Governance Networks, Transnational

The term transnational governance networks (TGNs) designates those networks that serve to coordinate actors on a transnational basis toward the production of public goods—safe air travel, for example—or the prevention of public bads, such as terrorism. Where TGNs include advocacy networks, they contest existing and dominant approaches toward the production of public goods. The role of such networks within global politics sits within a broader discussion concerning the formation of a global governance architecture. In particular, the critique of a classic international relations model of global politics based on hierarchically organized states drove research to identify new forms of order by which social life is organized at the global level.

The network model is distinct to both the rigidity of hierarchy but also the relative anarchy of the market, providing a more nuanced perspective by which to map the existence of order in a complex world. Within this perspective, who or what may be an “actor” is understood in a broad fashion where research turns to relations between not only nation-states but includes multiple types of nonstate agency, including international organizations, private firms, trade associations, standards and accreditation associations, trade unions, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, religious organizations, domestic legal courts, legal firms, and subnational governmental agencies (e.g., city councils). The relevance of any such relations to global studies is determined by the extent to which they can be demonstrated to help constitute or contest global politics.

Within the international relations literature, the significance of network models for global politics has become well established during the past decade. Initially, the network metaphor served to describe the role of relations between states that bypass their respective executive level, such as meetings between similar governmental agencies from two or more states. Such relations have been described by Anne-Marie Slaughter as “transgovernmental networks” where, for example, environmental agencies from multiple nation-states have institutionalized regular meetings and communications through which policy developments may be discussed and shared. Such mechanisms of policy diffusion promise the possibility of transnational standardization within subexecutive areas of governmental policy making, demarcating global governance into a series of like-minded policy groups rather than by traditional state-to-state relations. In addition to agency-to-agency relations that cross national borders, Slaughter has identified the rise of coordination between national courts where judges have made reference to rulings made in similar cases heard in other territories. Such findings point toward a complexification of governance where policy, law, and their implementation exceed traditional sites of power. Furthermore, the division between politics at the domestic and global levels seems increasingly subject to critique.

As the role of networks in global politics has been identified with increasing frequency, a degree of conceptual ambiguity has emerged. This is because the network model has been applied to so many otherwise divergent configurations of social interaction. Typically networks are defined by the relations between their members rather than [Page 771]a predefined structure and so may lack clear borders. It remains unclear whether global politics can be described as one single network or a multitude of overlapping networks, and where networks overlap, the same actor may appear in multiple networks but play very different roles such that the character of its agency is difficult to define. TGNs are “transnational” because they cross borders and so may also include less global forms of governance, such as in the European Union.

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