This chapter surveys the rapid growth of globe-spanning organizations and institutions over the past 120 years – from the League of Nations to the UN to today’s International Criminal Court and European Union. Spurred by the world wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters of the twentieth century, humanity has already come much farther than most people realize in building innovative instruments of global concertation and crisis management. Therefore, the pathways of constructive change that lie ahead of us can best be understood as continuations and extensions of the remarkable gains already achieved. Four institutions – OECD, UN, NATO, and EU – exemplify distinct levels of rising integration across national boundaries. Institutions such as International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) have offered powerful new pathways for citizens’ concerted action beyond borders. The recently-adopted UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) reflects a newfound legitimacy of cross-border ethical obligations and proactive interventions to halt large-scale humanitarian disasters.

This chapter sheds light on the international organisations that have been active in proliferating leniency programmes. This contribution includes the efforts of the OECD, ICN, UNCTAD and ASEAN. For each of these organisations, the chapter argues that they have a tendency to look for the common elements among existing leniency programmes and present them as an international guideline or best practice. When the existing leniency programmes diverge, the international guideline or best practice is to offer options. By not further clarifying these options, the chapter holds, the international organisations do no more than summarise local practices and pull them outside of their context. Due to this practice, convergence is unlikely to happen because, when the international guidelines or best practices are consulted, there will be an automatic reflex to also consult existing local practices and the existing literature regarding those practices.

Algorithmic transparency is the basis of machine accountability and the cornerstone of policy frameworks that regulate the use of artificial intelligence techniques. The goal of algorithmic transparency is to ensure accuracy and fairness in decisions concerning individuals.AI techniques replicate bias, and as these techniques become more complex, bias becomes more difficult to detect. But the principle of algorithmic transparency remains important across a wide range of sectors. Credit determinations, employment assessments, educational tracking, as well as decisions about government benefits, border crossings, communications surveillance and even inspections in sports stadiums increasingly rely on black box techniques that produce results that are unaccountable, opaque, and often unfair. Even the organizations that rely on these methods often do not fully understand their impact or their weaknesses.

This chapter discusses the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises as voluntary standards for business and human rights. Both standards have received significant scholarly attention. Although both initiatives differ with regard to some dimensions (e.g., in terms of their scope), they also share a number of similarities (e.g., their voluntary and principle-based nature and their lack of monitoring). It is therefore appropriate to discuss both initiatives and to also compare them with each other (whenever possible and feasible). The discussion in this chapter proceeds as follows. The next section discusses the theoretical background by emphasizing the rise of voluntary standards related to corporate sustainability and responsibility. The following two sections provide a more practical discussion. Section three and four take an in-depth look at the UNGC and the OECD Guidelines and discuss (a) the basic idea underlying both initiatives, (b) their link to the business and human rights agenda, and (c) their enforcement mechanisms. The discussion of both standards shows one important similarity: the lack of a robust system to implement and enforce the promoted principles.

In the third chapter, some data are provided to explain the effects produced by the individual national financing systems, in terms of overall healthcare expenditure and insurance coverage of the population. The data reported confirm – both from a comparative and a diachronic perspective – that healthcare expenditure typically grows faster than GDP. The data concerning the insurance coverage of the population shows that many OECD countries do not provide healthcare coverage to the entire population. Considering all OECD countries, the uninsured total almost forty-nine million, corresponding to 3.7 percent of the population. Within EU countries, there are more than seven million uninsured (or 1.4 percent of EU residents).

Having developed a suitable normative approach, this chapter considers how best to achieve this, in light of current international law. A variety of legal modalities (treaty or soft law), fora (e.g. existing or standalone forum) and drafting approaches (multi-stakeholder or expert-led) are considered. An international expert-led soft law approach, outside the auspices of any existing international body, is recommended in the first instance, noting that, in due course, a more permanent forum may be warranted and that, indeed, binding treaty approaches may also be contemplated in the longer term. It is finally considered whether such an approach would remain consistent with existing international law, notably international intellectual property law. It is concluded that the proposed approach would be fully consistent with existing international law.

This chapter examines the reasons for, and policy behind, the programme of work that has developed a new international tax framework. In developing two "pillars", the OECD Secretariat and, more latterly, the Inclusive Framework, with the proposals in Pillar One, have broken new ground in proposing new taxing rights without the requirement of physical presence in the source or market jurisdiction. These profit allocation rules radically depart from the existing international tax framework. In addition there are other proposals that use formulaic calculations, residual profit split methodology and elements of formulary apportionment, allocating profits to the marketplace jurisdiction, ignoring the single entity concept, and departing from the arm's-length principle. In respect of Pillar Two, the proposal to prevent profit shifting is equally controversial. The proposals under Pillar Two contemplate a minimum level of tax paid on all internationally operating businesses. These proposals confront the international tax framework norm in the areas of transfer pricing, the use of intellectual property, residence taxation and, in particular, tax competition.

