Affectedness in international institutions: promises and pitfalls of involving the most affected

ABSTRACT

Persons and groups affected by the choices and actions of international institutions increasingly claim to have a say in their making. They challenge governments, international bureaucrats, and classic NGOs for lacking legitimacy and acting in ways that disregard too many people’s legitimate concerns. To study these recent developments, this collection brings together political science and international law scholars. Based on their observations, the introduction makes three major contributions: First, it conceptualises the rising involvement of affected persons’ organisations (APOs) in global governance as a turn to affectedness-participation. As the contributions to this collection demonstrate, affected persons and groups by now participate in many areas of global rule- and law-making. Second, the introduction shows that their participation addresses current legitimacy problems of international public policy making and transnational (self-)governance. APOs often make innovative policy demands, articulate marginalised normative understandings and call for radical political change. However, third, this introduction also finds that pitfalls remain: conceptualising and identifying affected persons and their legitimate representatives is difficult, APOs often face serious capacity constraints and powerful international actors threaten to co-opt the newcomers. Nevertheless, the greater involvement of affected persons is a promising development in the journey towards more inclusive and legitimate global politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Affectedness
• civil society
• co-optation
• international institutions
• legitimacy
• participation

Introduction

On 4 December 2018 the 15-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a moving speech at the plenary session of the COP 24 climate change summit. In the name of children she accused the world’s political leaders of ‘stealing their future’.¹ Calling the politicians ‘not mature enough’, she asked for an urgent global policy change before it is too late. This is just one of many recent examples in which persons who have been or may become directly affected by international decisions raise their voice in the global arena. Their involvement has been on the rise in international institutions since the early 2000s. Members of indigenous groups and peasant organisations have engaged in various UN bodies and successfully lobbied for new instruments and institutional reforms to ensure protection, participation, or influence.² Persons affected by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria have been accorded seats on decision-making bodies in the Global Fund, UNITAID, and other institutions of global health governance.³ Organisations comprised of disabled people took a strong role in the negotiation of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.⁴ Finally, working children movements from the Global South have challenged Western understandings of child labour at international conferences.⁵

This collection studies the rising involvement of affected persons and groups. We propose that it constitutes (and follows from) a paradigmatic turn towards the principle of affectedness in global politics. As we will show, this comes mainly as a response to a major legitimacy crisis of global rule- and law-making. In the traditional Westphalian understanding of international politics, states and their governments are representing the interests of their citizens in foreign affairs. By extension, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) are considered endowed with legitimacy to coordinate states’ foreign conduct and to promote international negotiations on joint policies and legal instruments. Yet, it has become evident that this legitimation model is deficient in many regards: for various reasons, the activities of most governments, diplomats, and international bureaucrats remain largely beyond meaningful democratic control in many international institutions.⁶ So-called international civil society participation has grown in recent decades, in part to address this problem. In particular international NGOs (INGOs) from the Global North have become influential players in the advocacy of human rights, the provision of basic services, and the representation of marginalised populations.⁷ With their mostly expert staff members, however, these INGOs have often been accused of being too disconnected from those whom they claim to represent.⁸ Therefore, many academics, activists, and politicians have called for greater direct involvement of citizens in global politics. For instance, the UN’s ‘Cardoso Report’ stressed the need for the UN to ensure that ‘global deliberations are informed by local reality’.⁹ Such calls for ‘participation’, ‘inclusion’, ‘partnership’, ‘local ownership’, or ‘localisation’ have become frequent in many governance areas.¹⁰ We suggest that the trend towards the participation of affected persons and groups responds to these assumed deficiencies in the global political order.

The general concept of affectedness of course is neither new, nor has it remained unobserved by researchers in social sciences. It has been a basic and long-standing democratic ideal that those who are affected by public policies have a say in their making. In traditional Western democratic theory, for instance, from Kant to Rawls, being affected by public policies on a delineated territory has been understood as requiring the election of representative bodies on a ‘one person one vote’ basis to ensure equal influence of citizens on the composition of parliaments and executive bodies.¹¹ More recently, scholars have sought to conceptualise an ‘all-affected principle’ and discuss its current implications from a political philosophy perspective.¹²

This volume deals with a related but somewhat different phenomenon. We observe that irrespective of, or alongside, elected institutions on national territories, groups of individuals have successfully advanced the claim of being existentially ‘affected’ by decisions taken on an international scale. As a consequence, they have requested to participate in global public policy making. Among international institutions, the first historical emanation of the idea to include the most affected directly in international governance can be found in the International Labour Organization (ILO). The ILO was founded in 1919 and has institutionalised tripartite negotiations among worker representatives from trade unions, national governments, and employer representatives.

