Transnational Governance

Transnational governance is the coordination of policy decision making or enforcement in a given issue area across national borders. Transnational governance typically involves nonstate actors as principals, as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), multinational firms, or international organizations respond to problems that cross national jurisdictions—often in the absence of meaningful involvement by national governments.

Transnational governance can be distinguished from three forms of interstate cooperation—supranationalism, multilateralism, and transgovernmentalism. Supranational governance involves the operation of formal, superordinate institutions that subsume existing national institutions, such as the International Criminal Court. Multilateral governance establishes norms and rules that constrain countries' policymaking prerogatives in given issue areas, such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, but which tend not to apply to nonstate actors (at least directly). Transgovernmentalism, for its part, involves coordination among specialized national officials and agencies tasked with enforcing policy in their respective jurisdictions to combat global problems, such as drug trafficking or terrorist financing. Although transnational governance shares the cooperative and cross-border attributes of each of these models, it is distinct in its less formal, networked form and greater role for nonstate actors.

Transnational governance typically emerges when formal international coordination mechanisms designed by and for sovereign states prove incapable of responding to specific transnational problems. International NGOs are often initiators of transnational governance, as they promote their vision of “good” behavior from governments or firms in contexts of insufficient formal regulation, whether at the international, national, or local level. These networks typically promote stakeholder participation in defining and monitoring relevant issue-area standards, presenting a form of global civil society self-government that simultaneously rivals and complements traditional national and international forms of regulative authority.

Transnational governance does not impose formal international institutional authority on states, but rather uses “softer” mechanisms of nongovernmental monitoring and certification of specific principals' performance in meeting a relevant set of broadly consensual standards. For example, a system of forest management certification of logging firms conducted by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and its partners monitors and reports on these firms' practices, typically with voluntary participation of the firms themselves. Governance networks such as the forest management certification system bring together global and local stakeholders to deliberate shared goals and solutions and to enforce these solutions through the use of informal (especially reputational) inducements and costs rather than more formal command-and-control regulation.

Although transnational governance networks may be more flexible and possibly more efficient than traditional forms of top-down governance, they also face their own difficulties. They rely on the voluntary participation of principals, they lack internally generated material resources, they have indeterminate legal status, and they lack clear mechanisms of democratic accountability. However, unlike traditional multilateral governance in particular, their focus on nonstate actor participation may be particularly appropriate to issue areas and contexts in which these principals are the primary drivers of global processes.