This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

This chapter describes the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) and the mhGAP-Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG) developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), aimed at scaling up suicide prevention and management services to bridge unmet need.The mhGAP-IG is an evidence-based tool for mental disorders with structured and operationalised guidelines for clinical decision-making targeting non-specialist community and primary care workers in low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

Suicide prevention requires a systematic approach to develop a framework that brings together different elements of a prevention strategy, including surveillance, mental health service access, restriction of lethal means, and public awareness campaigns. Originating with Finland's pioneering efforts in the 1980s, such strategies have since expanded worldwide, driven by the World Health Organization's call for action and alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. It is imperative that these programmes/strategies are evidence-based, informed by local research, continuously monitored and regularly evaluated for effectiveness. By developing suicide prevention programmes/strategies, governments around the world show their commitment to mitigating preventable deaths, underscoring the need for sustained funding, leadership, and research-driven implementation.

Abstract: This chapter examines post-judgment procedures in international law that aim at (or can be used for) compliance adjudication and the applicable remedies. Specific procedures for compliance adjudication exist in regional trade agreements as well as in some multilateral treaties establishing adjudication mechanisms. Additionally, ad hoc agreements to submit disputes to adjudication sometimes permit adjudication on implementation or compliance. States have occasionally resorted to these provisions. A few ICs, and in particular the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have themselves established the permissibility of compliance adjudication. In a few cases, states have sought to employ requests for interpretation to obtain rulings on compliance. The chapter concludes by considering the permissible scope of review and the remedies applicable at the compliance stage, including the lawfulness of remedy repetition and remedy escalation.

This chapter analyses efforts within the United Nations to develop legal and normative frameworks for transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights, beginning in the 1970s. It first considers the UN Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations and explains why this initiative failed to materialise despite many years of negotiation. It then examines the Global Compact, which reflects emerging trends in legalisation through its emphasis on implementation, participation by non-state actors, and reliance on consensus-building and norm promotion. The chapter next reviews the rise and fall of the Draft Norms, before turning to the development of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This section highlights the innovative nature of Ruggie’s constructivist approach to generating new legal and social norms. A new treaty process, initiated in 2014, remains ongoing and suggests that traditional legalisation strategies continue to retain relevance in certain contexts.

This chapter assesses the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional project as an international regime. Although ASEAN’s regime is underpinned by unique features, certain characteristics of other regional integrations are still evident. Accordingly, ASEAN’s regime is devoid of complete synchrony of state parties’ normative interests and the surrender to implementing institutions of the regional project. Although ASEAN has been lauded as a successful regional integration project, its normative beliefs have been constructed around its identity as a regional project. Indeed, ASEAN member states might have taken inspiration from the EU, but they continue to be highly cautious about institutional arrangements that centralise decision-making and dilute state sovereignty. Hence, the gains of prosperity recorded so far are largely driven by individual countries’ efforts rather than a collective outcome of normative interests and obeisance to the implementing institutions.

Ireland showcases the full spectrum of policy triage outcomes, driven by varied institutional setups and organizational cultures. Independent regulators at the central level—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Pensions Authority — manage their tasks with minimal triage. Their status as independent agencies limits blame-shifting, while formal accountability frameworks and political clout help secure resources. Moreover, both agencies foster strong organizational cultures that emphasize collaboration and flexibility, enhancing their ability to absorb additional workloads without undermining core functions. By contrast, the Department of Social Protection exhibits moderate triage frequencies, mostly occurring during sudden workload spikes or seasonal surges. Although the organization’s integrated policy formulation and implementation model shields it from excessive blame-shifting, centralized budgetary controls can hinder its resource mobilization efforts. The National Parks and Wildlife Service, however, grapples with severe, routine triage, largely due to chronic underfunding, weak structural ties to its parent department, and a fragmented internal culture in combination with an increasing implementation load. Finally, Irish City and County Councils also face frequent triage, contending with uncapped policy accumulation yet limited authority to negotiate additional support.

Portugal’s social and environmental sectors both exhibit pervasive and severe policy triage, driven by pronounced policy growth that no longer aligns with stagnating or shrinking administrative capacities. Despite the formal centralization of administrative responsibilities, environmental agencies across the board routinely prioritize urgent tasks while neglecting or delaying routine monitoring, inspections, and enforcement. Austerity measures have worsened chronic understaffing, leading to shortfalls in skilled personnel and aging workforces. Similar challenges plague social implementers, which struggle to fulfill core functions amid overwhelming caseloads and hamstrung resource mobilization. Efforts to mitigate overload such as overtime, inter-agency staff transfers, and basic workflow automation provide only limited relief. Moreover, policymakers frequently shift blame for implementation failures to budgetary constraints and the Ministry of Finance. As a result, Portugal’s public agencies are forced to engage in near-constant triage, with significant negative effects on timeliness and thoroughness of policy implementation.

This chapter examines how growing policy portfolios and administrative burdens affect environmental and social policy implementation in Denmark. Despite Denmark’s relatively modest overall policy growth, local environmental authorities face increasing overload, resorting to policy triage where tasks are postponed or selectively neglected. By contrast, central environmental agencies—the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Nature Agency, and Energy Agency — experience similar expansions in policy tasks but display minimal triage due to greater resource mobilization opportunities and a strong sense of policy ownership. In social policy, national agencies likewise show no triage despite decentralized responsibilities for unemployment and welfare programs. Notably, municipal job centers also avoid triage despite rising task complexity, leveraging clear political attention, central–local consultation, and reimbursement schemes that encourage sufficient funding. Taken together, these findings underscore that policy expansion does not uniformly result in triage. Instead, blame-attribution structures, resource mobilization channels, and organizational commitment determine whether implementers can compensate for chronic overload.

