Taming Polycentric Governing

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines Global Administrative Law (GAL). GAL’s key contribution to the study of polycentric governing is the claim that many of the processes that are taken place transnationally can be understood as a species of administrative law. Transnational institutions and actors work in similar ways to how domestic administrative agencies operate, even if the exercise of power of these transnational institution and actors differs from how administrative agencies operate within states. The chapter discusses how the reliance on administrative law has a dual purpose. On the one hand, administrative law allows to capture processes that otherwise would be missing from conventional accounts of international law. At the same time, administrative law provides a set of normative tools allowing the evaluation and reform of transnational institution in order to make them more accountable in light of the power that they have accumulated in the last decades. Lastly, the chapter considers some potentially problematic features of GAL such as its Western-centric bias, the possibility of GAL being used as cover for hegemonic projects, and its technocratic liberalism.