However, as we argue in the following, it is only since the millennium that the idea to involve the most affected has developed into a guiding principle for legitimacy in international politics. Scholars recently documented by a number of case studies that more and more grassroots organisations and activists have been invoking affectedness by international decisions and have been calling for more inclusive governance structures.¹³ In response, several IGOs have improved on the access opportunities for affected persons and engaged in what some researchers referred to as ‘global experimentalist governance’.¹⁴ We contribute to this research but take a more general perspective: we attempt to demonstrate the increasing relevance of the participation of the most affected by gathering and comparing evidence from various policy areas and discussing its implications for global rule- and law-making.

For this purpose, we take an interdisciplinary political science and international law perspective to study the affectedness turn with regard to its political and normative dimensions, touching upon core issues in both disciplines such as legitimacy, participation, power, and co-optation. On these grounds, the articles in this collection make three contributions: First, they help to conceptualise the participation of the most affected and collect corresponding evidence from various issue areas. By doing this, they show that there has indeed been an increasing involvement of affected persons’ organisations (APOs) in food security, health, indigenous affairs, rights of persons with disabilities, and children’s rights. Moreover, this trend resulted in a strong normative demand for a broader inclusion of APOs in other issue areas as well (including climate governance, development, and humanitarian aid), where the actual involvement is lacking behind.

Second, they argue that the participation of the most affected may have the potential to mitigate well-documented legitimacy deficits of international rule- and law-making processes.¹⁵ Evidence collected here, in particular from food security governance and the struggle for children’s rights, shows that affected persons develop innovative policy proposals, bring local experiences and suppressed normative understandings to the fore, and often make radical demands for change. Their inputs can enrich political debates, make heard the voices of people who have too often been excluded from policy-making forums, and strengthen the agency of affected persons. Thus, the contributions show that the involvement of APOs in international institutions potentially increases the legitimacy of global policy-making processes.

However, third, this collection also finds that the greater role of affected groups or persons is no silver bullet as major pitfalls still exist. It remains conceptually challenging to define the meaning of affectedness in order to objectively identify affected persons and groups as well as their representatives. Moreover, APOs often face huge obstacles for participation in the global arena, which can limit their influence. Finally, more powerful actors—in particular states but also IGOs and NGOs—may seek to co-opt APOs and use them for ‘window-dressing’. While several authors within this collection discuss these challenges, they also make recommendations of how to address them.

In the remainder of this introduction, we elaborate on these three areas of interest. In each part, we draw on the relevant literature to clarify key concepts, highlight relevant debates, and show how this collection furthers current knowledge. In the conclusion, we summarise our core findings but also critically discuss caveats and point to further research needed to better understand the role of involving the most affected in global governance.

Conceptualising the paradigm of involving the most affected

The new forms of participation in that we observe international institutions build on the guiding principle that those who are affected by the choices and actions of others should have a say in their making.¹⁶ Thus, the paradigm of involving the most affected vests legitimacy in affected persons and groups as well as their representing organisations. These organisations—APOs—comprise members directly from a group of people that can be considered existentially concerned by a particular problem. Their leaders and representatives typically embody the affected group—for instance, when children claim children’s rights, survivors of humanitarian disaster advocate the reorganisation of the international emergency regime, or a person with disabilities seeks improvements for others living with disabilities. Being personally affected or close to affected persons, these representatives typically have local knowledge, lived experience, and cultural understandings of the issue at hand. In the ideal version, others from the affected group see these representatives as legitimate but can also hold them accountable and revoke them if they find the broader group inadequately represented.¹⁷

This differs from more indirect forms of representation of affected populations, which has classically been provided by NGOs along the public interest paradigm.¹⁸ While difficult to define, NGOs are commonly understood as professionalised civil society organisations (CSOs) with expert staff members, administrative bodies, formalised accountability requirements, and media presence. NGO personnel typically have an academic-professional background and rarely are affected persons themselves. As mostly third-party advocates, they rather derive their legitimacy from benevolence and effectiveness in improving other peoples’ lives and in promoting ‘common interests’, such as the protection of the environment or endangered species. Following the well-known ‘boomerang model’ of transnational civil society engagement, globally operating NGOs often cooperate with national and local partners in order to enhance implementation of international standards in domestic settings and to legitimise their claims in the global arena.¹⁹ According to a common critique, however, many of these INGOs remain too disconnected from the affected grassroots: often based in the Global North, they are accountable mostly towards their donors and frequently have only weak ties with the populations on whose behalves they claim to act.²⁰

The rise of the affectedness paradigm thus entails a shift from third-party and public interest advocacy by NGOs towards direct engagement of particularly affected persons on the global level (Figure 1). This direct engagement is usually channelled through APOs, which can be community-based organisations or social movement organisations. Thereby, the representatives of APOs themselves take part in global deliberations in order to voice the grievances and demands of the affected group. Evidently, this conceptualisation is based on ideal types, whereas the reality is often more nuanced. For instance, the label of NGOs subsumes a huge variety of organisations, some of which may have thorough local roots and comprise staff members who can be considered affected. APOs, in turn, can become professionalised and lose their grassroots connections and legitimacy.

Figure 1. Civil society paradigms.

