Recent years have seen increasing calls by a few scientists, largely from the Global North, to explore “solar geoengineering,” a set of speculative technologies that would reflect parts of incoming sunlight back into space and, if deployed at planetary scale, have an average cooling effect. Numerous concerns about the development of such speculative technologies include the many ecological risks and uncertainties as well as unresolved questions of global governance and global justice. This essay starts with the premise that solar geoengineering at planetary scale is unlikely to be governable in a globally inclusive and just manner. Thus, the ethically sound approach is to pursue governance that leads to the nonuse of planetary solar geoengineering. Yet is such a prohibitory agreement feasible, in the face of possible opposition by a few powerful states and other interests? Drawing on social science research and a host of existing transnational and international governance arrangements, this essay offers three illustrative pathways through which a nonuse norm for solar geoengineering could emerge and become diffused and institutionalized in global politics: (1) civil society-led transnational approaches; (2) regionally led state and civil society hybrid approaches; and (3) like-minded or “Schengen-style” club initiatives led by states.

Governance institutions such as the Arctic Council face ongoing (de)legitimation that impacts the broader legitimacy beliefs which enable them to govern effectively. Research has increasingly studied how different actors engage in legitimation and delegitimation that bolster or challenge legitimacy, but there has been limited study of the variation in the (de)legitimation practices of individual states and the reasons for this variation. This article studies variation in discursive (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council by the United States and China. It advances a theoretical argument for how this variation in (de)legitimation is driven by broader political developments. Using content analysis, it maps these two states’ (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over a 12-year period and examines evidence for this theory. The article finds that both states vary considerably in their (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over time. Changes in the intensity of their (de)legitimation are found to be linked to political developments including heightened security tensions, positive/negative shifts in environmental politics, and institutional changes. This contributes empirical evidence and new theoretical insights to the body of research about how different actors engage in (de)legitimation of global governance.

Business actors play increasingly important roles in global governance and international regulation. This paper considers how regime complexity influences the roles of businesses and impacts opportunities for business influence on international regulatory regimes. We conducted a scoping literature review of 243 articles from the International Regime Complexity (IRC) theory literature to explore if and how complexity affects the roles of businesses and their influence on international regulation. We found that complexity presents opportunities for businesses to regime shift and exploit knowledge asymmetry in order to influence international regulation. Further, IRC theory illustrates how the roles of businesses interact and leverage one another in order to create better opportunities for influence in specific international regulatory regimes. This paper contributes to IRC theory by building on the existing non-state actor discussions and offering specific theorization of business behavior, thus starting to bridge the gap between the empirical and theoretical understanding. Second, it contributes to existing discussions in business and politics literature by developing existing knowledge on the roles of businesses in global governance to better reflect the added dimension of complexity.

Global governance institutions have increasingly ‘opened up’ to non-state actors, leading to more formally inclusive governance arrangements. This has prompted inquiry into the extent and the drivers of this inclusivity, patterns of participation, and the consequences for the legitimacy and effectiveness of global governance. However, while the measurement of formal openness has expanded, the quality of inclusion remains underexplored. We therefore introduce a framework centred on the notion of ‘meaningful inclusion’, distinguishing between formal (de jure) structures and the perceived quality of actual (de facto) engagement. Drawing on extensive empirical data, we then examine the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. This case exemplifies strong formal mechanisms for inclusion that are contrasted sharply by significant shortcomings in effective engagement. Our findings suggest that improvements in formal global governance structures alone cannot ensure meaningful inclusion. Instead, we highlight the centrality of power dynamics and vested interests in shaping inclusivity dynamics in practice.

In this article, I reconceptualise the League of Nations as an Imperial Assemblage that embeds and is embedded by coloniality. Relying on the return to the League’s historisisation by Third World Approaches to International Law, I argue that we can understand the League as a governance body that works across scales of international, transnational and local actors, processes and structures to reiterate coloniality within the mandated territories. I utilise Deleuzian notions of assemblage alongside the concept of ‘coloniality’ within the literature of decolonial theory within International Relations and Sociology to show how the work of the League’s various actors, processes and structures across different scales made, actualised and evolved the laws on Forced Labour and Slavery from 1925 to 1932 in the inter-war era with a particular focus on Mandate Territories B and C.

During the Great War, J.P. Morgan bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, and Dwight W. Morrow expanded their visions of organizing across distances and supported the development of spaces where like-minded individuals could make coordinated decisions regarding the stability of industrial capitalism. These financial elites focused not only on profits but also on deeper ideas. Their experience organizing across distances, first domestically and then across the Atlantic, demonstrates the importance of these financiers to visions of global economic governance centered on information exchange and communication, intimate long-distance relationships, and deliberation among perceived equals, which are essential elements of merchant banking. Their visions further reflected a hierarchical and racial understanding of a liberal global order. Highly flexible in their strategies, these bankers possessed long-term views of national and global development that engaged overlapping connections among networks, institutions, and the public that privileged the creation of transatlantic spaces for deliberation and socialization among Western economic elites.

While many scholars expect people's ideological orientations to drive their beliefs regarding the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs), research has found surprisingly limited support for this common assumption. In this article we resolve this puzzle by introducing the perceived ideological profile of IOs as a critical factor shaping the relationship between ideological orientation and such beliefs. Theoretically, we argue that citizens accord IOs greater legitimacy when they perceive these organizations as ideologically more congruent with their own orientations. Empirically, we evaluate this expectation by combining observational and experimental analyses of new survey evidence from four countries: Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. We find that citizens indeed perceive IOs as having particular ideological profiles and that those perceptions systematically moderate the relationship between people's ideological orientations and their sense of IOs’ legitimacy. These findings suggest that political ideology is a more powerful driver of legitimacy beliefs in global governance than previously understood.

How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify ‘sources’ of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors’ normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation.