15.1 Introduction
Within a few years after it was established in 1906, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) became the institutional focal point for the governance of electro-technologies and has for 115 years retained this preeminence – exhibiting striking resilience. As of the end of 2021, the IEC had developed 11,200 international technical standards and standard-like documents,Footnote 1 specifying design, performance, labeling, and other aspects of millions of electrical and electronic components and products. These standards are widely used across the globe for consumer products (with implications for consumer safety, consumer choice, and market share)Footnote 2 and – even more so – in business-to-business transactions.Footnote 3 In a wide range of industries, they affect the functioning of markets, including market access and the distribution of costs and benefits, through interoperability, substitutability, etc. IEC standards thus ultimately govern technologies ranging from magnetics; electro-acoustics; batteries, and energy production, storage, and distribution; to information and communication technologies and various aspects of the digital economy, including artificial intelligence–supported applications and virtual/extended reality.
IEC technology governance thus is an example of private authority. The IEC exercises this authority as a nongovernmental transnational organization, along with its national member bodies (of which the most prominent ones are also mostly nongovernmental) and the overwhelmingly private-sector experts who populate its technical committees and carry out most of the technology governance functions in practice. This chapter examines the resilience of IEC private ordering.Footnote 4
Notwithstanding the often high commercial stakes and the substantive societal importance of its standards, the IEC has attracted much less attention than its companion international standard-setting body, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), examined in this volume in the chapter by Stephanie Biljmakers.Footnote 5 One reason why the IEC has received less public and scholarly attention is that it has deliberately steered clear of getting involved in efforts to govern broad issues such as general quality management, environmental impact assessment and management, and corporate social responsibility, which the ISO addresses through its 9000-, 14000- and 26000-series of standards, respectively. These issues are of great economic and societal importance and have created much, sometimes controversial, visibility for the ISO. The public interest in these issues has prompted ISO to set up multi-stakeholder processes that have been extensively scrutinized by scholars and practitioners alikeFootnote 6 but remain atypical of the technical standard-setting processes in ISO and IEC (as well as the many organizations that mimic the ISO-IEC blueprint).Footnote 7
IEC standards tend to be more strictly technical and relatively narrowly focused on issues specific to electro-technologies. Most scholarship about the IEC has accordingly been standard-specific.Footnote 8 And with very few exceptions,Footnote 9 previous work has paid little attention to the IEC’s institutional resilience.
This dearth of analytical attention is unfortunate since the IEC has, over the course of its 115-year history, experienced a series of challenges to its centrality as the preeminent international body for the governance of electro-technology and a key node in the increasingly global network of electrical and electronics engineering, which make studying the IEC insightful for understanding institutional resilience. The IEC has adapted to technological changes, the rise of the consumer movement, power shifts in the world economy, and other challenges with remarkable agility, building and exhibiting resilience, often by heading off challenges before they became existential crises. Examining the pursuit of resilience in the specific case of the IEC is valuable not just because it is even more purely representative of institutionalized technical standard-setting than the ISO, but also because it offers some distinctive insights, in part due to its longer history. We therefore provide this analysis of IEC resilience as a complement to the analysis of ISO resilience by Stephanie Bijlmakers.Footnote 10
Our analysis of IEC resilience builds on Panagiotis Delimatsis’ notion of resilience as the ability to “absorb stress and reorganize after the occurrence of a disturbance that upsets” the status quo equilibrium.Footnote 11 A private regulatory body – or more generally an inter- or transnational organization – is resilient to the extent that it does not just nominally survive an exogenous (or possibly endogenous) sudden shock or gradual yet serious challenging internal or environmental changes but “absorb[s] stress,” adapts, reorganizes, or in other ways responds to the “stress” on the system so as to “emerge” from the episode “resembling its former state and functionality.”Footnote 12
A conceptualization of resilience as persistence through adaptability, however, raises the – theoretically and empirically challenging – question of at what point adaptability entails so much change that it is no longer a means of resilience but rather an indication of the lack thereof, as illustrated by the long-standing conceptual and empirical debate over escape clauses in trade agreements.Footnote 13 Similarly, when EU political leaders temporarily set aside state aid rules to allow member states to subsidize their domestic firms to help businesses stay afloat and prevent mass unemployment in light of, first, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is this indicative of the resilience of the state aid rules or indicative of how brittle European political leaders’ commitment to the ordo-liberal regime of controlling economic nationalist subsidies really is?Footnote 14 In Section 15.2, we therefore briefly introduce the IEC as a private regulatory body, focusing on four fundamental, defining characteristics or “attributes” of IEC-based technology governance, which would have to remain largely intact for any adaptation of this private regulatory body under changing circumstances to be considered indicative of resilience.
In Section 15.3, we then sketch the theoretical framework guiding our empirical analyses, before we identify and discuss four key challenges to the IEC’s preeminence and legitimacy over the course of its 115-year history in Sections 15.4–15.7, where we examine how the IEC has responded to those challenges. In Section 15.8, we discuss whether the experience of previous challenges has increased the private rule-making body’s resilience over time.
15.2 The International Electrotechnical Commission: Essential Attributes
Advances in electrical engineering in the late nineteenth century motivated prominent electrical engineers from across the then-developed world to seek common terms and measurements. In creating common metrics and nomenclatures, they sought to facilitate scientific and commercial exchange, reduce safety risks in the development and operation of electrical machinery, and foster the development of electrical engineering as a new field of science and engineering without borders. The developments in electro-technology and other considerations, which prompted them to institutionalize their information exchange and standardization efforts by founding the IEC in 1906, have been examined in some detail elsewhere.Footnote 15 Rather than recap the early history of the IEC, we highlight here four essential or “fundamental attributes”Footnote 16 of the IEC. These fundamental attributes would need to remain intact in the face of stress-induced adaptation for persistence to constitute “resilience” as defined above.
The first essential attribute of the IEC is being the institutional focal point for inter- or transnational electro-technology governance – or at least being able to make a defensible claim to being such a focal point and have that claim be widely believed. Being such a focal point implies, above all, providing the institutional structure and having the technical and administrative ability for developing high-quality technical standards in its area of expertise. It also implies that those standards, once they have been developed, will be widely used across the globe, not just where their implementation might be required by public laws and government regulations but also voluntarily because they are considered useful by producers and users of the products and services governed by those standards.Footnote 17 If a standards-developing organization (SDO) is widely believed to have these qualities, it will lead to a widespread expectation that this SDO will (maybe even should) be the place where stakeholders will address further standard-setting needs related to the organization’s area of expertise.