The paradigms of affectedness and of public interest advocacy also do not occur in isolation but intersect in at least two ways. First, as APOs often lack the necessary resources and political expertise for activism at the global level, NGOs have been major partners for them. This can endow APOs with means for their activism, both locally and globally, while also legitimising the NGOs’ activities. However, such partnership can lead to the co-optation of APOs by the more resourceful INGOs who may use the grassroots’ testimony merely for a façade of legitimacy and for their fundraising. Wary of instrumentalisation, some APOs have openly challenged INGOs and their often dominant advocacy position as well as frequently paternalistic attitudes.

Second, there are a number of institutional arrangements at IGOs, which combine both paradigms. Markus Hasl shows in his contribution to this collection that APOs have been involved in IGOs recently along three major models: subordination, parity and priority.²¹ In some institutions, representatives of affected populations have been included within NGO delegations. This ‘subordination model’ recognises the relevance of affectedness but still largely adheres to the public interest paradigm. In the more egalitarian ‘parity model’, APOs and NGOs have been endowed with equal participation rights through separate delegations. Finally, some IGOs have accorded APOs priority over NGOs (‘priority model’), thereby institutionalising the affectedness principle in its fullest form.

The meaning of participation of the most affected

In abstract terms, people are affected if some social occurrence negatively impacts on their interests, livelihoods, or freedoms.²² The basic problem with the concept, however, is that in an interconnected world virtually everyone is—in one way or another—affected by almost every problem and related decision-making process.²³ Therefore, the concept of affectedness needs further specification. Following various authors within this collection, affectedness encompasses both a substantive and procedural dimension. The former refers to the impacts created by social issues themselves, e.g. poverty, war, hunger, or diseases. The latter means (potential) affectedness from the decision-making processes of political institutions, which can provide normative justification for affected groups to participate in the process.

Furthermore, to draw the line between those who are seriously affected—meaning that their claims must be respected and their voices must be heard before decisions are made and actions taken—and those who are not, scholars have proposed various measures. Affectedness can be qualified in terms of human rights violations, infringement of people’s self-determination, or the degree of impact on people’s life expectancy and life chances.²⁴ In any case, affectedness should be understood as socially constructed. It presupposes a common life-world, designates a group of people as existentially threatened according to common standards, and calls for appropriate redress.²⁵ In practice, the social attribution of affectedness can be produced through bottom-up as well as top-down processes. From the bottom up, many local communities, activists, lawyers, and movements have invoked affectedness to demand their political inclusion. For example, the food sovereignty movement,²⁶ disabled people’s organisations (‘Nothing about us without us’), and the Occupy movement (‘We are the 99 percent’) all have made corresponding claims. Depending on their salience and credibility, these claims resonate with the relevant audience and convince the public that there is indeed an affected group.²⁷ This makes affectedness basically a matter of convincing others, a claim that can be rebutted. It is not necessarily those who are most affected who receive most attention.²⁸ Regarding the top-down perspective, affectedness can be established by IGOs, international courts, and other institutions. In this collection, Giedre Jokubauskaite coins the notion of ‘tied affectedness’ for such affectedness-attributions that are initially constructed by international institutions.²⁹ The notion points to the problematic implication of institutional biases. Whether or not a group is recognised as affected and what consequences this entails, remains largely at the discretion of the international institution and subject to its logics and fallacies. These social-constructivist perspectives thus demonstrate that affectedness is a concept that—in particular as a top-down process—can be manipulated and instrumentalised.

While the various authors within this collection use different understandings of affectedness, a common denominator is the idea that affectedness goes beyond a formal attribution of the effects of institutional decisions to a group of persons in a geographically determined space, such as a nation state or specific region. The bottom-up claim to be affected by global governance in our understanding has an existential dimension that transcends formal criteria of jurisdictional or geographical attribution. So understood, affected groups are comprised of persons who, through their specific situation or lifeworld, can persuasively claim to be existentially impacted by decisions taken in the respective international institution. In that sense it is helpful to speak of the participation of the ‘most affected’—a terminology used by peasant movements and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) over the last decade. In many sectors of global governance, it goes without saying who is member of an affected group, such as in the field of the rights of persons with disabilities, the rights of children, and in the efforts to eliminate discrimination against women. In less group-centred issues, it is not so clear who the ‘most affected’ are. This is for instance the case in global regulations for trade or environmental protection. Here ‘the most affected’ need to be defined, if possible as a product of a persuasive bottom-up claim and not vice versa.

