The COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to refocus scholarly attention on the politics of crisis. Crises that abruptly upend political and economic relations are important and increasing in frequency. However, the division of international relations into international political economy (IPE) and international security has contributed to the relative neglect of non-militarized crises like pandemics. Crises are defined by threat, uncertainty, and time pressure: understanding them requires a careful examination of how these variables affect political and economic outcomes. Drawing on often disparate literatures on finance, energy and climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, and violent conflict, I propose a broad research program around the politics of crisis, focusing on puzzles related to causes, responses, and transformations.

Significant efforts towards environmental transparency have been made by the Chinese government since 2008. This paper focuses on the technical decisions shaping a database of official pollution information built and operated by a Chinese NGO known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). Issues of standardization, power distribution and institutional fragmentation are discussed. The paper illustrates a case of NGOs integrating enforcement capabilities as data centres amidst the growing reliance on processes of informational governance of environmental issues.

Scholars of international relations and global governance are increasingly interested in the transnational commercial arbitration system. So far, they have tended to characterize the system as a form of private global governance. However, using a combination of empirical and legal analysis, this article draws attention to the critical role of the state in the transnational commercial arbitration system, and shows that both rule-making and enforcement in the system depend largely on interactions between private and public actors. By treating arbitration as a form of private governance, scholars run the risk of obscuring these interactions and hindering their understanding of how transnational economic activity is governed. This article therefore argues for a modest reorientation of global governance scholarship on transnational commercial arbitration in a direction that focuses more closely on private-public interaction. More broadly, this article suggests that understanding interactions between private and public actors is a key to understanding global governance in general, and it raises doubts about the analytical desirability of a sharp distinction between private and public forms of global governance.

In this concluding essay to the special issue on Private Regulation in the Global Economy, I review the main findings, focused on the answers that the papers in this issue jointly suggest to the three sets of core questions noted in the introductory essay: (1) How do private bodies attain regulatory authority? Why do private regulators provide governance and why do the targets of these rules comply? (2) Who governs? Who are the key actors in private regulation and what are their motivations? (3) What is the effect of the rise of private regulation on public regulatory authority and capacity? I then identify and discuss several key issues to develop a research agenda for what I call “global private politics.”

Private regulation has become a highly debated phenomenon. Previous research has focused mostly on the effectiveness, legitimacy, and governance structure of private regulators at the global level. Few existing analyses have focused on private regulation at the European level, where only questions of interest representation have attracted attention. Analyses of the contribution of private regulation to the process of European legal integration, in particular, are lacking. We seek to fill this gap. From private rules for product safety and for financial markets, such as the Single Euro Payments Area standards, to private rules governing the professions, we observe that private regulation has facilitated and accelerated European legal integration. We argue that in some cases this effect was anticipated, especially by the European Commission, and in those cases the intended effect on European legal integration at least partly explains the rise of private regulation. I other cases, it was an incidental by-product of attempts to address market failures or achieve network legitimacy. In the conclusion, we turn to questions of accountability and legitimacy raised by the increasing importance of private regulators in the Common Market of the EU. Although the EU lacks a body of rules that imposes democratic controls on private regulators, we identify components of European law that can be used as control mechanisms.