Why do states choose informal organizations to govern global challenges? Using the global development regime as a piloting case, this article argues that different informal organizations serve different purposes. Informal intergovernmental organizations generate “club benefits” for member states, which arise from executive policy coordination behind closed doors. In contrast, transnational governance initiatives allow states to reap “risk-sharing benefits” in the production of global public goods by involving stakeholders. Using regression analysis for a set of development-related institutions, the analysis demonstrates that the two types of organizations are driven by different motivations. Complementary evidence is provided through case studies of two institutions: The IBSA Dialogue Forum (an informal intergovernmental organization) and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (a transnational public-private partnership). The findings inform conceptual discussions of the informality of institutions while contributing to a better understanding of the design determinants of informal organizations.

Over the last two decades, researchers have sought to understand whether and to what extent donor-conceived people are motivated to seek contact with donors and donor siblings. This chapter contributes to this literature by focusing on donor-conceived adults’ everyday experiences living with anonymity and absence across the life course. Drawing on the concept of ‘haunting’ and combining reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived adults (N = 28) and vignettes of personal experience, I elucidate how anonymity and absence reshape flows between past, present and future, altering personhood and relationality. I argue that framing anonymity as an issue of the past (re)produces ongoing haunting and that reform without concomitant processes of truth-telling and redress represent an injustice to those who continue to live with the lingering impacts of such past conditions. More broadly, this work expands sociological conceptualisations of family by attending to how familial (non-)relationships shape belonging.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA testing has had a major impact on people affected by donor conception, including donor-conceived people, their parents, and donors. It has enabled people to discover their conception status and to identify the donor. Donors who were assured of anonymity and their extended families are being contacted by their donor offspring and recipient parents. Consequently, it is now impossible to assure donors they will be anonymous, and parents can no longer consider that nondisclosure of donor treatment to their children is a viable option. Fertility counselors need to prepare their clients for the implications of DTC DNA testing, be fully informed of the repercussions faced by donor-conceived adults, especially those finding out their conception status past childhood, and also to have donor-linking skills as part of their counseling tool kit.

Special needs of LGBT community, donors, recipients, assisted conception, screening

Over a month after 2020 election night had ended, the results of the presidential contest between former Vice President Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump seemed obvious to all except President Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party. Even as Biden’s victory over Trump became clear in the days following the election, a campaign unfolded to overturn the vote totals and deny Biden his victory. The most worrisome elements have involved armed supporters of President Trump threatening election officials with violence or death. No less extreme has been unprecedented litigation supported by seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of House Republicans asking the US Supreme Court to reverse the election. The case is sure to lose. But in the process, broad swaths of the Republican Party leadership have indicated they are willing to use every institutional lever at their disposal to overturn public opinion as expressed in the voting booth.

The United Nations (UN) charter did not include voluntary contributions because some feared it would undermine multilateralism. Since the 1990s, UN agencies have increasingly been financed through earmarked contributions from a diverse set of donors. A growing body of literature examines the relationship between funding and global governance. This chapter examines the role that money has played in the origin and evolution of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a case study of earmarking in the wider UN system. The chapter uses a new dataset of earmarked contributions to IOM to examine thematic and temporal patterns in the contributions of main donors. Contributions have largely focused on issues relating to migration management that reflect the specific interests of donors, lending weight to the argument that the earmarking of financing has allowed bilateral interests to dominate multilateral responses. On the other hand, earmarked funding has also allowed the international community to extend protection to displaced populations not covered by the refugee convention as well as to push forward migration, often a contentious issue, at the international level.

This chapter discusses international observers and their efforts to improve the quality of elections. Elections are profoundly performative. They demand an audience, and since the late colonial period that audience has been in part an international one. Generations of political leaders, and civil servants, have sought to emphasise the disciplinary function of elections by reminding the public that “the eyes of the world” are upon them. The institutionalization of international election observation over the last thirty years has turned this gaze back upon the state itself: requiring and expecting behaviour in line with international norms. In the African context, though, international election observation has attracted more criticism than acclaim. We argue that this is because observers face two fundamental problems. The first is that observers’ very presence is part of the state effect of elections, conferring legitimacy, yet observers can only report critical opinions after the fact. This links to a second problem, which is that as observers respond to the numerous pressures they face they risk undermining their own credibility, especially among opposition supporters. Especially where elections have generally failed to deliver political change, this undermines the capacity of observers to encourage citizens and parties to play by the rules of the democratic game.

Chapter 6 interrogates the underlying assumption that Liberian diasporas and returnees are the remedy to reconstruction, with expanded discussions on post-war recovery challenges and successes, remittances, capital flight, and public sector graft. It demonstrates that while dual citizenship legislation was proposed with the intention of incentivising emigrants to contribute their time, talent, and treasure, backlash against the 2008 bill escalated due in part to fraud allegations implicating some returnees. Although recovery requires the active participation of Liberian transnationals in the political economy of belonging, a disproportionate number of diaspora recruits implicated in public sector graft cases has severely hobbled socio-economic transformation thereby justifying restrictions on non-resident citizenship.Moreover, post-war reconstruction as a political project has exposed the inherent tensions between external state-building agendas and internal nation-building aspirations which have produced conflicting outcomes for Liberian citizenship construction and practice. This chapter contends that one-size-fits all approaches to post-war recovery are fundamentally flawed because context matters.