The rise of the affectedness concept in international institutions

The contributors to this collection demonstrate the rise of the affectedness paradigm in various international policy fields. The trend has been particularly pronounced in global food security governance. As Josh Brem-Wilson as well as Annette Schramm and Jan Sändig show in this collection, transnational agrarian movements including La Vía Campesina (LVC) have made a strong case that peasants are negatively affected by neoliberal policies and global capitalism. Globally organised peasants have called for a fundamental shift in agricultural policies, the creation of new rights, and an extension of the sphere of global regulation to fight hunger, poverty, and dispossession.³⁰ Indigenous peoples’ movements are another paradigmatic example. The contributions by Andreas Hasenclever and Henrike Narr and by Linda Wallbott and Eugenia Recio show that since the early 2000s indigenous peoples’ movements have successfully promoted the creation of new bodies at the UN and the adoption of new legal instruments and provisions for their recognition and protection.³¹ In a comparative study, Markus Hasl examines various IGOs, especially in health governance. He shows that UNAIDS, UNITAID, and the Global Fund established innovative arrangements to ensure that affected persons are part of decision-making processes, although their participation is often still tied to NGOs.³² Focusing on children’s rights, Anna Holzscheiter demonstrates that working children’s organisations have been increasingly present at high-level events and international negotiations since the 1990s.³³

In the areas of development, humanitarian aid, and climate governance the authors in this collection observe that there is increasing normative commitment to involving affected populations but their actual participation has lacked behind. Studying the development policies of the BRICS, Lisa Thomspon and Pamela Tsolekile de Wet highlight rising verbal commitment to collective development solutions. At the same time, however, they show that the BRICS states have still pursued exploitative development strategies and that the BRICS’ civil society summits have largely excluded grassroots activists.³⁴ Concerning World Bank development projects, Giedre Jokubauskaite examines the new mechanisms (e.g. the Environmental and Social Framework) to protect affected people.³⁵ They now have to be consulted early on in the planning of development projects and have easier access to remedies than before. Jokubauskaite, though, finds that the World Bank retains too much leeway in defining and excluding affected groups, which undermines some of the potential of these mechanisms. In the related area of humanitarian aid, Tanja Granzow observes the emergence of a similar discourse of participation and ‘localisation‘ in recent governance frameworks. Cooperation with community-based organisations is assumed to increase the effectiveness of international humanitarians.³⁶ Yet, according to Granzow such localisation stands in conflict with other recent efforts of professionalisation and centralisation under UN auspices. Moreover, her ethnographic analysis of a small humanitarian INGO in Haiti reveals that dominant organisational frames of insecurity and paternalism, which are typical in the humanitarian sector, largely preclude the cooperation with grassroots groups. In climate governance Patrick Toussaint also finds an increasing normative demand for the involvement of affected communities.³⁷ Yet, application of affectedness remains difficult here for lack of a single and easily identifiable group of ‘climate victims’. Moreover, the dominant framing of international climate negotiations and impacts as a matter of loss and damage has maintained government control over this issue area and sidelined civil society so far. While this collection can only study a limited number of governance areas, this overview clearly shows that since the early 2000s there has been increasing recognition and participation of affected persons in varied international institutions.

The promise of legitimate and more inclusive international institutions

A commitment to include the most affected is a promise to make global governance more participatory and legitimate. For a long time, the legitimacy of international public policies has been based on the logic that states pursue ‘common interests’. By extension, IGOs were expected to act in the interest of ‘humankind’. This statist legitimation model, however, is in crisis.³⁸ More than half of all states lack democratic credentials, and even in democracies foreign policy is rarely debated in electoral campaigns, thus remaining largely at the discretion of government and diplomats. Globally, major powers disproportionately influence the structures and decisions of IGOs. In addition, corporate interests, the neoliberal consensus and what B.S. Chimni refers to as the transnational capitalist class shape policy outcomes.³⁹ The belief that states and IGOs automatically serve the people has also been shattered by the global social justice movement and its resistance against neoliberal globalisation since the late 1990s.⁴⁰ Consequently, IGOs as well as major stakeholders perceive a clear need to become more inclusive in order to legitimise the exercise of authority through international institutions.⁴¹

Both the enhanced participation of NGOs in global governance since the 1980s and the current rise of the affectedness paradigm can be understood as responses to this legitimacy crisis.⁴² The increasing involvement of APOs also promises to bring in more Southern grassroots’ views into global governance, which has still been dominated by the Global North.⁴³ Moreover, by raising people’s concerns, the participation of the most affected generally seems to be a step towards more democratic international policy-making. Yet, the question is whether the affectedness paradigm can fulfil these promises?

The demands for the participation of APOs and for institutional openings at IGOs are difficult to frame in classic nation-state-based democratic legitimation models. Their participation does not correspond to established democratic procedures which guarantee formal equality between citizens through a process of regular general elections.⁴⁴ But this threshold anyway seems to overburden decision-making in international institutions given the number of diplomatic representatives from authoritarian governments and increasingly autonomous and unelected IGO secretariats.⁴⁵ Moreover, many APOs do not want to vote and decide within policy- and law making procedures in international institutions but seek inclusion in order to initiate new policies, and to comment, negotiate, or criticise proposals initiated by member states and secretariats. Through media-campaigns they can indeed—in line with the boomerang model—inform interested domestic publics about policy-processes in international institutions. While this is a valuable contribution with the potential to better hold governmental representatives and IGO secretariats accountable through the domestic realm, it is not necessarily specific to APOs but a role that classic NGOs have performed for a relatively long time. So what specific contribution can only APOs make to these processes within international institutions, which distinguishes them from expert-driven NGOs?

