The agency of the governed in transfer and diffusion studies

Abstract

Research on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer has long neglected the agency of the governed. In the last decade, conventional top-down approaches have been increasingly challenged because they have downplayed interactions between the global and the local, in which the governed constantly coproduce and change global standards, their meanings, and their functionality. This collection explores adaptational dynamics between the global and the local, by asking: How and why do actors on the receiving end of North-South relations shape processes of norm diffusion and institutional transfer; and to what effect? This introductory contribution covers the key concepts that characterise the nascent research field of local agency in global contexts, and presents some empirical evidence from various sites of contestation.

Keywords:

• Norm diffusion
• institutional transfer
• local agency
• translation
• appropriation
• resistance
• contestation

Introduction

Research on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer has often neglected the agency of the governed. Both approaches imply that the worldwide spread of more or less formalised ‘standard(s) of appropriate behaviour’¹ follows a roadmap from North to South.² While active ‘senders’ are thus thought to create social and political standards in a consolidated centre of the world and to direct their dissemination, passive ‘recipients’ in peripheral regions are supposed to simply take and copy, or reject, the social innovations from elsewhere. However, local actors on the receiving end of development cooperation, state building, or security interventions are also likely to significantly shape institutional change. In practice, the governed decide whether and how human rights norms connect to their lifeworld; they change the meaning of a democratic reform agenda and challenge its global justification; further, they resist undesired governance efforts, channel project funds, and alter organisational procedures. Basically, local agents in the global South – ordinary people alongside political elites – have the power to substantially transform a ‘travelling model’³ and shape local and global cultures as well as power constellations. Thus, one should not presume rather passive ‘recipients’ in North–South relations.

In the last decade, this criticism of a one-sided perspective on globally visible actors has reached transfer and diffusion studies. Specifically, conventional top-down approaches are increasingly challenged because they have downplayed interactions between the global and the local. In fact, they have largely overlooked those intermediate spaces in which the governed constantly coproduce and change global standards, their meanings and their functionality. In a nutshell, scholars claim to study ‘norm translation’ instead of diffusion⁴ ; ‘appropriation’ and ‘resistance’ instead of institutional transfer⁵ ; and ‘contestation’ instead of implementation⁶ . In terms of actors, ‘brokers and translators’⁷ should come to the fore. This collection takes the same line by exploring adaptational dynamics between the global and the local. How and why do actors on the receiving end of North–South relations shape processes of norm diffusion and institutional transfer; and to what effect?

The authors in this volume approach this research question from an actor-centric perspective. We understand global norm diffusion and institutional transfer as governance processes of authoritative ruling and collective goods provision⁸ , and exclude non-intentional macro-processes of global entanglement (which are included in more general definitions of diffusion⁹ ). On the receiving end, our focus is thus on ‘the governed’¹⁰ – those who are expected, obliged, or compelled to adapt to new institutional conditions which themselves have been shaped by external actors. Evidently, we are dealing here with asymmetric power relationships, expecting some to make decisions and others to follow. With regard to the latter group of actors, participation in the policy-making process depends on the institutional context as, for instance, the rule of law and basic civil rights determine whether forms of contestation and protest might have an impact or are simply met with state repression. It is indeed a great achievement of Western democracy that institutions can effectively balance power asymmetries, hence giving voice to the governed. However, it would be wrong to assume that the agency of the governed is confined to Western liberal democracies. As the contributions to this collection demonstrate¹¹ , it is equally problematic to allege that the governed in the global South are particularly powerless, given the weakness of political and societal institutions.

In fact, we argue in this collection that areas of limited statehood – where central state institutions are too weak to implement and enforce central decisions and/or might even lack the monopoly over the means of violence¹² – provide particular opportunities for the governed to raise their voices and be listened to. Limited statehood in this sense is the default condition in much of the global South – and not only there: think of the peninsula of Crimea or the Palestinian territories; and of the suburbs and no-go-areas in Western cities. It follows that agency cannot rely on stable democratic political institutions under these circumstances, but has to be based on the existence of underlying social relationships of social trust, which enhance the action capacity of the governed.¹³ Moreover, the absence of effective state institutions can be a blessing under particular circumstances, e.g. when autocratic and rent-seeking regimes simply lack the means to enforce (repressive) rules. Thus, as social anthropologists and postcolonial scholars suggest, limited statehood and unbalanced power asymmetries do not eliminate agency, but rather change people’s ‘repertoires of contention’¹⁴ .Today, the diverse repertoires of political action of people in the global South receive significant attention in transfer and diffusion studies¹⁵ , but this has not always been the case. On the contrary, being typically interested in the process by which policies and institutions ‘converge’¹⁶ or ‘spread across different contexts’¹⁷ , scholars of transfer and diffusion had long expected that norms and institutional transfers would be either adopted or rejected in areas of limited statehood. The next section will briefly recap this one-sided perspective to get to the heart of its criticism. Subsequently, I will change perspective and present the leading concepts of the nascent research field of local agency in global contexts of transfer and diffusion. Afterwards the constituting articles of this collection will be introduced to the reader. The introduction concludes with a general assessment of the new research field of local agency in global contexts of transfer and diffusion.

