Introduction

How do global governors relate to each other and what, if any, are the consequences of these ties? Although scholars of international organization tend to focus on the purpose and structures of contemporary global governance, the actual ties that bind global governors remain undertheorized. As this chapter will suggest, these linkages not only set parameters on the agency of individual global governors, but they also help to establish their authority over a given sector and structure their interactions with one another. At the extreme, certain types of ties may actually undermine the implementation capacity of governors and, instead, encourage improvisation or counterproductive competition by actors on the ground.

If there is a prevailing wisdom on the topic, it is that global governors are implicated in a set of networks that involve various types of international and transnational actors. Anne-Marie Slaughter (2004) has recently advanced one of the most sophisticated versions of this thesis and argues that these networks comprise a variety of governors, including international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and disaggregated parts of states and their bureaucracies. These actors forge horizontal ties to other organizations to coordinate and manage their regulatory tasks, as well as vertical ties that delegate the governance of particular issues and sectors to specific transnational bodies. From this perspective strong network ties facilitate effective and responsive global governance through increased information flows, coordinated agenda setting, and the use of informational technologies to conduct regulatory functions and transnational campaigns.