The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has grown to become one of the world’s most influential standard developing organizations since its creation in 1947. This chapter examines empirically the evolution and resilience of ISO, in relation to crisis. It departs from the assumption that ISO’s evolution can be explained in relation to its ability to respond and adjust to dynamics and relating challenges in its environment. ISO has experienced rapid transformation especially during crisis moments posing a threat or risk to the organization. First, this chapter provides an illustrative example of a crisis moment that originated from the needs of ISO members from developing countries, identifying its drivers and ISO’s responses and adaptations. It then illuminates certain traits that confer resilience onto the organization, how ISO has acquired or built these traits during crisis moments, and their cultivation over time. This chapter finds that ISO over the decades through strategies and meeting challenges has grown stronger and more influential, also in relation to the state.

The LIBOR scandal stands out as the most striking failure of private financial standard-setting in the post-crisis era, and thus provides an important case study of the resilience of private authority. Public authorities brought corporate criminal cases against the world’s largest banks, imposed penalties of tens of billions of dollars, and indicted several brokers and bankers. LIBOR’s private administrator was replaced, and the public sector has played a central role in creating and administering new, more robust benchmark interest rates. Neither the transnational nature of the benchmark itself, its users, and the manipulation scheme, nor the fact that the scandal coincided with a financial crisis prevented this reassertion of public authority. The intervention of a different set of public actors—most saliently prosecutors—with different incentives and capabilities is the key factor that explains this outcome, which stands in stark contrast with the hands-off approach to LIBOR governance and reform followed by banking regulators before the crisis. This suggests that involvement of a broader range of public actors can restore the balance between private standard-setting and effective public oversight.

This chapter problematises the notion of resilience as continuation with adaptability, suggesting that it requires specifying in advance the essential attributes of a global governance body, which would have to remain largely intact for adaptation to changing circumstance to count as resilience. The chapter therefore identifies those essential attributes for the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC). The chapter then theorises resilience of a private rule-making body as a function of its capacity and capability for autonomous agency in pursuit of its organizational self-interest, the embeddedness of the rule-making body among its stakeholders, and its leadership’s ambition to ensure the organisation’s survival. It shows that these characteristics helped the IEC to achieve resilience in the face of numerous and diverse challenges from technological changes, the emergence of competing SDOs and geopolitical changes accompanied by power transitions in the world economy, including the rise of China. The unresolved challenges of meaningful consumer participation and better gender balance in international standardization suggests, however, that past resilience is only partially predictive of future resilience.

From European integration to domestic politics to the development of the global economy, technocracy and private ordering have shaped economic behaviour. Such transformative private-driven forces of economic activity flourished through the promulgation of voluntary standards. In view of the ever-increasing powers that are transferred to private actors and their relative power as a de facto pillar of global regulatory making, it is surprising that their dominance remains largely unaffected by regulatory shocks that they partly cause. Rather, in practice, crises (broadly defined as disruptive disturbances) appear to empower such forces or generate new ones, whereas existing checks and balances fail their initial purpose. In emphasising the role of the innate traits, fabric of interactions and dynamics in times of crises within private rule-making bodies, the present article analyses the foundations for a new, evidence-based theory to explain the resilience of private collective action and establishes a research agenda.

Standards are valuable not only to their users but also to the organizations that develop and promote them. It is simplistic to only view the economic function of standards from the standpoint of its use cases. We should also recognize and examine how the setting of standards contributes to the empowerment of private standard-setting organizations and their advocacy agenda. This chapter analyzes the standard-setting activities of the Institute of International Finance and argues that those activities are an important factor that accounts for its continued existence and relevance.

This chapter provides a detailed systematic overview of the operational rules of seven prominent standards development organizations, each having a different institutional background and developing different types of ICT standards, namely: ITU; ETSI; 3GPP; IEEE; IETF; W3C; and Bluetooth SIG. Building on the previous chapter, it examines these organizations’ standards development procedures, which it divides into three stages: proposal of standardization projects, rules on contributing and voting at the meetings of technical committees, and approval of standards. It then offers comparative observations to the extent that the different institutional settings of these organizations allow.

This chapter examines institutional hybridity in the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) regulatory prowess as the primary organized business interlocutor for intergovernmental bodies in global commerce. The empirics follow various ways in which the ICC embeds itself in global institutions through issue-definition, agenda-setting, and rulemaking. Institutional linkages allow the ICC to organize international markets while boosting the privilege of global corporate elites to reap the benefits of trade and investment at the expense of others. Balancing the legitimacy blowbacks to this elitism is at the core of the politics of institutionalizing rules for global commerce. Moreover, the study of the ICC helps us see that “transnational private authority” need not necessitate a retreat of the state, but rather a recomposition of what it means to regulate across borders. The ICC’s Lived Sovereignty relies fundamentally on the Idealized Sovereignty of governments to keep its institutional status.

This chapter presents an array of institutions at many levels: international, regional, and national and municipal levels. The survey of mechanisms identifies the key features of each system, noting the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Landmark decisions illustrate facets of the systems. The overview concludes with two famous success stories of enforcement in civil litigation, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala (US) and In Re Pinochet (UK).

Building on the discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative, the chapter offers a comprehensive inquiry into China’s economic statecraft. It first argues that the analogy often drawn between the BRI and the Marshall Plan misconstrues contemporary China’s economic statecraft. It then examines how the interest communities and partnership diplomacy serve as mechanisms for China’s economic influence. The next section considers how, with Chinese economic ascendancy in Asia, a semblance of Chinese centrality in Asia is emerging. The following section looks at China’s global influence effect in terms of the international discourse on its great-power standing as well as its drive for technical standard-setting in key industries. Lastly, the chapter discusses the built-in limits of the BRI and broad limitations of the Chinese economic statecraft in the twenty-first century.

It is shown that the form of an institution, its legal character, and membership do not determine procedural density.

The finding that the procedural density regarding an activity is zero is very prevalent in the sample. The reasons for this usually lie in low state interest, which is demonstrated via case studies of the European Advertising Standards Alliance and the Proliferation Security Initiative.

During coding, there were certain procedural steps which occurred more frequently than others but no distinct patterns of combinations of procedural steps. This leads me to assume that procedure as a design element is valued for its variety and flexibility.

Whether an activity is hard or soft law or somewhere in between greatly determines state interest in procedural justice. This is further explored via a case study of the Human Development Index.

Like the legal character, the exact characteristics of an administrative activity affect procedural density. This is illustrated using the different branches of the International Telecommunications Union and their procedure.

Of the different kinds of procedural steps, review is by far the least prevalent because it strongly affects state interests and often juxtaposes them with individual rights and interests. This is illustrated with comparative case studies of the Interpol Commission for the Control of Files and the ICANN Independent Review Procedure.

Procedural justice in the shape of procedural steps is a more flexible design tool than an institution's different organs. All things being equal, it is therefore preferred. This is demonstrated by the decentralized compliance monitoring mechanism used by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

The main findings from the empirical research are summarized.