As highlighted by Büthe and Mattli’s typology of global regulation,Footnote 18 having such a single focal institution for technical standard-setting in a given jurisdiction or market avoids the (often drawn-out and resource-intensive) process of multiple standards competing in “standards wars” for market share after two or more conflicting standards have been fully developed – though at the cost of shifting the underlying conflicts of interest to the standard-setting stage.Footnote 19 It creates incentives to invest in institutionalized joint standards development before a particular technical solution gets finalized and adopted as an international standard – subject to the structure, rules, and procedures of the standards-developing organization.
A second essential attribute of the IEC is maintaining internationally broad-based input legitimacy for its role as a global governor through inclusiveness toward all legitimate stakeholders based on a structure of nominally equal national representation.Footnote 20 The creation of the International Electrotechnical Commission was preceded in the late nineteenth century by the establishment of domestic electro-technical “societies” – professional associations of physicists and early electrical engineers – within virtually all the “advanced,” industrializing countries at the time. The highly transnationally connected individuals who started the IEC were mostly the leading figures within those domestic bodies.Footnote 21 And while they initially largely acted on their own (and often with a personal commercial stake in the matter as commercially successful scientist-entrepreneurs), they laid a claim to acting on behalf of those national bodies. The IEC then later asserted these bodies to be representatives of all legitimate stakeholders in those countries. The IEC’s structure reflects this historical legacy to this day, and it is central to its claim of legitimacy based on inclusiveness toward all legitimate stakeholders via internationally broad representation. This claim to internationally broad representation means concretely that participation in IEC governance is organized by country and requires each participating country to have a domestic Electrotechnical Committee, which, upon becoming the country’s IEC member body, is recognized as the country’s “National Committee” in the IEC.
A third essential attribute of the IEC is its status as a nongovernmental (and therefore transnational) organization. The electrotechnical societies that were the IEC’s founding member bodies were mostly nongovernmental bodies.Footnote 22 Over time, many of them have been recognized by their respective governments as private bodies with a public purpose; quite a few are also partially government-funded and/or regulated by governments; and a number of the national committees, especially from the Global South, are even government entities. The IEC, however, considers itself a strictly nongovernmental body – a defining feature that was consciously and emphatically selected already in the very beginningFootnote 23 – and governments as such have no direct role in IEC governance.Footnote 24
The IEC’s nongovernmental status has numerous important consequences. Among them is that the IEC does not have guaranteed public financial support but instead depends for its financial viability on buy-in from its – mostly commercial – stakeholders. Those stakeholders provide the IEC with expertise through their participation in standard-setting as well as financial resources, directly, by literally buying the documents that contain the technical specifications of IEC standards, as well as indirectly, via the National Electrotechnical Committees that comprise the IEC and pay membership fees. At the same time, the IEC’s nongovernmental character constrains the usability of traditional power resources of statesFootnote 25 but also means that the legitimacy of global technology governance may be much more easily challenged than the legitimacy of a traditional (inter-state) international organization.
The fourth “fundamental attribute” of IEC governance is maintaining a balance between decentralized, bottom-up agenda-setting and decision-making, on the one hand, and centralized coordination and oversight, on the other, to ensure coherence and consistency as well as maintain the IEC’s ability to act in pursuit of its organizational self-interest. As discussed below (Section 15.3.2), the pursuit of this balance has been a key driver of the IEC’s structure and procedures and an essential source of both its technical authority (enabling it to become the focal institution for international electrotechnical standard-setting) and its legitimacy.
15.3 Explaining Resilience
15.3.1 Theoretical Sketch
A fully developed theory of organizational resilience is beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet an explicit sketch of the theoretical ideas underpinning our empirical analysis is warranted before we turn to examining specific challenges faced by the IEC over the course of its 115-year history. Building on Büthe’s proto-theory of preeminence in global private governance,Footnote 26 we posit that, for a substantively important international organization or transnational governance body, resilience – in the sense of its ability to survive shocks and environmental changes, such that it still resembles its former state and functionality as defined by its essential attributes – requires such a body to have three characteristics:
(1) Capacity and capability for autonomous agency. To be resilient, a global governance body needs to be set up in such a way that it is able to pursue its organizational self-interest even in cases when the body’s interests are distinctive from the interests of the national-level or subnational units that comprise the inter- or transnational body. Such capacity for agency implies a structure where the leadership and staff support does not just rotate among these “members” but has some permanence and genuinely identifies with, or has allegiance toward, the global governance body. It also requires the leadership to be authorized and incentivized to speak and act on behalf of the organization with some degree of autonomy.
Following Cafaggi and Pistor’s work on regulatory regimes, Lavenex, Serrano and Büthe have recently introduced into the analysis of global governance bodies Nussbaum and Sen’s distinction between capacity and capability. The latter is defined as “the ability to recognize and articulate” the organization’s self-interest, even when it is not just the lowest common denominator (or some other function) of the constitutive units’ self-interest but might even diverge from them. Capability thus also implies an ability to develop original, alternative proposals for how best to pursue the organization’s own interests.Footnote 27 Having capability implies that the transnational body must have some permanent staff with the requisite analytical skill set, as well as financial resources that are at least in part independent of its members.