We hold that the contribution of APOs lies in the ‘existential’ dimension of their relationship with the decisions taken in these institutions. To speak for the ‘most affected’ can generate an ‘existentialist’ legitimacy by persuasively arguing that this particular decision will have a more or less direct and concrete effect for the person or group of persons uttering a position in this governance process. If a person with a mental disability argues within the UN General Assembly that a certain exception clause in a new convention on the rights of persons with disabilities will lead to the legal possibility of her government to institutionalise her (and other persons with a similar disability) against her will, this person speaks with a different authority than a classic NGO expert. The same arguably holds true for a smallholder farmer who within the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) can demonstrate that a proposed market-based solution to large-scale foreign investments in land has already had specific damaging effects for local communities in the particular region of Thailand where this person lives. What distinguishes such communicative interventions from those of governmental and classic NGO experts is a specific form of local knowledge that would otherwise be absent in these deliberations. This local knowledge and lived experience can illustrate how otherwise abstract global processes of regulation impact on people’s lives on the ground. The inclusion of the ‘most affected’ can thus confront dominant epistemic networks of (Western) administrative and scientific elites with local knowledge about the potential effects of law and policy-making. While APOs that seek to represent the most affected can certainly not substitute for a ‘thick’ public sphere in Habermasian terms and can only partially represent the varied interests among affected groups, they can create a certain irritation and resistance to hegemonic epistemic orthodoxies. Such debate and contestation is considered essential for legitimate rule-making in all deliberative theories of democracy. Habermas in this context approvingly cites Dewey’s remark on the deliberative preconditions of any form of democratic rule:

Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it never is merely majority rule. (….) As (…) Samuel J. Tilden, said a long time ago: “The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is the more important thing”: antecedent debates, modification of views to meet the opinions of minorities, the relative satisfaction given the latter by the fact that it has had a chance and that next time it may be successful in becoming a majority. (….). The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion.⁴⁶

While we do not hold that 'rational' and consent-oriented deliberation with affected groups within international institutions is a harbinger of global democracy,⁴⁷ we do think that involving what Nancy Fraser has called 'subaltern counterpublics'⁴⁸ can be an important contribution to the responsiveness of international institutions. The decisive question, however, is whether or not the unruly, spontaneous and at times rebellious communicative power of many APOs is in fact being transformed and de-substantiated through its integration into the administrative global governance machinery. Or in other words: Does formal inclusion of the most affected in NGOs lead to a loss of the specific value of their discursive contributions, which theoretically thrive on a dialectical outsider-position to the legislative and administrative apparatus?

Based on the contributions of this collection, we would rather argue that the participation of APOs in international institutions has indeed brought new policy proposals, challenges to dominant norms and established borders of international regulation, and often more radical claims into the global arena. To some extent, their participation has already reshaped debates, policies, and normative standards. For example, in her study of children’s activism and rights, Anna Holzscheiter argues that working children’s organisations have challenged the dominant discourse on ‘appropriate childhood’. This discourse, established mainly by Northern adult NGOs, stipulated that childhood should be free from economic responsibility, which has also downplayed children’s agency. Yet, Southern-based APOs, which have become increasingly present at high-level events since the 1990s, have demanded inclusion into policy-making and recognition of various forms of child work and children’s agency.⁴⁹ Their activism has revealed normative inconsistencies in international treaties that abolitionist INGOs have long sought to suppress.

Two contributions in this collection study how the involvement of peasant movements and affected local communities has reshaped the structures, debates and to some extent also normative standards in food security governance. The strong endorsement of the affectedness principle in this issue area follows in large part from the struggle by peasant movements with LVC at the forefront. According to Annette Schramm and Jan Sändig, these peasant movements formed ‘affectedness alliances’ with INGOs. Within these coalitions, APOs represent the concerns of affected groups, while INGOs act as supporters. This collaborative arrangement addresses some of the typical challenges that APOs face at the global level, in particular resource constraints and the marginalisation of their views. The cooperation, thus, has ensured a leading advocacy role of peasant movements and affected local groups and guaranteed access to resources and expertise for meaningful participation, which they have used to voice their grievances and raise challenging policy demands.