The spread of western institutions and global norms

In the tradition of Eurocentric social science theory, International Relations scholars have discussed transfer and diffusion as processes of modernisation and liberalisation. In the early 2000s, research still suffers from a normative bias towards global norms and Western institutions, while simplistic, essentialist, and static notions of ‘the local’ clearly dominate the discourse. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scholarly debate on international interventions in the overlapping fields of security and development. Scholars discussed ‘the local’ as a disruptive factor in transfer processes – a spatial black box or cultural filter that should explain deviance from expected transfer outcomes. Particular social practices and normative concepts as constituents of a local context were widely regarded as an obstacle rather than a chance for peace and development.¹⁸ Recently, a more critical literature of ‘the local turn in peacebuilding’¹⁹ refers to social anthropology to acknowledge the emancipatory effects of local agency in processes of institutional transfer. However, buzzwords such as civil society and grassroots, as well as local ownership and participation, are all too often accompanied by an essentialist notion of local cultures. This eventually reproduces a stereotypical notion of ‘hybrid peace’²⁰ that eventually obscures the dynamics of reshaping and reinterpreting external agendas of institutional change.

In the debate on global norm diffusion, the expected adoption process resembled socialisation in the sense that the governed in the global South had to be induced and to learn a norm’s content and logic of appropriateness.²¹ While work on international human rights, for example, assigned pride of place to ‘the local’ and to domestic politics, it assumed that the content of the norm would not change when being localised.²² Furthermore, this scholarship and most diffusion research did not take into account that socialisation is not a passive process of norm adoption, but entails active transformation and change, including change of meanings. Today, scholarship on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer is changing its perspective from the global to the local.²³ It encompasses analyses of norm translation, policy appropriation, resistance, and normative contestation; the latter being a response to the newly emerging interest in the global effects of local agency.²⁴ To begin with, the appeal of resistance, appropriation, and translation stems from their heuristic value. All three concepts help empirically oriented scholars to foreground the previously hidden capacities of local actors to shape meanings and manipulate institutional transfers in practice.

Indeed, people in the global South can and do effectively intervene in processes of transfer and diffusion, thus showing their agentic capacity ‘to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations’.²⁵ Like any engagement of an actor, the agency of the governed is based on an evaluation of the past (habit), present (contingencies of the moment), and future (objectives). It consequently translates into three basic capacities: (a) to reactivate past patterns of thought and action; (b) to imagine alternative possibilities of action; and (c) to judge the options in practical as well as in normative terms.²⁶

Change in perspective

Depending on the context of action, subversive forms of agency may be more likely reactions to transfer and diffusion from the outside than open ‘contention’²⁷ . To capture these reactions, the concepts of resistance, appropriation and translation have recently emerged and gained ground at the interface of social anthropology and political science. Most prominently, James C. Scott has argued that, in areas of limited statehood, ‘everyday forms of resistance’²⁸ hide behind seeming compliance and are therefore often overlooked. Rather than aiming at a system change, relatively powerless people keep their eyes on immediate benefits: ‘de facto gains’ rather than ‘de jure recognition of those gains’²⁹ . This holds for governments, regime bureaucrats, oppositional or civil society elites, and ordinary people alike, provided their relative inferiority. Scott himself has been particularly interested in the ordinary people. In his conception, the agency of the governed is most often not reflected (at least not in public), and poorly organised; it emerges unspectacularly in non-elite conversations and daily practices. Thus, being far from common notions of politics, these ‘infra-politics’³⁰ can nevertheless have massive effects in aggregate. From Scott’s perspective, indifferent labour and foot-dragging, for instance, were effective ‘weapons’³¹ of slaves resisting their Southern oppressors in the US Civil War; as well as of socialist workers contributing to the system’s collapse in the 1980s.