(2) Embeddedness among stakeholders. There is no global governance in a Hobbesian state of nature. Governance authority at the inter- or transnational level must be built and actively maintained since such authority is usually and traditionally situated at the local or national level – or at most at the level of regional common markets.Footnote 28 To be resilient, retain authority, and remain a focal point for developing standards or to govern other aspects of technology in the face of challenges, a global governance body needs to be at least sufficiently embedded among its members (and possibly other stakeholders) to ensure the continued relevance of the organization’s work to those stakeholders. Particularly important in this respect is the ability to recognize and meet the needs of stakeholders who might be in a position to participate in, or even set up, alternative inter- or transnational governance arrangements – sufficiently so that it reduces the incentive of those stakeholders to explore alternatives. At the same time, meeting the particular needs of those stakeholders must not to so far that the global governance body loses the required autonomy or legitimacy in the eyes of the organization’s other stakeholders.Footnote 29
(3) Ambition. The combination of capacity and capability should in principle assure the active and strategic pursuit of the organization’s survival with its essential attributes intact – that is, its resilience – because the continued existence and substantive relevance can be assumed to be an essential first-order preference of any organization.Footnote 30 In practice, however, the actual active and strategic pursuit of the organization’s self-interest is also a function of the skill of the organization’s leadership and its ambition to ensure the organization’s continued existence and importance. Institutional factors, such as career incentives and rewards for senior leaders’ skillful pursuit of resilience, can increase the likelihood that the global body will exhibit such ambition and develop the skills to pursue resilience, but the idiosyncratic qualities of the individuals who fill those leaderships conditions also matter.Footnote 31
15.3.2 Does the IEC Meet the Requirements for the Pursuit of Resilience? Applying the Analytical Framework to the Specific Case
Operationalizing the required characteristics for the specific case of the IEC suggests that the IEC meets (and for a long time has met) the criteria set up abstractly above, which should empower it to pursue resilience. We first discuss how the IEC assures embeddedness, which is critical to the IEC’s technical expertise and authority, as well as key to the commercial usefulness of its standards. Given that electro-technology has changed tremendously over the course of the IEC’s existence (and it continues to evolve over time), with innovations resulting in “new” areas of electro-technology not yet covered by the IEC’s structure, maintaining (the ambition for) such preeminence also implies the ability to pursue organizational interests actively and strategically. It also implies a responsiveness to – and maintaining a reasonable balance between – major stakeholders who might otherwise have the credible option to try to “go it alone”Footnote 32 by developing competing standards outside of the IEC.Footnote 33 So does the IEC exhibit capacity and capability, as well as embeddedness?Footnote 34
The IEC’s structure and procedures ensure its embeddedness. As of the end of 2021, the IEC has 110 Technical Committees (TCs); some of them also have numerous subcommittees (SCs), for a total of 212 TCs and SCs.Footnote 35 Much of the technical work in those TCs and SCs is actually done in distinct working groups (of which there were 725), project teams (200), and maintenance teams (669 as of the end of 2021). This structure and the procedural norms and rules of the IEC allow for bottom-up agenda-setting, making it very easy for a small number of national member bodies to launch the development of a new standard for a product or electrotechnical phenomenon.Footnote 36 Consensus norms then give a right to be heard to all member bodies that have elected to be “participating members” (P-members) of the TC where a given standard is developed, reviewed, or revised. These norms – at least in theory – provide all stakeholders with opportunities to make alternative or compromise proposals for all aspects of the technical work. They are reinforced by procedural rules governing the IEC standards development process, which require large super-majorities in formal votes on the penultimate “Committee Draft for Voting” (CDV)Footnote 37 and for the adoption of the resulting “Final Draft” as an official IEC standard.
Balancing these decentralized elements of the IEC’s institutional structure, the IEC has for a long time reserved a crucial (if mostly light-touch) centralized role for the IEC leadership, especially its Standardization Management Board (SMB) and the IEC Central Secretariat. Jointly, they provide coordination and oversight to ensure coherence and consistency as well as maintain the IEC’s ability to act in pursuit of its organizational self-interest.
The IEC leadership consists of a president, three vice presidents (one each for standardization management, market strategy, and conformity assessment), a treasurer, and the IEC Secretary General.Footnote 38 Candidates for the part-time positions of president or vice president(s) tend to come from the private sector and customarily have previously held prominent leadership positions in one of the largest IEC’s national member bodies. They are elected for (once-renewable) three-year terms, and during this time, (vice)presidents are supposed to pursue the interest of the IEC, only, though they usually retain their private sector full-time (and income-providing) position.
Not as visible but at least as important for the IEC’s capability and its capacity for autonomous agency are the Secretary General and the senior staff of the central secretariat of the IEC. They are longer-term, full-time employees of the IEC, which gives them a strong incentive to think and act in the institutional self-interest of the organization. The staff, which supports the work of the IEC leadership and administratively and technically handles most of the coordination between the IEC’s many committees, is lean (much smaller than the ISO’s) but readily provides the support to enable capacity and capability.
The SMB is critical to the IEC’s agency, as it coordinates and oversees the work of the many technical committees, subcommittees, and working groups of the IEC. It ensures that these various groups do not work at cross-purposes, for example, by developing competing IEC standards for the same purpose where the purview of two or more committees might overlap. The SMB (similar to the other boards) comprises “automatically appointed members” (representatives of the largest member bodies in terms of their contributions to the IEC annual budget and staff support for technical committees), elected representatives of the remaining member bodies, and IEC senior staff ex officio. The elected members of the SMB are elected for three-year terms, renewable once, by the IEC General Assembly, usually in the annual meeting of the member body presidents and senior officers.
SMB oversight is supposed to ensure timeliness and high quality of the technical output – and that all IEC work follows the procedural rules and norms for IEC standard-setting and no one company or country might highjack any TC or larger parts of the organization. The SMB also may reorganize the technical work by merging TCs; it appoints TC secretariats and chairmanships; it adjudicates jurisdictional conflicts between the TCs; and it is responsible for relations with other organizations.Footnote 39 In doing so, the SMB ensures the ability of the IEC to act in the self-interest of the organization while keeping the IEC leadership grounded in the organization’s member bodies – which we would expect to play an important role in the IEC’s ability to exhibit organizational resilience.
15.4 IEC Resilience in the Face of Technological Change
One of the remarkable features of the early history of the IEC is how few committed individuals it took to launch a transnational private body that has – for 115 years and counting – played a major, increasingly global role in the development and governance of an enormous range of electro-technologies. The entrepreneurial approach and skill of key figures – above all Charles Le Maistre, the IEC’s first and long-term secretary general – surely was important for bringing the IEC into existence as an organization with its consensus-oriented structure and procedures for developing “voluntary” technical standards.Footnote 40 The relative ease of its creation may also have been a function of fortuitous temporal sequence: the IEC was the first body of its kind, set up to address functional needs and serve the (largely common) interests of key political-economic stakeholders in the early years of a new field (electro-technology).Footnote 41 Rapid technological development in this field meant that standardization tended to open up a wealth of new, profitable opportunities while foreclosing few. Standardization at that time thus resembled a coordination game with large gains from coordination and relatively small distributional effects, making distributional conflicts a second-order concern.Footnote 42
Yet, the conditions that facilitated the establishment of the IEC in 1906 also applied to a greater or lesser extent in later cases of “new” technologies. Indeed, over the decades, the development of new areas of electro-technology – such as batteries for mobile electrical devices, digital audio and video formats, electronics, and more recently artificial intelligence – have time and again created challenges to IEC preeminence. The IEC has proven remarkably resilient in the face of these technological changes.