Germany’s traditionally robust public administration faces escalating challenges as policy portfolios expand, complexities increase, and resource allocations lag behind. This chapter examines how federal, state, and local authorities in the environmental and social sector cope with growing implementation burdens. While Germany’s federal structure can foster high-quality governance, it also enables policymakers to shift blame across levels. Consequently, local offices and agencies with weaker political leverage are especially vulnerable to overload. In the environmental realm, tasks increasingly cascade downward, forcing local authorities — frequently short-staffed — to engage in trade-offs that compromise monitoring and enforcement. By contrast, higher level bodies like state ministries and offices can still manage most obligations, typically deferring only nonmandatory or long-term planning. The German social sector displays a slightly different scenario: The Federal Employment Agency demonstrates strong resilience, leveraging flexible resources and effective crisis management, whereas the Pension Insurance and some regional welfare agencies struggle with increasing task loads. Despite generally moderate instances of policy triage, critical support and preventive planning are often neglected, fueling organizational frustration and jeopardizing long-term governance capacity.

This chapter explores the pronounced divide in England’s environmental and social policy implementation, painting a highly diverse picture of policy triage across organizations. The Environment Agency, initially envisaged as an integrated “one-stop shop,” now exemplifies frequent and severe triage. Chronic underfunding, staff attrition, and politically induced blame-shifting in combination with ever-increasing workloads undermine its monitoring, enforcement, and crisis-preparedness functions. In contrast, most local authorities sustain only moderate triage levels, where increasing implementations tasks are mitigated by a broader range of financing avenues and political networks. In the social sector, the Department for Work and Pensions displays striking levels of triage despite minimal formal policy growth, as unrelenting welfare reforms, departmental downsizing, and inadequate cross-agency collaboration spur severe and frequent trade-offs. Meanwhile, The Pensions Regulator remains a near-anomaly, effectively managing regulatory expansion. The English case study thus underscores how variation in blame-shifting, opportunities for resource mobilization, and organizational overload compensation can yield a highly diverse triage scenario — even within a country.

This chapter examines the legal and policy regime that governs the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) and the underlying constraints. The AfCFTA, regarded as the largest trade arrangement after the World Trade Organization (WTO) in terms of the number of participating countries, seeks to utilise economic integration to promote pan-African development as a pathway to prosperity. With a commitment to eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) in intra-African trade, the AfCFTA is governed by general and specific objectives as well as principles aimed at making the agreement a transformative instrument of African prosperity. While the AfCFTA is a consequence of normative beliefs and common identity of the state parties, there are fears that NTBs and prevalent weak institutions could frustrate the expected outcome. This further buttresses our contention that normative interests should be mutually constitutive with the institutions established to manage the underlying implementation for prosperity to be realised. Although development and, ultimately, prosperity are well constructed under the AfCFTA agenda, there must be complementarity between the AfCFTA regime and the implementing institutions. This chapter proffers the way forward to navigate these dynamics.

Policy triage in Italy is widespread across both environmental and social policy, reflecting a sizable gap between ever-increasing legislative demands and stagnating or declining administrative capacity. Political incentives and unstable governing coalitions encourage policy overproduction, as politicians face negligible blame-shifting costs. Implementation bodies, on the other hand, have few avenues to mobilize resources. Austerity measures and rigid, centralized personnel controls leave many agencies chronically understaffed, while constitutional and administrative complexities create fragmented responsibilities and blurred accountability. Consequently, authorities at both national and subnational levels must constantly decide which tasks to handle superficially, defer, or in some cases disregard altogether. Nonetheless, the most severe failures are partially mitigated by strong internal efforts to absorb additional workload. Motivated staff often work overtime, team up to reassign tasks, and exploit external funding or outsourcing arrangements. Although these compensatory strategies keep disastrous implementation deficits contained so far, they come at the cost of quality, timeliness, and workforce morale. Overall, Italy’s case highlights how constrained resource mobilization and pervasive blame-shifting can promote frequent triage, while strong organizational commitment helps to avert total breakdowns in policy implementation.

This chapter investigates the legal instruments that govern MERCOSUR and the degree to which they have facilitated prosperity in the region. Even though it is an international regime, MERCOSUR remains a project for a future single market. In comparison with other regional integrations in this book, MERCOSUR members’ implementation of commitments has not unleashed regional prosperity. This is generally attributable to incongruity between the normative interests and beliefs in the state parties’ responses to MERCOSUR’s regime. Therefore, institutional functions and the level of implementation are not proportionate to the level of prosperity so far experienced. Indeed, MERCOSUR has not totally dismantled restrictions on intra- MERCOSUR trade, which couples with the delay in adoption of a number of secondary rules. To realise the prosperity gains of regional integration, state parties must synchronise the normative interests and beliefs in the implementing institutions.

One of the core arguments we have made in this monograph is that for regional trade agreements to effectively realise their prosperity agendas, greater attention must be paid to the institutions that can ensure the implementation of the newly created regional project. In this regard, this chapter explores such institutions and their necessity in regional trade agreements in the Global South. In the absence of a centralised authority to enforce international agreements, it is common for states to either rely on peer pressure to encourage enforcement of the agreements or delegate the authority to interpret and rule on compliance to a third-party adjudicating body. While the former might generally have a low success rate in terms of ensuring compliance, the latter might only be successful in ensuring a high rate of compliance if the third-party adjudicating body is sufficiently robust. Therefore, this chapter explores the promise that dispute settlement mechanisms hold for the effective implementation of various trade agreements in the Global South.