More generally, resistance appears to be particularly powerful if it is pursued through appropriation. We find such appropriation, for example, in the context of international North-South cooperation or aid, when local actors incorporate external strategies into their own ‘politics of survival’³² . More precisely, the governed manage to enhance their relative power position by subtly shaping and directing what is being imposed upon them. For instance, Vera van Hüllen analyses in her contribution to this collection how the autocratic government of Morocco cooperates with the EU on democracy promotion in a way that satisfies the donor (through certain liberalisation measures) but avoids regime change.³³ The (strategic) practices of appropriation thus change the very meaning of the EU reform agenda, and ultimately stabilises the status quo of power relations in the ‘local’ arena. Interestingly, the concept of appropriation stands for selfishness, opportunism, and even fraud in the debates on development and modernisation.³⁴ However, social anthropologists and postcolonial scholars have always emphasised that appropriation is more than a particular art of resistance; it also emerges in line with true compliance, with appropriation being a precondition for an internalisation of new goods, ideas and standards of behaviour³⁵ .

The analytical potential of the appropriation concept notwithstanding, another concept has established itself to describe this cultural process of internalisation, which is so important in processes of global institutional transfer and diffusion. Sally Merry introduced the humanistic concept of translation to the debate on global norm diffusion in the mid-2000s, thereby reminding us that the agency of the governed does not necessarily aim at resistance and contestation. Her work concentrates on the implementation of global human rights into ‘the local’. By doing this, she sheds light on the decisive role of local intermediary actors for the effectiveness and legitimacy of a global norm in local contexts. In a study on NGO-led human rights projects, Merry finds that only local actors manage to give global norms a local meaning, by embedding them into the normative context. This process of translation includes re-inventions and interpretations (a new framing of the norm), as well as practical modifications (new application areas and target groups), while the core meaning of a norm should persist.³⁶ To identify and follow a translation, scholars must thus tackle the major challenge of defining the essence of a norm, which is always open to interpretation.

Another concept begins to play a role in this nascent research field on the agency of the governed: International Relations scholars increasingly apply theories of norm contestation to global norm dynamics.³⁷ Assuming that a norm is always contested, they try to show empirically as well as in theory that global norms gain their legitimacy not only through formal ratification processes, but also from the critical engagement of norm addressees with a norm’s content and application practice. The concept of norm contestation thus brings the global level back in, and with it also the complex formation and change of global standards.

Structure of the volume

Drawing on the emerging body of literature on the agency of the governed outlined above, this collection assesses the current dynamics of transfer and diffusion studies at the interfaces of political science and social anthropology. By focusing on the agency of the governed, the collection integrates a broad spectrum of issues and debates, from the proliferation of global norms to state and security building to international policy cooperation. Additionally, it reminds us of the unused potential of inter- and subdisciplinary dialogue. A further ambition of this collection is to go beyond the trendy fascination of transfer and diffusion studies for local arenas, by tying local agency to global dynamics of norm change. That is why we connect the normative debate on contestation to the empirical debates on resistance, appropriation, and translation.

The volume begins with a theoretical reflection on the translation concept and its journey to norm diffusion studies.³⁸ From a genealogical perspective, Anke Draude uncovers how meanings and ontological premises shift when social science scholars adopt the humanistic concept in order to better understand global norm change. In fact, concepts imply assumptions about reality and truth. These should be uncovered if we want to break through conventional patterns of thought and give the governed a voice.

The next two pieces focus on local actors and their power to re-shape global norms and institutional transfers. In the first empirical study on rule of law promotion in Bangladesh, Tobias Berger explores the changes in meaning that constitute the translation of a global norm into a local context.³⁹ The analysis of a typical project of international development cooperation shows that the interpretation of the rule of law changed at all project levels, e.g. from an abstract principle to a concrete governance structure with different constellations of ‘relevant’ actors and institutions, new application areas, etc. After a complex ‘chain of translation’⁴⁰ , only local actors managed to give the global norm a local meaning, by embedding it into the normative frame of Islamic law – which was definitely not the intention of the responsible donors but may have transferred the basic idea of the rule of law.

The next study on intermediary actors in Lebanon and Cote d’Ivoire by Sina Birkholz, Tilmann Scherf, and Ursula Schroeder argues against a simplistic subsumption of local agency under notions of co-optation or resistance.⁴¹ By contrast, the authors differentiate between repertoires of action that key local actors on the receiving end of state-building and security interventions use to ‘manage’ or ‘push back’ international donors. The study thus underlines the creativity and inventiveness with which local actors effectively shape intervention outcomes, in spite of their generally inferior position of power.