The IEC was initially set up to agree upon a common set of terms and measurements that would be foundational for the development of electro-technologies and electrical products – anything from light bulbs to electricity-powered heavy machinery.Footnote 43 Its agenda soon broadened to include the development of standards for the design and performance of actual electrical devices. Initially, the focus was on power-generating equipment, industrial machinery, and standards for use (in scientific research and) within and between private enterprises.Footnote 44 Already by 1911, the agenda had become so broad that discussing all current projects in a single (multiday) plenary meeting was deemed impractical, prompting the IEC to delegate the technical work to more specialized committees, known today as the IEC Technical Committees.Footnote 45 Setting standards for consumer goods was added to the IEC agenda starting in the 1920s and became an important focus of multiple TCs after World War II thanks to the widespread electrification of households throughout advanced industrialized countries and the mass-market production of electrical devices for household use.Footnote 46 And as new electro-technologies were developed, the scope of IEC rule-making broadened further.
IEC standards have remained essential to the development of a wide range of electrical (and in more recent decades electronic) technologies in part because IEC standards define elements and components used as the foundation or building blocks for innovations and technological change. The units and methods for the measurement of voltage and frequency of electrical currents, established by the IEC early on, remain a good example: using other units or methods has become literally unthinkable. Another, more recent example are sensors, which have long had various industrial and household uses, and continue to become ever more important as key parts of complex smart manufacturing and a wide variety of artificial intelligence–driven or –supported systems.Footnote 47 A variety of sensors have, for instance, been integrated into smart “wearable technologies”Footnote 48 used, inter alia, in the healthcare sector. Such devices promise great improvement in patient care by tracking, recording, and (remotely) monitoring physiological processes and biomedical signals.Footnote 49 The COVID-19 pandemic brought this into focus: sensors installed in a wearable device can alert the user when changes in their metrics match those associated with COVID-19 or even track the stability and recovery of those infected.Footnote 50 The IEC plays a role in the development of all these new technologies because the sensors used are designed and manufactured according to the IEC 60747-14 “family” of standards, developed by IEC Technical Committee 47, such as the IEC 60747-14-10 for glucose sensors.Footnote 51
Even more important is that the IEC has proven adept at adding new issues to its agenda to keep abreast of technological changes. This is partly a function of the relative ease with which a “new work item” can be added to any Technical Committee’s standards development agenda. Such a proposal to develop a new standard can be put forward by any National Committee, any Technical Committee (for topics fitting its expertise), the secretary of that TC, the SMB, or the IEC leadership. The proposal is then put to a vote only among the P-members of the TC or SC specified in the proposal as the one to develop the standard. Among them, a simple majority and a commitment of at least four of them (five for larger committees) is all that is required to launch the new standards project. These procedural rules make it very easy to extend the scope of the IEC’s technical authority while making it very difficult for those who do not want to see an IEC standard developed to prevent the launch of such an effort, as long as at least a small number of members share the desire to develop it.Footnote 52
There are limits, however, to such incremental additions to existing technical committees’ agenda as a response to the need for standards development, especially if this work requires distinctive expertise or involves a distinct set of stakeholders. Accordingly, the SMB added entirely new TCs to the IEC portfolio (and occasionally restructured existing TCs), including for computing and information-processing standards in the 1960s; for laser equipment in 1970s; for fiber optics (TC86), superconductivity (TC90), and wind turbines (now “wind energy generation systems”, TC88) in the 1980s; for fuel cells (TC105) in the 1990; and for flat-screen panels (TC110), for nanotechnology in electrical and electronic products (TC113), and for marine energy (i.e., the conversion of tidal and other water currents into electric energy, TC114) in the 2000s. Recently established TCs include committees focused on smart grid user interfaces (TC118), wearable electronic devices and technologies (TC124), and “robotics for electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems” (TC129). Even the development of futuristic-sounding flying cars will involve IEC standardization: such urban air mobility devices will likely rely upon existing standards and standards newly developed by IEC TC100 for surround-view monitoring of the car, by ISO/IEC JTC1 for biometric interchange formats, and IEC 62668 to ensure that the electronic parts safely work together.Footnote 53
In sum, the IEC has, time and again, responded to technological change directly by extending the range of electro-technologies (by now long including in principle all kind of electronics, too) for which it claims standard-setting expertise and authority. While this has not completely prevented the creation of new, more specialized bodies for developing technical standards (see below), it has allowed the IEC to remain the preeminent forum for such activities, especially where cooperation, coordination, and interoperability with related technologies is important, as the standards for them are often already being developed or maintained at the IEC. Importantly, IEC resilience in the face of technological change was by no means coincidental but part of a conscious strategy, as occasionally documented, such as when TC111 was set up in 2004 and assigned the task to “monitor closely the corresponding regional standardization activities worldwide to become a focal point for discussions concerning standardization.”Footnote 54
15.5 IEC Resilience vis-à-vis Possible Competitor SDOs
Having been the first transnational body for setting electro-technology standards gave the IEC something of an incumbency advantage, making it the default focal point for subsequent initiatives to achieve coordination or even harmonization of technical standards related to any area of electro-technology.Footnote 55 From early on, however, other standards-developing organizations arose at various times, and it appears that IEC leaders quite consciously sought to head off possible challenges from potential competitor organizations by establishing more or less formal relationships with them, turning them into collaborators instead. The International Conference on Large Electric Systems and the World Power Conference, for instance, were initially set up as fora for electrotechnical standard-setting in 1921 and 1926, respectively, thus effectively threatening the IEC’s preeminence for commercially very important segments of electro-technology.Footnote 56 Over time, however, their standards-developing activities were either absorbed by the IEC, or they yielded them to the IEC. Other potential competitors established a symbiotic, complementary relationship vis-à-vis the IEC, as in the case of the International Federation of National Standardizing Associations (ISA), founded in 1926 and also headed by Le Maistre, who ensured that its portfolio was defined as standardization outside of the field of electro-technology.
