Governing through Networks
In the previous seminar, we learned that governance beyond the state is much more than a question of law and that it often takes on a variety of regulatory forms. This seminar pushes this idea further by exploring governance through networks. Networks are now a defining feature of both national and transnational governance.
They often consist of both public and private actors and include experts drawn from the very fields that the networks govern. Some argue that this makes governance networks more effective in achieving policy goals and managing particular problems. Others argue that governing through networks is problematic because it weakens accountability and expands the powers of experts to ‘capture’ and control regulatory processes with little oversight.
This seminar pushes you to engage with these debates by reading from one of the most influential and optimistic early texts on network governance – Anne Marie Slaughter’s New World Order. The second article by Hamann and Fabri offers a more critical analysis of the turn toward network governance from the vantage point of its effects on public law and constitutionalism. In spite of their differences, both authors agree that governing through networks is radically transforming the state.
Use this seminar to think critically about what future public law and constitutionalism has in an era of disaggregated sovereignty and rule by expert-led diffuse policy networks.
Core Reading:
Slaughter, A.M. (2004) A New World Order (Princeton University Press), Chapter 1, 1- 35.
1. What are the key legal and political effects of the shifts described by Slaughter?
2. What does she mean by ‘disaggregated’ sovereignty and government networks? What
kind of ‘new world order’ do they make possible, in her account?
3. Slaughter claims the disaggregated state provides a stepping-stone toward ‘a more effective
and potentially more just world’ (at 6). Is this optimism warranted or misplaced? What potential problems can you identify with Slaughter’s New World Order idea?
Hamann, A. and Fabri, H.R. ‘Transnational networks and constitutionalism’ (2008) 6(3–4)
International Journal of Constitutional Law. Focus on 481 – 495.
4. What are the main arguments that Hamann and Ruiz Fabri advance in this text? How does the rise of network governance come to affect constitutionalism and public law?
5. How does this article connect with or depart from those advanced by Slaughter in the earlier text? Do the authors share Slaughter’s optimism about network governance – why/why not?
6. Why is the transnational dimension of network governance particularly troubling for state-centred constitutionalism (at 484)? How do the concerns raised by Hamann and Ruiz Fabri here build on the arguments that Saskia Sassen presented earlier in Seminar 1?