The following contributions focus on the national level. With regard to contexts of international cooperation and global norm diffusion, they conceive governmental actors as ‘local’ actors who strategically appropriate or resist global political reform agendas according to their domestic political interests. Vera van Hüllen analyses the responses of Moroccan and Tunisian government officials to EU democracy promotion before and after the Arab uprisings of 2011.⁴² The comparison highlights how ‘subversive’ appropriation as ‘hidden’ resistance enables authoritarian regimes to deflect external demands while reaping the benefits of international cooperation.

Taking the same line, Jenny Lorentzen explores the way the government of Rwanda implements global standards of gender equality into national policy.⁴³ The policy analysis impressively deconstructs the African poster child for women’s empowerment, arguing that the norm of gender equality is only a means to an end for the government: The higher interests are economic progress and a ‘new’ national identity for Rwanda.

The final three pieces bring the international level back into view, exploring the interactions and retroactive effect of local agency on global norms. Susanne Zwingel focuses on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and its implementation into domestic law in Chile and Finland.⁴⁴ Zwingel argues that the contestation of women’s rights in the international realm leads to diverse translations into domestic practice – which are, again, contested. Local actors and the CEDAW committee (responsible for monitoring the implementation of the convention) have to negotiate continually on the situated meaning of the global norms package because the idea of women’s rights is open to interpretation.

The next contribution takes a theoretical perspective on the variety of concepts that focus on the agency of the governed. Based on careful discussion of diffusion studies, Lisbeth Zimmermann, Nicole Deitelhoff, and Max Lesch argue that the concept of contestation goes beyond translation and appropriation approaches.⁴⁵ While translation and appropriation research tend to create a top-down and North-to-South picture of global norm dynamics, contestation sheds light on bottom-up impulses for global normative change.

Finally, Antje Wiener extends this idea from a normative point of view.⁴⁶ She reasons that the actual agency of the governed depends on local stakeholders’ access to regular negotiations about norms on the local, national, or international political level. In line with recent postcolonial scholarship on political silence and speech, the collection thus concludes, recognising that diffusion studies should give the conditions of access to contestation more attention. Ultimately, the agency of the governed turns out to be essentially constructed in the political system.

Conclusion

In many parts of the world, the agency of the governed often does not manifest itself in those patterns of political action that have become established in Western democracies. That is why scholarship on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer has recently expanded its conceptual toolbox to include the concepts of resistance and appropriation, translation, and contestation. The tools discussed in this introduction guide a wide range of innovative, mostly case-study research in transfer and diffusion studies. This collection brings together these works under the umbrella term of the agency of the governed.

Although the concepts of appropriation and resistance, translation, and contestation stem from different discourses with different ontological assumptions, International Relations scholars largely treat them as synonymous. The pieces in this collection show the concepts’ capacity to make visible processes of re-interpretation, modification and normative change from the bottom up. As such, the concepts have effectively brought the agency of the governed into debates on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer.

Of course, this has changed the original debates. Indeed, transfer and diffusion scholars have discovered ‘the local’ – and some critics complain they have lost sight of ‘the global’.⁴⁷ Yet, even though the ideas of appropriation and translation in particular raise expectations of a local-level approach, the authors in this volume show the concepts’ versatile fields of application. In fact, the agency of the governed is not confined to a specific political level. People on the receiving end of global transfer and diffusion processes who appropriate, resist, translate or contest an international standard can be governmental representatives, national-level opposition forces, local elites, as well as ordinary people. This flexibility is a major advantage of these concepts since they are thus able to grasp multi-level dynamics and counter the ‘exoticization’ of local-level politics in the global South. Indeed, our research generally supports a relative notion of ‘the local’ (rather than an absolute one), pointing to a confined spatial entity in a broader regional, national or international context.

While the new awareness of agency and multidirectional influence at all levels of transfer and diffusion is definitely a benefit for the erstwhile top-down approach, some things remain to be done. First, research on the agency of the governed focuses too much on implementation issues, thus reducing the agency of the governed to reactive behaviour with only local consequences. More evidence is needed on the formation of global standards. What are their local origins? What are the dynamics, causes and consequences of their powerful framing as ‘global’? Second, beyond this empirical challenge, the change in perspective on the agency of the governed calls for a theoretical confrontation with the dominant positivist agenda in transfer and diffusion studies. What are the ontological assumptions of a debate that assumes the co-existence of multiple interpretations of the same global standard? Third, to assess the actual opportunities for participation of the actors in an asymmetric constellation, research must take a stance regarding the relationship between structure (or culture) and agency, which has also been described as the interplay of different forms of power⁴⁸ . How do structural asymmetries between the global and the local, the North and the South, or the centre and the periphery affect people’s capacity to effectively bring in their normative preferences? Fourth, normative standards of behaviour need to be differentiated. If we are principally in favour of the empowerment of the governed in processes of transfer and diffusion, what are the political implications? To answer this question, the scholarly community must fundamentally review their actual black-and-white assessment criteria for diverging normative positions, and develop new political reform agendas accordingly. Ultimately, we must define the limits of our tolerance. This volume intends to push these issues by integrating a fragmented discussion into a single and reflexive debate on the agency of the governed.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Notes on contributor

Anke Draude is a postdoctoral research associate at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on discursive shifts and conceptual innovations in the study of governance, aid, and development in areas of limited statehood.