IEC resilience was also helped by fortuitous elements of its institutional design, which allowed it to survive the hiatus of World War II largely unscathed – in contrast to many other inter- and transnational organizations. The statutes of the ISA, for instance, required the organization to hold a general meeting at the latest every three years and tied the terms of office of anyone who could claim to act on behalf of the organization to that meeting schedule. Having held a meeting in 1939 just prior to the beginning of the war, the ISA could go until 1942, but then the ISA arguably ceased to exist; it thus became a collateral organizational casualty of the war. The IEC’s more minimalist rules, by contrast, allowed its secretary general to continue to serve in that role until the next meeting after the war (at which Le Maistre was confirmed once more).Footnote 57
After World War II, the establishment of the ISO as a standards-developing organization for all industries put the IEC’s preeminence or independence at risk. Yet, here again the IEC, led by Le Maistre (who continued as IEC secretary general until 1952), intervened to make certain that the ISO agenda would not clash with the IEC’s. The IEC then proceeded to establish quite quickly institutional mechanisms for a division of labor between IEC and its “sister organization” and to ensure that, for any issue at the intersection of the IEC’s and ISO’s respective areas of specialization, they would not develop competing standards but coordinate. This cooperation has been maintained for more than seven decades – albeit with a growing set of work items assigned to various subcommittees of the rather unwieldy “Joint Technical Committee 1,” which the two standards bodies manage and staff jointly.
The most serious challenge to the IEC’s institutional preeminence in recent decades arose from a group of IEC “insiders” in the process of the EU Common Market initiative in the 1980s. After the failure of its attempts to achieve regulatory harmonization through inter- or transgovernmental negotiations,Footnote 58 the EU sought to overcome divergent, markets-fragmenting regulatory requirements, standards, and norms by delegating the development of technical standards to transnational, nongovernmental standard-setting bodies.Footnote 59 Seeking to balance the attainment of common technical standards with the achievement of legitimate public policy objectives as defined by Europe’s political (governmental) authorities through democratic processes, they set up a system where European policymakers specify the overarching objectives through legislative processes, then delegate finding a “consensus” technical solution for achieving those objectives (subject to international trade law and EU stipulations against discrimination, anti-competitive conduct, etc.) to the then-nascent European-level standard-setting bodies, CEN and CENELEC (corresponding to ISO and IEC, respectively). This arrangement constituted a dangerous challenge to the IEC’s preeminence, given the prominent role of numerous EU countries’ IEC member bodies in IEC-based electro-technology governance.
The IEC responded to this challenge (heading it off for the most part, though not without compromising some of its autonomy) by striking the 1991 Lugano Agreement and then the 1996 Dresden Agreement with CENELEC, which sets out detailed procedures for cooperation between the two transnational SDOs.Footnote 60 For new standards, for instance, it specifies joint decisions by the pertinent TCs of both organization about whether IEC or CENELEC shall take the lead in developing the standard. If IEC takes the lead, it commits to writing a standard that allows for achieving the EU objectives, as well as completing the work on the time line necessary to meet the EU legislative mandate. If CENELEC takes the lead, it keeps the corresponding IEC committee informed, but the technical work then takes place in CENELEC, where non-European IEC member bodies do not have any automatic status. Either way, voting on the final draft standard takes place in parallel in both organizations. If adopted by both, then the often-European-made standard becomes an international standard without further technical discussion at the IEC.Footnote 61
Notwithstanding the IEC’s propensity to swiftly pick up on (market demand for transnational private governance of) new technological developments, some firms have sidestepped the IEC to develop standards for new technologies in so-called standards consortia – ad hoc groups of firms set up (sometime formally as joint ventures) to develop a technical standard for a particular use and usually with exclusive intellectual property rights claims regarding the standard and the technical expertise contained therein.Footnote 62 There are precedents for developing standards collaboratively in small, exclusive groups of firms,Footnote 63 but standards consortia became a distinct method of standard-setting only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in the fast-changing information and telecommunications sector, where the long time required for IEC standards development (five to eight years in the 1980s) was considered particularly problematic.Footnote 64 The IEC responded to this challenge by taking various measures to accelerate the technical work in the TCs, SCs, and working groups, shortening the average time required, from the launch of a proposal for a new standard to the vote on the final draft, to less than three years by the early 2000s.
The IEC also has incorporated into its portfolio numerous standards initially developed by standards consortia (thus committing the holders of standards-essential patents to license those patents to any user on “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” [FRAND] terms while usually also greatly enhancing the value of those patents). To give just two examples with particular importance to the entertainment industry: the audio CD standard, maintained since 1987 as IEC standard 60908, was originally developed by a Sony-Philips consortium in 1979/80.Footnote 65 And the Blu-ray optical disc standard, maintained since 2011 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC23 as ISO/IEC 30193, was originally developed in 2000 by the Sony-Philips-Panasonic-led consortium in a fierce race with the Toshiba-led consortium, which had developed the competing High Definition DVD standard.Footnote 66 In all three cases (and many more like it), the IEC succeeded in gaining authority and in some sense restoring its preeminence, though at the cost of recognizing and arguably sanctifying standards developed without IEC input and without regard to the procedures and norms of IEC standardization.
