Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Lievens, Matthias; Bécault, Emilie; Braeckman, Antoon; Wouters, Jan --- "Democratic legitimacy and global governance: a research agenda" [2015] ELECD 1007; in Wouters, Jan; Braekman, Antoon; Lievens, Matthias; Bécault, Emilie (eds), "Global Governance and Democracy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 251

Book Title: Global Governance and Democracy

Editor(s): Wouters, Jan; Braekman, Antoon; Lievens, Matthias; Bécault, Emilie

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781952610

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Democratic legitimacy and global governance: a research agenda

Author(s): Lievens, Matthias; Bécault, Emilie; Braeckman, Antoon; Wouters, Jan

Number of pages: 26

Abstract/Description:

If establishing an effective global governance system is a tremendously difficult task, making it also democratic appears almost a Herculean endeavour. Yet, it is a task that we cannot put aside as being impossible or irrelevant. We cannot afford the luxury of confining democracy to the domestic realm, assuming that democratization beyond the nation-state is a hopeless endeavour. If global governance arrangements are unaccountable, unrepresentative or incontestable, they threaten to undermine the very democratic nature of both our national and global societies. One of the obstacles to developing a paradigm for democratic global governance is the scattered nature of existing research on (global) democracy and global governance. The principal aim of this book was to contribute to overcoming this state of affairs by bringing together insights taken from distinct disciplines and issue areas of global governance. In this perspective, its main objectives were, first, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of how global governance as an empirical phenomenon actually varies across thematic fields; and second, to bridge the gap between the study of actually existing global governance arrangements on the one hand, and norms of democratic legitimacy on the other.