Acknowledgements

For critical comments on the draft manuscript, special thanks go to Thomas Risse who also accompanied the overall publication project and gave continuous support and encouragement. I also wish to thank the editorial team of Third World Thematics, especially Madeleine Hatfield, for their time and understanding during the creation of this collection.

Notes

1. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics,” 891.

2. E.g. Evans, “Policy Transfer in Critical Perspective,” 245; Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders; Stone, “Private Philanthropy or Policy Transfer?.”

3. Behrends, Park and Rottenburg, Travelling Models in African Conflict Management.

4. Zwingel, “How Do Norms Travel?”

5. Merry, “Law, Culture, and Cultural Appropriation’; Scott, ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance.”

6. Wiener and Puetter, “The Quality of Norms is What Actors Make of It.”

7. Lewis and Mosse, Development Brokers and Translators.

8. Risse, “Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood.”

9. E.g. Strang and Meyer, “Institutional Conditions for Diffusion,” 487–88.

10. Cf. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

11. See particularly Berger, “Linked in Translation.”

12. Risse, “Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood.”

13. Draude, Hölck and Stolle, “Social Trust.”

14. Tilly, “The Analysis of Popular Collective Action,” 223; see also Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

15. For an overview of the debate, see e.g. Benson and Jordan, “What Have We Learned”; Dolowitz and Marsh, “Learning from Abroad”; Solingen, “Of Dominoes and Firewalls.”

16. Marsh and Sharman, “Policy Diffusion and Policy Transfer,” 271.

17. Börzel and Risse, “From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction,” 1.

18. Zimmermann, “Same Same or Different?”

19. For an overview of the debate on the role of 'the local' in peacebuilding interventions, see Hughes, Öjendal and Schierenbeck, “The ‘Local Turn’ in Peacebuilding”; see also Birkholz, Scherf and Schroeder, “Creating Room for Manoeuvre.”

20. Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace.”

21. March and Olsen, “The Logic of Appropriateness.”

22. Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights; Simmons, Garrett and Dobbin, The Global Diffusion of Markets; for the critique, see Acharya, “How Ideas Spread.”

23. E.g. Clarke et al., Making Policy Move; Risse, Börzel and Draude, The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood.

24. Wiener, “Agency of the Governed in Global International Relations”; Zimmermann, Deitelhoff and Lesch, “Unlocking the Agency of the Governed.”

25. Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency?” 971.

26. Dalton, “Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products”; Joas, The Creativity of Action.

27. Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics; see also Snow et al., The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements.

28. Scott, “Everyday Forms of Resistance.”

29. Ibid., 34.

30. Scott, Decoding Subaltern Politics, 64.

31. Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

32. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, 214.

33. van Hüllen, “Resistance to International Democracy Promotion.”

34. Olivier de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption”; Platteau, “Monitoring Elite Capture in Community-Driven Development.”

35. van Binsbergen, van Dijk and Gewald, Situating Globality; Hart, “Translating and Resisting Empire”; Ziff and Rao, Borrowed Power.

36. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization On the Ground”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism”; cf. Berger, “Linked in Translation”; Zwingel, “Women’s Rights Norms.”

37. For an overview, see Lantis, “Theories of International Norm Contestation.”

38. Draude, “Translation in Motion.”

39. Berger, “Linked in Translation.”

40. Bruno Latour, “Coming Out as a Philosopher,” 601.

41. Birkholz, Scherf and Schroeder, “Creating Room for Manoeuvre.”

42. van Hüllen, “Resistance to International Democracy Promotion.”

43. Lorentzen, “Norm Appropriation through Policy Production.”

44. Zwingel, “Women’s Rights Norms.”

45. Zimmermann, Deitelhoff and Lesch, “Unlocking the Agency of the Governed.”

46. Antje Wiener, “Agency of the Governed in Global International Relations.”

47. Bettiza and Dionigi, “How do Religious Norms Diffuse?”

48. Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics.”