In a similar vein, Josh Brem-Wilson shows that the affectedness principle has served the peasant movements to extend the sphere of public governance and become involved in policy-making.⁵⁰ Within a 'publicisation struggle' movements can invoke affectedness to shift the borders of international authority by bringing neglected actors and issues under regulation. The food sovereignty movement has pursued this struggle, amongst other institutions, in the Human Rights Council (HRC), where it has sought to bring transnational corporations under international public law, and the CFS where the 'most affected' obtained substantial participation rights. These findings complement recent studies that document how APOs in this area have reshaped the policy debates at the CFS, contributed to setting new land governance standards, and created a prime example of a transnational public sphere.⁵¹

Looking at the indigenous peoples’ movement, Linda Wallbott and Eugenia Recio illustrate how indigenous groups that are affected by forest conservation won recognition and rights protection under the carbon emission reduction scheme REDD+.⁵² Key to these achievements has been the strategy by indigenous peoples' movements to invoke affectedness and frame their local knowledge as indispensable asset that other stakeholders need for the implementation of REDD+ on the ground. These frames resonated with international policy-makers who subsequently enshrined environmental and social safeguards within the REDD+ financing mechanisms. Drawing on these provisions, affected local communities and indigenous people’s organisations effectively pressured governments into the creation of policy forums that involve indigenous' representatives on issues of forest conservation as the authors demonstrate with regard to various Latin American countries.

The contributions to this collection thus suggest that the participation of affected groups has already enriched transnational policy- and rule-making processes. In the observed issue areas, the involvement of APOs has diminished the divide between the policy-making and norm-setting processes on the international level and the affected grassroots organisations. Furthermore, several contributions highlight to what extent the recognition of the claim to speak for the most affected has strengthened the agency of APOs. At the same time, as a precondition to claim affectedness and a right to participation, local groups need a minimum of social coherence and agency.⁵³ Once claimed, affectedness probably derives much of its power and emotional appeal from its high moral ground and the extraordinary persuasiveness of direct testimony from affected persons. Following Jochen von Bernstorff the participation of affected persons ‘can change the atmosphere of the deliberations in international organisations’ and ‘constitute a strong irritation for national experts and scientists’, which ‘potentially modifies the authority configuration within an institution’.⁵⁴ Besides these various promises, however, we also see some pitfalls.

The pitfalls: capacity constraints and co-optation of the most affected?

The participation of the most affected is no silver bullet. APOs—as other CSOs—face challenges when they seek to participate in global policy-making and norm-setting. These processes are shaped in many ways by powerful actors such as states, IGOs, multinational corporations, and INGOs.⁵⁵ In this context, APOs may become co-opted, which would mean that⁵⁶ their aims become compromised and that they exert little influence but lend legitimacy to policy outcomes that hardly serve the interests of affected groups. Such co-optation may materialise due to various reasons: First, APOs are relatively inexperienced in these arenas and often do not have the necessary organisational capacities. Meaningful participation, however, requires formal organisational status, considerable technical expertise to follow and influence the bureaucratised procedures, and substantial financial means to ensure a continued presence at IGOs.⁵⁷ Second, in order to win and maintain influence, APOs like INGOs may ‘water down’ their more radical demands, e.g. through the use of ‘agreed language’ and established frames.⁵⁸ Third, APOs may become professionalised and institutionalised at the international level, whereby they can lose their grassroots’ character and increasingly resemble established INGOs. As a consequence, APOs could unwillingly legitimise policy- and law-making processes that they hardly influenced and that may eventually contravene the interests of the affected groups at grassroots level. Furthermore, their involvement may consume resources that could have been used for more effective resistance from the outside of IGOs and on the domestic level.

Various contributions in this collection examine the risk of co-optation. Andreas Hasenclever and Henrike Narr study the indigenous peoples’ movement, which is often seen as particularly successful in promoting the interests of affected groups.⁵⁹ Through its long-standing activism, the movement achieved the creation of new instruments and institutions, for example the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII). Indigenous people’s participation at the UN, therefore, makes a likely case for the shift from state dominance towards more participatory forms of governance. However, the authors show that the movement’s impacts are often overestimated. Due to capacity gaps and states’ disregard to the PFII, many critical indigenous' views become marginalised within the UN, thus tainting the success story. To strengthen their influence, indigenous peoples’ organisations would in practice often partner with NGOs to professionalise their working methods and adapt to the international context, while attempting to ensure that this does not sever their connections with affected local constituencies.

The problem of APOs’ co-optation is also observed by Lisa Thompson and Pamela Tsolekile de Wet at the annual BRICS summits.⁶⁰ Since 2015 the Civil BRICS forum gathers CSOs to make official recommendations to the summits. These forums, however, have been dominated by state-aligned think tanks and major INGOs whereas grassroots activists and movements have remained excluded. Only in 2018, NGOs undertook first efforts to collect grassroots voices and facilitate the participation of local activists. Yet, the activists have perceived their inputs as managed by NGOs and felt alienated by the technical language used for recommendations. Considering that proposals by the Civil BRICS, furthermore, have been entirely disregarded by the BRICS’ heads of state, the authors suggest the need for CSOs to complement their participation by activism from the outside.

The risk of co-optation also prevails within the World Bank’s development projects. As Giedre Jokubauskaite shows, the Bank’s institutional biases have shaped its top-down mechanisms for the involvement of affected groups.⁶¹ The World Bank Inspection Panel has taken only certain types of requests and social groups into account. Even under the new Environmental and Social Framework recognition of affectedness will likely remain at the discretion of the Bank’s management. To ‘untie’ affectedness from such institutional biases, Jokubauskaite proposes to enact a new provision that tasks independent specialists with identifying affected people . This can address the problem of co-optation if specialists with sensibility to the local context and population diversity are employed and mandated to mediate between the affected communities, the borrower, and the Bank throughout the project duration.