Athanasios Semoglou examines the role of sponsorship and its influence on the iconographical depiction in Byzantine (Greek) Macedonia, arguing that donors affect the use and character of the monument chosen as their burial place. Semoglou vividly demonstrates the connection between the iconography of Hell and the hopes of the faithful for eternal life, which consists a strong motivation for donors to commission images of the Last Judgement. According to the author, the influence of sponsorship on the iconography of Hell can be detected in the illustration of parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), the earliest example of which is found in the Church of Saint Stephen in Kastoria, dated to the end of the 9th or the beginning of the 10th century. Furthermore, the author asserts that during the middle Byzantine period two major changes occurred that led to the articulation of the dipole between sin/punishment and virtue/reward, the first being the consolidation of the Last Judgement in the narthex and the second its vertical alignment, both dominant characteristics in its later representations.

Athanasios Semoglou examines the role of sponsorship and its influence on the iconographical depiction in Byzantine (Greek) Macedonia, arguing that donors affect the use and character of the monument chosen as their burial place. Semoglou vividly demonstrates the connection between the iconography of Hell and the hopes of the faithful for eternal life, which consists a strong motivation for donors to commission images of the Last Judgement. According to the author, the influence of sponsorship on the iconography of Hell can be detected in the illustration of parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), the earliest example of which is found in the Church of Saint Stephen in Kastoria, dated to the end of the 9th or the beginning of the 10th century. Furthermore, the author asserts that during the middle Byzantine period two major changes occurred that led to the articulation of the dipole between sin/punishment and virtue/reward, the first being the consolidation of the Last Judgement in the narthex and the second its vertical alignment, both dominant characteristics in its later representations.

Charalambos Gasparis assesses the implications of the dissolution of the Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy in Venetian Crete and the influence this had on the imagery of Hell. He offers an overview of the continuities and novelties in the political, administrative, economical and ecclesiastical realm that shaped a society that produced numerous images of Hell. The study of the Cretan images of Hell has become essential for our understanding of social norms as well as the enforcement of Venetian penal law and the survival of Byzantine law on the island. By providing a detailed analysis of the organisation of the local Orthodox Church as well as a comparative analysis of offences, presented in both pictorial and textual form, as found in hitherto unpublished documents from the Venetian archives, where the social, economic and religious profile of the donors is also reflected, Gasparis correlates iconography to its social background and demonstrates how images can mirror aspects of the society that depicted Hell in their churches.

Charalambos Gasparis assesses the implications of the dissolution of the Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy in Venetian Crete and the influence this had on the imagery of Hell. He offers an overview of the continuities and novelties in the political, administrative, economical and ecclesiastical realm that shaped a society that produced numerous images of Hell. The study of the Cretan images of Hell has become essential for our understanding of social norms as well as the enforcement of Venetian penal law and the survival of Byzantine law on the island. By providing a detailed analysis of the organisation of the local Orthodox Church as well as a comparative analysis of offences, presented in both pictorial and textual form, as found in hitherto unpublished documents from the Venetian archives, where the social, economic and religious profile of the donors is also reflected, Gasparis correlates iconography to its social background and demonstrates how images can mirror aspects of the society that depicted Hell in their churches.

Malagasy society is historically highly hierarchical, endlessly differentiating and ranking individuals in keeping with a hereditary inegalitarian order that has lost none of its symbolism over time. Social inertia is further reinforced by weak formal and informal intermediary bodies, a missing vertical link between president and the population. This phenomenon is accentuated by the subsistence of a traditional political theology that instils the state with a providential quality and attaches Raiamandreny status (duly respected father and mother of their subjects) to those who embody it. The upshot of these elements is a yawning divide between the elites and the people.Social fragmentation is also a factor in the chronic political instability. Madagascar features a lack of stable, long-term coalitions of elites. The scant attention paid the populations and the fragility of the clientelistic connections do not afford broad-based popular support for the men in power.External factors form one last explanatory element for the long-term political instability. The consequences of the donors’ ongoing operational actions, which effectively weakened the state from the early 1980s to the 2000s, were disastrous. This pressure, combined with the people’s poor capacity to demand accountability, brought on the gradual institutional decay and loss of legitimacy.

The adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 engendered a global social movement to promote disability rights around the world. A central aim of this movement has been to support Disabled Persons Organizations’ (DPOs) human-rights work. This focus on advocacy has now become a new organizational norm disseminated from international donors, networks, and NGOs to grassroots DPOs through training and small grants provided to DPOs in the Global South. In many places, however, local DPOs have resisted the changes this new norm implies, instead seeking to continue their traditional focus on addressing their members’ concrete needs through material support and services. In Segovia, Nicaragua, seven grassroots DPOs share an internationally funded grant for rights advocacy. They struggle, however, to use the money to address their local members needs while also keeping the international donor happy. This disconnect between international norms and local associations is the result of Nicaragua’s history of mobilizing people for the purposes of addressing basic needs and promoting community development. Since the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, local citizens, including disabled persons, have joined grassroots groups in solidaridad in coming together for mutual aid and social support.

This chapter argues that reproductive banks provide buyers the option to segregate on the basis of race. I define “segregation” here as discriminating on the basis of race in order to avoid racial integration. In selling sperm and ova, reproductive banks both discriminate against potential donors on the basis of race and steer buyers to do the same. Most notably, these banks engage in racial steering by disclosing the race of the donor. In doing so, they provide buyers the option to form a biological family that is racially homogenous. This allows buyers the option to avoid racially integrating their families. This is how banks sell segregation. Drawing on both the ideal society and actual society approaches to racial justice, this chapter argues that selling segregation is wrong. I also show that this practice is unlawful and unenforceable under the Constitution.