Another challenge to the IEC’s authority arose from governments in the context of the multilateral international trade regime of GATT and WTO. In the 1960s and 1970s, cross-national differences in technical standards (as such or when subsequently used as a basis for government regulations) were increasingly recognized as important non-tariff barriers to trade.Footnote 67 By the 1990s, their trade-inhibiting effect for manufactured goods was estimated to far exceed the effect of the remaining tariffs for such goods between advanced industrialized countries, resulting in a strong push to incorporate the previously optional GATT Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade into the WTO Treaty, of which it became an integral part, binding on all WTO member states. The resulting international trade law obligation to use “international standards” as the “technical basis” for regulatory measures (whenever international standards exist that can achieve the stated regulatory purposes, such as consumer health and safety) promised to be very profitable for competitive producers and to yield substantial macroeconomic gains.Footnote 68
For the IEC, the new prominence of international standards in international trade law created unprecedented visibility (beyond the niche world of standards experts), but it also created two risks: first, it created the risk that the IEC’s preeminence might be diluted through provisions in the intergovernmental agreement for the recognition of alternative transnational bodies for electrotechnical standard-setting. Second, it created the risk of overt politicization and government attempts to interfere in the work of the IEC. Working jointly with ISO, the IEC addressed these risks, first, by actively lobbying (successfully) for the incorporation of the ISO-IEC joint Code of Good Practices for the Preparation, Adoption and Application of Standards, which was written into the TBT-Agreement as Annex 3, which also gave ISO and IEC, via their joint “Information Center,” an official role in the implementation of the agreement. They also successfully lobbied against any mention of other “international standards” bodies (except for the more specialized, intergovernmental ITU) in the Agreement. The exclusive recognition of IEC, ISO, and ITU does not, strictly speaking, give these organization exclusive rights, but it raised their status and made it clear that they met the requirement for WTO recognition as an international standard-setter.Footnote 69 IEC responded to the second risk by being even more protective of its nongovernmental status. In the end, the entry into force of the WTO Treaty with its TBT provisions thus confirmed and may have even strengthened the resilient IEC and its preeminence.
The most recent risk to the IEC from an SDO competitor arises from China’s efforts to enhance its role in global technology governance, especially technical standardization through its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and, more generally, through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is an extremely broad – comprehensive, though not necessarily cohesively planned, and in parts still rather vague – initiative, sparked by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, to connect China-centered continental East Asia more closely with East and South Asia, Oceania, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa via land and maritime networks.Footnote 70 These networks go by now far beyond the trade and transport networks of the Han Dynasty’s “silk road,” which is said to have inspired the BRI. It includes foreign direct investments, all kinds of development cooperation, and various forms of international, trans-governmental, and transnational exchanges (though the latter appear often high centrally directed from the Chinese side).
Most of the BRI is not about technical standards at all, but many observers have reported that China has been using BRI-created or -intensified interdependence as leverage to get other countries to accept Chinese national technical standards as de facto international standards – facilitated by the hub-and-spokes bilateral rather than multilateral structure of BRI governance, which guarantees China a dominant position vis-à-vis each of its BRI partners.Footnote 71 A recent example has been the pandemic-induced demand for digital tools to fight COVID-19 to get BRI partners to adopt technologies based on Chinese standards that diverge from international ones.Footnote 72 Chinese officials have attributed such efforts (as well as occasional talk of possibly setting up BRI-based institutions for international joint development of technical standards) to the inability of Chinese – or, generally, developing and transition economy countries’ – technical experts to get a fair hearing with the IEC. We therefore postpone discussion of this issue to Section 15.6.3.
15.6 IEC Resilience and the Global South: Economic Globalization, International Politics, and Transnational Private Regulation
15.6.1 A Growing Yet Still Marginal Role for Most Stakeholders from the Global South
From the beginning, participants in IEC standard-setting have paid their own way, which created a bias in favor of commercially successful stakeholders from rich countries. By the time World War I put the IEC on hold (eight years after it had been founded in 1906), the IEC had member bodies from only seventeen countries. Most of them were European: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Canada and United States also were among the founding members. Argentina (at the time one of the richest, most technologically advanced countries) and the quickly rising Japan were the only countries beyond the Northern transatlantic area to have national electrotechnical societies that joined the IEC before World War I.
In the beginning, this exclusionary focus was generally overtly considered desirable – as it was expected to facilitate agreement through similarities in engineering expertise, professional norms, and general needs and interests in international standards.Footnote 73 And the IEC became only marginally more diverse during the interwar years, adding mostly further European members and only five member bodies from countries beyond Europe: Australia (1927), India (1929), Egypt (1930), China (1936), and South Africa (1938). After the end of World War II, IEC membership continued to grow further but only at a very modest pace throughout the decades of the Cold War compared to other international and transnational organizations with a similarly universalist claim to global governance.Footnote 74 By the end of the Cold War in 1990, the IEC had grown to have member bodies from forty-four countries, including twenty non-OECD countries (eleven of them from the Global South).
The de facto role of stakeholders from non-OECD countries and especially the Global South in IEC-based global governance, however, remained more marginal as the membership roster might suggest: IEC National Committees from the non-OECD countries generally held participating membership in only a few IEC Technical Committees and Subcommittees; their actual participation in the process of developing new IEC standards was even rarer; and secretariats and chair positions were virtually all held by the technologically most advanced countries with the largest domestic markets (Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherland were outliers as “small” countries regularly holding more than one of those positions).
The limited membership roster and the even more limited actual participation in standards development became a problem for the IEC in the post–Cold War period. It threatened the IEC’s persistence as the focal institution for the global governance of electro-technology in the post–Cold War years for four reasons. (1) Intensified economic globalization in the 1990s integrated ever more countries of the Global South into truly global markets and value chains, from which they often ended up excluded or unable to reap the full benefits without adopting international standards (including IEC standards) domestically.Footnote 75 The WTO-enhanced role of IEC standards in governing market access gave many countries quite suddenly a much greater stake in IEC standards, leading them (and some observers) to make their marginalization in IEC governance an issue. (2) The explosive growth in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the 1990s, covering a growing range of issues, including regulatory issues and technical non-tariff barriers to trade,Footnote 76 created a risk for the IEC that standards other than IEC standards might get written into PTAs as the technical basis for trade integration – especially in the growing number of South-South PTAs – unless at least one and ideally both countries had a stake in ensuring the continued centrality of IEC standards.Footnote 77 (3) The shift from the bipolar to a multipolar international system reduced the willingness of many countries, especially in the Global South, to be deferential to a small group of Northern countries on issues such as market governance, all the more so in light of simultaneous widespread demands for more democratic participation, both domestically within many countries and in global governance.Footnote 78 This resulted in rising expectations that global governance bodies provide at least for “voice opportunities” for the Global South and arguably also influence over outcomes.Footnote 79 Global governance institutions that failed to live up to these expectations were increasingly subjected to legitimacy challenges.Footnote 80 (4) The economic and political transition after the end of the Cold War resulted in several countries becoming new major powers, especially China, India, and Brazil. Until the 1980s and in some areas even the 1990s, they had been “rule-takers” in global economic affairs; but from the 1990s or 2000s onward, they have increasingly demanded greater voice and real influence in the governance of the world economy.Footnote 81
The IEC responded to these challenges with several initiatives to grow and diversify its membership, as well as some efforts to increase opportunities for substantively meaningful participation by countries from the Global South. IEC leaders worked with several Global South countries’ electro-technical organizations to transform their informal relationships with the IEC into official associate (or even full) memberships. These efforts were complemented by the introduction of the Affiliate Country Program in 2001, through which developing countries can (to a limited but substantively meaningful extent) participate in IEC standard-setting without the financial burden of membership. In addition to gaining access to up to 200 standards documents free of charge (which they can then sell to interested users in their respective countries, providing them with resources they can use to strengthen domestic electro-technical standards bodies), the program gives participants access to IEC meetings and IEC trainings.
