International organizations are established by international treaties that set out their powers and limits and the obligations toward international institutions even though few such institutions have the power to enforce their decisions. The politics of international organizations therefore arises in the dynamic between obligation, compliance, and enforcement.

Complex global and regional governance includes both the informality of governance institutions and informality around those institutions. National governments are only one category of actor, though an important one, among a more heterogeneous group of governors. The dynamics and evolution of globalization over time explain the emergence of complex governance in recent decades, an explanation that is complementary to those based on functionalism or domestic politics. Globalization alters actor incentive structures and reduces border effects, allowing nonstate and subnational actors to collaborate and reducing costs of participation in governance. Globalization has empowered actors: Emerging economies, INGOs, and MNCs. Globalization's future will continue to shape the prospects of complex governance.

We assess the development of informality in international climate policy on two levels: Whether informal organizations meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation, and what role informality plays under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Proliferation of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) has enabled the move from a rigid list of countries with and without commitments, to the Paris Agreement, under which each country contributes to mitigation. Within the UNFCCC process, we find a “formality-informality cycle,” in which actors sometimes render rules and procedures more flexible and hence more efficient, only to suddenly reverse this trend at other times. Such a high-profile reversal occurred in Copenhagen in 2009. Subsequently, through the use of highly transparent negotiation procedures, trust in informality increased again, allowing negotiators to successfully override Nicaragua’s opposition in Paris in 2015. Similar formality-informality cycles can be observed on specific topics within the UNFCCC negotiations, such as international market mechanisms.

Understanding contemporary global governance requires a focus on informality. States increasingly govern through informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational public–private governance initiatives, and other informal institutions. Even within formal institutions, informal practices complement or override formal rules. And diverse informal groupings operate in the orbit of governance institutions, framing novel issues and placing them on policy agendas. We address these three aspects of informality – of, inside, and around global governance institutions. We first trace the nature and extent of the shift toward informal governance. We then consider a range of factors that may be driving the shift, drawing on major streams of International Relations (IR) theory; we treat these as candidate explanatory variables. Finally, we summarize the findings on those variables, and other theoretical insights, from the empirical chapters of this volume.

Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

The final chapter concludes the research project, offers a summary of the four main findings and the diagnosis of deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation. The chapter then shows how this new legal geography can be applied in practice and outlines avenues for further research. The chapter argues territories can at the same time be understood as more complex and dynamic than the discipline of international law has hitherto imagined them to be, and, at the same time, as devastatingly simple if territory is instead understood as constituted by practices of control performed in relation to specific spaces, people, and activities.

The introductory chapter outlines the need for a rethink of territory. Beneath the surface of international and transnational discourses about globalisation and global governance is a conceptual and theoretical indeterminacy deriving from the, often unperceived, conflicting nature of the spaces of globalisation and the spaces of sovereignty. Where global law and governance are discussed, the old statocentric conceptions of spatiality provide the governing model, dominating such that if there is no state-territory, it is asumed there is no territory at all. There is tension between theories of a system with an overly determined spatial logic to ones without much account of space. There is little discussion about where functions go nor of the logics of the spaces in which they are exercised. The spaces of reterritorialisation are missing. As a result, functions exercised ‘beyond’ state territories appear to ‘float free’ of the highly specific territorialised legal order. Many theories cannot account for reterritorialisation because the territories of non-state actors are invisible to international legal thought because its orthodox spatial imaginary only makes visible state spaces.

Quantitative research has grown to be part of the standard methodological portfolio for comparative lawyers. Large-sample quantitative studies search for correlations between legal institutions and socioeconomic outcomes, while indicators have become important tools of governance. Such initiatives, however, have been criticised for unduly simplifying complex legal realities, possibly betraying an ideological bias, and then hiding it under a cloak of quantitative data. This chapter argues that much of this critique misses the point. While it is important to be sceptical of indicators’ ability to describe reality, quantitative methodologies are part of a wider turn towards a flexible form of global governance, in which the accurate description of reality is not essential. Instead, they reflect a version of reality created for a specific purpose, which participants acting in a given regulatory space agree is not ‘real’. This lack of reality, though, is irrelevant: what matters is that the specific version of reality created by the indicator serves its institutional purpose. We must recognise it as a particular form of quantitative knowledge that, regardless of its accuracy, is constantly used instrumentally, and may open new spaces for politics, contestation, and resistance that are overlooked by the more traditional, accuracy-focused critique.

Conflict of laws (or private international law) deals with cross-border legal relationships involving private parties. Methods of modern conflict of laws originate in Europe and largely remained intact until today despite modifications brought about by the US Conflicts Revolution. Other parts of the world, that is, Latin America, Asia and Africa, have not been on the centre stage. Even the recent globalisation discourse on legal pluralism and conflict of laws has principally focused on Western, developed countries, although the wave of globalisation affects the entire world. Countries in the Global South have been invisible presumably because, as former colonies, they are not readily accessible, are presumed not to have sophisticated conflicts rules, or are deselected by the choice of forum/arbitration clauses in cross-border business transactions. This chapter will deal with comparative conflict of laws from a non-Western viewpoint. This stance will allow for the relativising of the trends of conflict of laws in Europe and America and shed light on the recent debates on corporate due diligence and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in conflict of laws by considering interests of the most affected and vulnerable people in the Global South. This chapter will also discuss future developments of conflict of laws treaties, which Asian and African countries have rarely joined so far.

Since adopting its reform and opening-up policy in the 1970s, China has steadily expanded its relationship with international institutions and transformed its role from passive norm-follower to active norm-maker in the new international order. China’s move to international institutions is characterized by: (1) an economic-led approach to participation; (2) diverse forms of participation; (3) participation on the basis of sovereign equality and peaceful coexistence; and (4) the aim of a fair, transparent international order that considers the interests of developing countries. While China is maintaining its basic position of compliance with existing international rules, its norm-making efforts are demonstrated through its initiatives to establish new international institutional networks. This chapter further examines China’s norm-making role in three major international arenas: peace and security, economic development, and environment and sustainable development. It testifies vividly to China’s increase in soft power as it leads the transition from Western-led global governance to a global co-governance system in which all members of the international community participate.