While these contributions suggest that the co-optation of APOs can be avoided or at least mitigated through various strategies, B.S. Chimni takes a more pessimistic stance in the epilogue.⁶² From a critical postcolonial perspective, he sees global governance as deeply structured by capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Social movements that invoke affectedness may achieve recognition and participation in international institutions but remain unlikely to overcome these deep structures and the dominance of the transnational capitalist class. Chimni therefore calls for movements to focus their resistance mainly on the national level, form intersectional alliances, and reclaim policy space that post-colonial states have lost to international law and IGOs.

Conclusion and outlook

The collection shows the rising relevance of affectedness as guiding principle of civil society involvement in international institutions. The participation of existentially affected groups of persons promises to give voice to people who have been marginalised in law and policy-making procedures. Through APOs, they often contest dominant normative understandings, seek to reshape international regulation, and call for more radical political change. Their involvement can in that sense reduce the gap between global policy- and rule-making processes and the affected grassroots, thereby increasing the responsiveness and legitimacy of global politics. Yet, major conceptual challenges persist in identifying the most affected groups and to better understand and assess the ‘dark sides’ to the affectedness approach. As most APOs face constraints of resources and technical expertise, their increasing role at IGOs often comes at the expense of INGOs, which would be in many cases better positioned to influence policy processes. Relatedly, APOs may become co-opted if they lend legitimacy to policy processes in which they hardly influence the outcomes. While the authors in this collection make various suggestions on how to evade co-optation, it remains an open question for now whether the participation of the most affected can contribute to transform the deep structures of institutional biases and the neoliberal consensus in a meaningful way.

Research on the participation of the most affected persons in international institutions is still at an early stage. Three questions seem particularly relevant for further research: First, the drivers and obstacles of the affectedness principle need to be studied. In terms of actors and institutions, the questions are under which circumstances IGOs accord participation rights to affected persons, and when do states support or oppose this?⁶³ Relatedly, the diffusion processes of the norm of involving the most affected should be examined and the prospects of a norm cascade assessed.⁶⁴ This includes the question of whether the principle can be applied to all issue areas or only to some contexts. Second, the representativeness of APOs needs to be scrutinised considering that virtually all CSOs claim to represent some population’s interests. Like NGOs, APOs may also become professionalised and institutionalised at the international level, which can undermine their representativeness of affected groups. For these questions, further clarity on the meaning of ‘existential’ affectedness in various policy fields is needed. Third, the consequences of the participation of the most affected should be investigated. This also concerns APOs’ impacts on procedures of policy- and rule-making in international institutions considering that broad participation can also hamper negotiation processes and may lead to institutional counter-reactions of other actors.⁶⁵ Moreover, scholars should further study the issues of legitimacy and co-optation, and explore them with regard to theories of resistance, rebellious politics, and global democracy. Through this collection, we hope to stimulate such a broader debate on the role of affected persons in international institutions.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all contributors of this collection for their inspiring articles and reflections. Annette Schramm and Markus Hasl provided valuable inputs to this introduction. Furthermore, we would like to thank Madeleine Hatfield for excellent editorial support during the whole process of putting the collection together. Last but not least, the reviewers deserve much appreciation for often detailed and very helpful feedback.

Additional information

Funding

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) supported our research on the role of affectedness in international institutions within our research project F07 on mobilisations against Land Grabbing at the Collaborative Research Centre 923 ‘Threatened Order – Societies under Stress’, University of Tübingen. As part of this, the DFG also funded our international conference ‘Empowering the Most Affected: A New Paradigm in Global Governance and International Law?’ (Tübingen, November 2017). This collection is the conference’s main outcome.

Notes on contributors

Jan Sändig

Jan Sändig is a research fellow in peace and conflict studies at the Collaborative Research Centre 923 ‘Threatened Order – Societies under Stress’, University of Tübingen. His research focuses on armed and non-violent contention in Sub-Saharan Africa and the role of civil society in global governance. Currently, he studies the strategies, framings, and dynamics of resistance pursued by affected peasant communities and transnational activist networks against 'Land Grabbing.' This inspired him to explore the role of affectedness more broadly within global governance.