In some sense, these efforts have been tremendously successful. The IEC today has sixty-two full members plus twenty-six associate members (which pay lower fees in exchange for more limited participation rights) and eighty-six affiliate countries (which have certain voice opportunities but no voting rights).Footnote 82 The IEC membership has thus become much more global and diverse, enhancing its input legitimacy, at least formally. P-membership in the IEC Technical Committees and Subcommittees, too, has increased for many non-OECD countries, including countries from the Global South (see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1. IEC P-Memberships 2021 vs. 2010.
As Figure 15.1 shows, however, for most developing countries, the increase is very small, and most of the long-dominant larger OECD countries have actually increased their P-memberships to the same extent or even to a proportionally larger extent. A similar pattern emerges with regard to committee chairs and secretariats, as depicted in Figure 15.2 for the (more powerful) committee secretariats: only four non-OECD countries hold any committee secretariats today. Russia, which used to hold one such secretariat in 2000, holds none anymore; the number of South Africa’s secretariats has shrunk from two to one; and EU members Croatia and Poland each hold one (unchanged even when considering the longer twenty-year time span for which this data is available). The striking exception to this overall pattern is China, which has significantly increased both its P-memberships and the number of secretariats held (from five to twelve).
Figure 15.2. IEC TC Secretariats 2021 vs. 2000.
Complementary qualitative evidence supports this interpretation of the quantitative evidence summarized in the figures: with the exception of Chinese participants, experts from the Global South report in interviews that they are still facing challenges in participating in IEC standard-setting. Participants from affiliate countries, in particular, report insufficient advance awareness of IEC work to be able to make substantive contributions to the development or revision of standards, and several of them indicated that much more training and advance preparation would be needed for them to be able to understand how the IEC works as an SDO (despite the IEC offering some training opportunities on just these issues already).Footnote 83 Our evidence aligns with a recent internal survey conducted by the IEC.Footnote 84 Additionally, our data show that, since the introduction of the affiliate program, only 59 comments on standards proposals have been submitted by more than one hundred affiliate-participants over the period 2004–2020, during which thousands of IEC standards were developed or revised.
15.6.2 The Rise of China as a Special Challenge for the IEC
Recent decades have not only seen a greater role of the Global South in the world economy. Distinctly – even when compared to the other “rising” BRICS powers – China has risen to the status of an economic superpower, demanding a greater voice and real influence in global economic governance, including in the governance of technology.
Communist/mainland China’s standardization regime emerged in the early 1950s. Under strong influence from the Soviet Union, it was characterized by top-down state control and widely considered ineffective in supporting Chinese industrial and technological development.Footnote 85 Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, China introduced a series of reforms, which made technical standards, including international standard-setting, a central element of China’s national development policies, initially with the primary aim of reducing dependence on foreign technologies and the respective intellectual property rights.Footnote 86 These reforms included massive state funding to boost engineering education, structural changes in the Chinese domestic standards-developing institutions, specialized training courses for technical standards development, as well as numerous incentives to encourage Chinese stakeholders to increase their participation at the international level, resulting in increased Chinese presence across a broad range of inter- and transnational SDOs.Footnote 87
Having superseded the United States as the largest patent applicant in the world, China is now capable of developing domestically sophisticated alternative technical standards to many international ones. This can already be observed in its pursuit to establish, among other others, a homemade satellite navigation system (as an alternative to GPS) and a Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (as an alternative to SWIFT).Footnote 88 These developments have posed a major challenge to the IEC as the focal institution for electrotechnical standard-setting, for at least three reasons. First, China internationalizing its technical standards outside the IEC’s institutional framework directly undermines the IEC preeminence and status as the focal institution for electrotechnical standard-setting. Second, China has occasionally hinted at establishing competing international bodies to allow stakeholders that are traditionally marginalized at the IEC to have better representation. This might prompt such stakeholders to leave the IEC to join the China-led institutions. Finally, China-centered competing institutions threaten established powers’ ability to keep tabs on newly developed standards and technologies. This is important, not least because they are particularly skeptical of Chinese activity in the area of digitalization and data protection.Footnote 89
15.6.3 IEC Responses to the Rise of China
China has repeatedly emphasized that it has no desire to overthrow the current standardization regime and that it only seeks to ensure that its interests are taken into account similarly to those of the other major, technologically most advanced countries.Footnote 90 The IEC’s response has taken these Chinese assurances seriously and has attempted to accommodate China to a greater extent, so as to give it a greater stake in the continued functioning and preeminence of the IEC – in sense of what we have defined as resilience in the introduction.
Concretely, the IEC has facilitated China becoming one of the most active and prominent member countries. Since 2011, China has been recognized as one of the leading members, entitled to an automatically appointed seat on the SMB and the other IEC decision-making bodies. China also holds two IEC “ambassador” positions (responsible for representing the IEC interest in IoT and cyber security). And in 2019, the IEC elected Yinbiao Shu, chairman of one of China’s five largest state-owned electricity generation enterprises, as its next president; his three-year term started on January 1, 2020.
Already a P-Member of most TCs, China has increased its formal participation even further with P-memberships in now 90 percent of the IEC TCs. At least as importantly, the volume and quality of Chinese delegates’ contributions to the technical discussions at the committee and working group level has notably increased. China has also substantially increased the number of TC secretariats held by its delegates. Working with some of the traditionally leading member bodies (especially Germany’s DIN/DKE), IEC has also attempted to address what are widely seen as key reasons for Chinese experts’ arguably often limited success in IEC committees, including language skills and lack of understanding the norms and procedures of IEC committee work.Footnote 91 Interviews with a former secretary general (CEO) of the IEC confirmed that these changes were a conscious response to the rise of China, seeking to elevate its status in the IEC in accordance with its increased status in the world economy.