The chapter compares how the G20, the OECD and the IMF addressed fossil fuel subsidies and finds that while the three institutions agreed on the importance of reform of fossil fuel subsidies due to their environmental and economic consequences, they also differed in how they addressed these subsidies. Most notably, the IMF adopted a radical definition of fossil fuel subsidies based on the notion of corrective taxes, which stood out against the more established definition of the OECD. The chapter demonstrates that economisation may lead to diverging framings of the issue in economic terms. Subsequently, the chapter outlines how this divergence was driven by the differences in worldview, policy entrepreneurship and the degree of autonomy of the IO bureaucracy from principals. Yet, the similarities between their worldviews (they agreed on a range of fundamental issues), institutional interaction and overlapping memberships pulled in the direction of convergence between the institutions. Finally, there is a discussion on the consequences of this divergence at the international and domestic levels, while the convergence between the institutions was important for the attention to the issue and the norm of fossil fuel subsidy reform.

This chapter describes the history and track record regarding environmental issues and institutional worldview of respectively the IMF, the G20 and the OECD. Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis the G20 became the global forum for the coordination of economic policy, and the emphasis on economic objectives is visible in its prioritisation of issues and their economic impact. One of the most powerful international institutions, the IMF has a strong track record when it comes to influencing state policy, but has traditionally not paid much attention to environmental protection. Finally, the OECD promotes policies improving the economic and social well-being of people, and since the 1970s it has influenced environmental policy on the global level and within the OECD countries.

This chapter summarises the main findings of the book: international economic institutions address climate issues through economisation, yet there are differences in how exactly this economisation defines the issue at hand, differences mainly shaped by the institutional worldview of the institution and to lesser degrees by the relationship with member states. The differences were mitigated by the interaction between the institutions. The institutions were more influential regarding fossil fuel subsidies than regarding climate finance. This is due to fossil fuel subsidy reform resonating more with domestic actors than climate finance due to its positive fiscal impact (unlike climate finance that constitutes expenditure) and closer fit with neoclassical economics. These findings are discussed in the wider perspective of economic institutions and climate politics, arguing that economisation does not lead to a paradigm shift away from established practices of environmental politics. Furthermore, the economisation of climate finance and fossil fuel subsidy reform does not necessarily entail an overarching paradigm shift within the institutions, which continue with unsustainable practices such as political and economic support to fossil fuel production and consumption.

The OECD has a long institutional history of defining and providing knowledge about fossil fuel subsidies. While the G20 commitment to reform fossil fuel subsidies lifted OECD efforts to address fossil fuel subsidies to a new level, the institutional worldview of the OECD bureaucracy (influenced by the experience of addressing other kinds of subsidies) shaped how it was addressed. The OECD has been important in providing ideas, knowledge and possibilities for learning about fossil fuel subsidies among states, and influenced how the G20 and other international institutions addressed fossil fuel subsidies.

The OECD has worked with climate finance since the 1990s, addressing it from both a development and an investment perspective. As a knowledge-producing institution, the OECD has produced numerous reports and other publications on climate finance, which can be divided into two strands: A development strand within which the DAC has published statistics on the provision of development aid with climate objectives, and an investment strand producing analyses of how to redirect investment to green purposes. The former perspective led the OECD to frame climate finance as a subtype of development finance while stressing its economic aspects (cost-effectiveness, leveraging private finance). The latter, less important, perspective framed climate finance as an instrument for redirecting investments from 'brown' to 'green' and linked it to fossil fuel subsidy reform, carbon pricing and institutional investment policy. The OECD’s approach had an ideational influence on how both the G20 and the OECD member states addressed climate finance. The OECD’s output on climate finance was shaped by institutional interaction, the OECD worldview and the member states. The chapter finds that the consequences of OECD output at the international was most salient regarding the UNFCCC, and at the domestic levels most salient regarding the development strand.

All three institutions have framed climate finance in economic terms and stressed normative ideas such as efficiency. They have also linked climate finance to issues such as fossil fuel subsidies, carbon pricing, risk and investment to a larger degree than environmental institutions. Despite the overarching convergence between the institutions around addressing climate finance as an economic issue rather than an issue of environmental protection or global justice, the institutions also diverged on climate finance to some degree. The divergence is most notable regarding whether carbon pricing should constitute a source of climate finance, and to some extent also regarding how equity should be prioritised. Subsequently, this chapter explains this alignment in terms of economic worldviews and interaction pulling towards convergence. Divergence between the institutions has been driven less by fundamental differences in worldviews (e.g. between the OECD Development Directorate and the IMF) and the degree of autonomy from member states. Finally, the consequences of the output are described, identifying more significant (cognitive) influences at the international level than the domestic level, but also incentive-based influences from the OECD and the G20.

This chapter suggests that that the similarities in approaches to internationalization lead to convergence across higher education systems, actual practices and governance arrangements also show continued divergence. By adopting a cultural / phenomenological approached as part of the world society theory perspective (Meyer et al., 1997), this chapter aims to provide a cultural rather than a functional explanation for the remarkable degree of convergence, while not losing sight of divergence. Taking this cultural perspective to both frame and explain the proliferation of the internationalization discourse in higher education — and the resulting convergence and divergence — has, to the best of our knowledge, not been done before in the academic literature. To further our understanding of the internationalization discourse and the implications for governance of higher education, we ask the following research question: how can the rationales and practices underpinning the internationalization of higher education be understood from a world society perspective? To answer this question, we first outline the world society theory. We then highlight patterns of convergence, followed by signs of divergence, in rationales and practices.