Jochen Von Bernstorff

Jochen von Bernstorff is Professor of International Law at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. His research focuses on the history and theory of international law and international institutions. Related recent publications include: “Authority Monism in International Organisations: A Historical Sketch.” In Allocating Authority: Who Should Do What in European and International Law? edited by J. Mendes and I. Venzke, 99–113. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018; and “‘Community Interests’ and the Role of International Law in the Creation of a Global Market for Agricultural Land.” In Community Obligations in Contemporary International Law, edited by E. Benvenisti and G. Nolte, 278–293. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Andreas Hasenclever

Andreas Hasenclever is Professor of International Relations and Peace Studies at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. His major research interests are in the field of Peace and Conflict studies with particular reference to regime analysis, international trust dynamics and the impact of religious traditions on political conflicts. Among his most important publications are ‘Theories of International Regimes’ published with Cambridge University Press and ‘Does Religion Make a Difference? Theoretical Approaches to the Impact of Faith on Political Conflict’ which he contributed to Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Most recently, he co-edited a special issue of Civil Wars on ‘Framing Political Violence – A Micro-Approach to Civil War Studies’ (2015) and various papers on the conceptualisation of collective trust in international affairs. He currently serves as research dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences and is a member of the Collaborative Research Centre on ‘Threatened Orders – Societies under Stress’.

Notes

1. Youtube, “Greta Thunberg full speech.”

2. Dahl, Indigenous Space; and McKeon, Food Security Governance.

3. Fraundorfer, “Experiments in Global Democracy.”

4. Lord et al., “Lessons from the UN”; and von Bernstorff, “Zivilgesellschaftliche Partizipation.”

5. Hahn and Holzscheiter, “The Ambivalence of Advocacy.”

6. Reimann, “View from the Top”; and von Bernstorff, “Authority Monism.”

7. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders; and Scholte, Building Global Democracy?

8. Banks et al., “NGOs, States, and Donors”; and Brühl, “Representing the People?”

9. Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations–Civil Society Relations, “We the Peoples,” 9.

10. Green and Chambers, Sustainable Development Governance; and Richmond, “Post-liberal Peace.”

11. Relying on Kantian foundations, see Rawls, Political Liberalism.

12. Goodin, “Enfranchising all affected Interests”; and Näsström, “All-Affected Principle.”

13. See notes 2–5.

14. Búrca et al., “Pluralist Global Governance”; and Fraundorfer, “Experiments in Global Democracy.”

15. Steffek et al., Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance; and Scholte, Building Global Democracy?

16. Goodin, “Enfranchising all affected Interests”, 51.

17. Banks et al., “NGOs, States, and Donors”, 708–9.

18. Hasl, “Shifting the paradigm.”

19. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 12–3.

20. See note 8 above.

21. See note 18 above.

22. Näsström, “All-Affected Principle.”

23. Goodin, “Enfranchising all affected Interests.”

24. Stewart, “Remedying Disregard”; Näsström, “All-Affected Principle,” 125; and Held, “Reframing Global Governance,” 170–1.

25. Saward, The Representative Claim.

26. Brem-Wilson, “Legitimating Global Governance.”

27. Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements.”

28. Bob, Marketing of Rebellion.

29. Jokubauskaite, “Tied Affectedness?”

30. Brem-Wilson, “Legitimating Global Governance”; and Schramm and Sändig, “Affectedness Alliances.”

31. Hasenclever and Narr, “Dark Side”; and Wallbott and Recio, “Practicing Human Rights.”

32. See note 18 above.

33. Holzscheiter, “Affectedness, Empowerment and Norm Contestation.”

34. Thompson and Tsolekile de Wet, “BRICS Civil Society.”

35. See note 29 above.

36. Granzow, “Threat Frame and Infantilisation.”

37. Toussaint, “Voices Unheard.”

38. Scholte, “Reinventing Global Democracy,” 6–8.

39. Crouch, Post-democracy; and Chimni, “International Institutions today.”

40. Della Porta et al., Globalization from Below.

41. On the rise of the exercise of public authority by international institutions see Bogdandy et al., The Exercise of Public Authority; and Zürn, A Theory of Global Governance.

42. See note 6 above.

43. Scholte, “Conclusion,” 336–7.

44. Montanaro, “Democratic Legitimacy.”

45. Barnett and Finnemore, “Pathologies of International Organizations.”

46. Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus, 369; Dewey, The Public and its Problems, 154–5.

47. Conceptionalised originally for remedying the EU’s ‘democracy deficit’, see Cohen and Sabel “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy”; and with a critique: Weiler, “Prologue.”

48. Fraser, “Rethinking the public sphere”, 67.

49. See note 33 above.

50. See note 26 above.

51. Duncan, Global Food Security Governance; and Brem-Wilson, “La Vía Campesina.”

52. Wallbott and Recio, “Practicing Human Rights.”

53. See note 29 above.

54. von Bernstorff, “Authority Monism.”

55. Chimni, “International Institutions today.”

56. De Jong and Kimm, “Co-optation of Feminisms.”

57. Brem-Wilson, “Towards Food Sovereignty.”

58. Stroup and Wong, The Authority Trap.

59. Hasenclever and Narr, “Dark Side.”

60. See note 34 above.

61. See note 29 above.

62. Chimni, “Limits of the all affected principle.”

63. Similar to Tallberg et al., The Opening Up.

64. Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics.”

65. Dimitrov, “Paris Agreement on Climate Change.”