15.7 Unresolved Challenges
15.7.1 Democratic versus Expertise-Based Legitimacy: The Rise and Resurgence of the Consumer Movement
The IEC has always maintained that it welcomes the input and seeks balanced participation from all who have a legitimate stake in the development of electro-technology.Footnote 92 The IEC Code of Conduct for Technical Work also requires the national member bodies to represent all interests at the national levels. In practice, however, stakeholder representation has been (with rare exceptions) limited to technical experts whose participation is funded by private sector employers with an immediate commercial stake in the issue at hand.
This predominance of private sector experts is consistent with the IEC’s reliance, from the start, on the expertise-based authority of the IEC, its national member bodies, and the individual participants in its technical committees for the legitimacy of IEC governance.Footnote 93 The IEC’s expertise-based authority has in recent decades been supplemented by delegated authority, especially since WTO member states designated ISO and IEC standards (in the WTO’s TBT-Agreement) as a way to achieve legitimate public policy objectives without setting up unnecessary technical barriers to trade through divergent national standards.Footnote 94 The consumer movement, however, increasingly calls into question the IEC’s reliance on little more than expertise-based and delegated authority.
The IEC started to develop standards specifically for consumer products – and explicitly acknowledged consumer safety and welfare as objectives of IEC regulatory governance – starting with the lamp socket standards it developed in the 1920s.Footnote 95 But the question of whether consumers needed to be incorporated into the standard-setting process to safeguard the IEC’s centrality and legitimacy was only brought to the fore by the rise of the consumer movement in the late 1960s and the 1970s,Footnote 96 as well as the broader shift toward post-materialist values across most advanced capitalist democracies.Footnote 97 To be sure, consumer interests are far from assured voice or influence over policy – even in democratic political systems,Footnote 98 which might be due to organized opposition from producer interestsFootnote 99 or difficulties in discerning consumer preferences.Footnote 100 Research on the political consequences of post-materialism also yields mixed findings regarding the relationship between post-materialism and political consumerism or, more generally, willingness and forms of political participation. Yet the dearth of consumer representation (and more generally the representation of noncommercial interests) in IEC technology governanceFootnote 101 has consequences for the contents of IEC standards and increasingly has come to be seen as a threat to the IEC’s legitimacy.Footnote 102
In response, IEC (and ISO) in 2019 created the ISO/IEC Guide 59, which mirrored the “Six Principles for the Development of International Standards, Guides and Recommendations,” articulated in 2000 by the WTO TBT Committee as part of its Code of Good Practice: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, relevance and effectiveness, coherence, and ensuring de facto opportunities for participation by stakeholders from developing countries.Footnote 103 ISO/IEC Guide 76:2020 also calls for taking consumers’ inputs in consideration in developing service standards.Footnote 104
To implement the Guides, the IEC sought to facilitate noncommercial stakeholders’ participation in standard-setting, for instance, by allowing “liaison organizations” participation (differentiating between three types with different participation rights).Footnote 105 Moreover, the IEC has increased its use of digital tools to boost participation. Beginning in 2001 already, it required all comments to be submitted online and started to introduce electronic voting on technical work. More recently, the IEC introduced to its website a tool to allow the public to submit comments online, and it has continued to increase opportunities for remote access to documents and standard-setting activities – including through the “online authoring tool,” introduced to enable participants to work on a given document simultaneously. All of these steps aim to lower the costs of participation (which had been frequently noted as an important impediment for noncommercial stakeholders).
Regrettably, however, the limited publicly available information – as well as interviews with IEC insiders with access to performance data for the IEC-internal systems – suggest that all of these efforts have yielded little actual participation by consumers so far. The public commenting tool, for instance, has registered a small number of records only.
15.7.2 Gender Equality in IEC Standard-Setting
The IEC has also been repeatedly criticized for the lack of women participants in its work.Footnote 106 Recently, the IEC admitted the existence of the problem, having examined it through an internal survey.Footnote 107
The IEC has, so far, responded to this, above all, by promising to take corrective action. It also joined the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, supposedly to ensure representation of women in TCs. Additionally, the IEC has partnered with the ISO under the stewardship of the Joint Strategic Advisory Group to develop guidance to help TCs ensure they are developing gender-responsive standards. These efforts, however, have only recently begun, and it remains to be seen whether they are effective, given the continued strong gender imbalance in most engineering fields.
15.8 Conclusion: Learning Resilience?
Over the course of its 115-year history, the IEC has exhibited remarkable resilience in the face of numerous and diverse challenges to its preeminence – challenges that have arisen from technological change, the emergence of alternative institutions for developing electrical and electronics standards, and geopolitical upheavals and related power shifts in the world economy, including two world wars, decolonization, the end of the Cold War and the arrival of new, rising powers in the world economy. In this chapter, we have provided a sketch of this resilience and examined its drivers (as well as its limitations).
We started by identifying (in Section 15.2) four essential attributes of the IEC, which, we suggested, would have to remain intact in the face of otherwise extraordinary adaptability to head off challenges to its predominance and legitimacy, if we are to consider the IEC’s continued existence indicative of genuine resilience. We then sketched a theory of resilience, extending Büthe’s proto-theory of organizational preeminence in light of Delimatsis’ analytical framework for this book. The empirical account of IEC resilience in light of a variety of challenges that it has encountered over the course of more than a century show time and again the central importance of the IEC’s autonomous agency in pursuit of its organizational self-interest – while largely maintaining the inclusive, participatory governance structures and procedures on which its legitimacy is in large part based.
At the same time, the IEC cannot be said to have (yet) successfully addressed all challenges to its preeminence, raising questions about the extent to which resilience can be “learned.” To be sure, some changes made by the IEC in response to earlier challenges, such as its creation of the Standards Management Board (originally set up in the 1920s as the Committee on Action to coordinate the work of its then-fifteen Technical Committees), have lastingly enhanced its ability to combine autonomous agency with legitimacy-enhancing embeddedness of the IEC leadership in the community of member bodies. Yet the ultimate test of resilience arises from having to respond to shocks that are different from prior ones, necessarily limiting the extent to which past resilience might predict future resilience.
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