One of the central assumptions underlying the stakeholder model is that strengthened opportunities for involvement of non-state actors in political procedures hold significant promise for making those procedures more democratically legitimate. However, recent studies show that more open international organisations (IOs) are not perceived as more legitimate by non-state actors. In this article we explore one potential reason to explain this apparent paradox, investigating whether, and under what conditions, strengthened opportunities of stakeholder involvement enable the effective representation of global constituencies. The article shows that globalisation and politicisation of IOs go hand in hand with greater political activity by non-state actors defending domestic, rather than global, interests. Globalisation and politicisation may thus contribute to the exponential growth of the community of non-state actors active at IOs, but they do not make such community more globalised in nature. The article also illustrates that granting greater access to stakeholders in international institutions can somehow mitigate the effects of this underlying structural factors, and that institutional openness disproportionally fosters political activity by civic, rather than business, global stakeholders. We advance these arguments relying on a novel dataset including over eight thousand organisations active at the UN climate conferences and the WTO Ministerial Conferences.

This study examines the effects of contestation on individual norms that are embedded in larger norm clusters. We define norm clusters as collections of aligned, but distinct norms or principles at the center of a regime. Norm clusters include multiple norms that can be insulated from contestatory challenges by degrees of cohesion, institutionalisation, and legalisation. While some constructivists argue that the most important dynamic to study is ‘robustness’ of individual norms, we contend that ‘resiliency’ of norm clusters offers a richer assessment of prospects for international cooperation and long-term impact on state behaviours. Thus, this study distinguishes conceptually between different structural layers that can generate various effects in conjunction with norm contestation. We add a third, or intervening layer of explanation with norm clusters, between the intersection of norms (lowest layer) and normative structures (broadest layer). To explore this argument, comparative case studies examine the resiliency of two prohibitionary norms – the nuclear disarmament norm within the non-proliferation regime and the norm banning assassination of foreign adversaries, which is not embedded in a regime structure. While the robustness of individual norms may be challenged, our results suggest a role for resilient structures in promoting overall longevity of norm clusters.

The regionalisation of the world economy is one of the most important developments in global governance in the past two decades. This process has seen ‘inter-regional’ economic agreements emerge between two or more regional groupings. Drawing mainly on the European Union’s external relations, observers accordingly point to the growing importance of regional actors, explaining their agency (or ‘actorness’) with regional attributes such as (supranational) institutional design, size, and member state cohesion. This article challenges this dominant explanation of regional agency. It argues that regional actors are socially, politically, and historically ‘embedded’. Agency reflects the contingency of regional integration processes, the motivations that underpin those processes, and the specific relationships between regions and third parties. This approach explains an important case of inter-regionalism from the Asia-Pacific: CER-ASEAN relations. Since the early 1990s, Australia and New Zealand have used their ‘Closer Economic Relations’ trade agreement for relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This reflects the ambitions of Australasian officials to shape processes of Asian-Pacific regionalism, and the interests of ASEAN officials in consolidating their own process of transnational market-making. Here, regional agency owed to a transforming world economy and the reconceptualisation of regions within new networks of trade governance.

Instead of asking whether regional organisations can promote democracy, a well-established conclusion, this article asks what type of democracy regional organisations can promote. Where their commitments to democracy are weak, regional organisations can promote the transition away from authoritarianism but cannot drive that process to completion with the creation of embedded liberal democracies. Under such circumstances regional organisations serve as regimes of bounded toleration, and can provide regional linkages that sustain defective democracies. Through examining the relationship between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Myanmar, three supporting roles are identified; regional legitimacy, defence from external pressure, and future-oriented accommodation. The presence of these linkages between defective democracies and regional organisations provides a caveat to the positive assessments of regional organisations as socialisers of democracy.