend, can expose disingenuous rhetoric, weaken low-ambition alliances and reveal opportunities to overcome resistance to ambitious governance. In light of this, and toward highlighting fractures and potential counter-alliances and strategies, we call for a global research inquiry to map the full scope and nature of the petrochemical historical bloc.