Legitimacy and Legitimisation of Global Governance in Crisis
Organised by Kyriaki Nanou

Workshop Summary 

The workshop aims to provide a forum that is exploring the implications of the increased politicisation and contestation of global shifts in power and policymaking, from national authorities to international organisations, which can be seen to be threatening to the liberal international order and multilateral structures in regional and world politics. Such politicisation and contestation are increasingly manifested in democratic societies, through the political emergence and electoral success of populist parties and leaders (of the right and left), heighted nationalist sentiment, and growing public mistrust of or hostility towards regional integration, globalisation, and immigration. In response, there is increasing pressure for international organisations to enhance legitimacy and put forward legitimisation practices including open participatory forms of decision making with engagement with multiple stakeholders. International organisations need to justify their role and scope – given perceptions of a lack of legitimacy, policy failures or inefficiencies, and a ‘liberal bias’ to their rules and policy-making – and to widen and deepen their legitimisation activities. Some of these activities consist of building engagement with constituents, for instance significant investment in public communication activities and institutional linkages with legislatures. These are costly activities for international organisations and highlight concerns that, increasingly, neither output legitimacy nor institutional legitimacy - due to their intergovernmental character – are sufficient.  

A key aim of the workshop would be to encourage interaction between more theoretically focused or more empirically-focused research on legitimacy and legitimisation. Apart from the substantive discussions on the topic that will take place the first and second day, the workshop would encourage also a dialogue as to how we can employ experimental approaches from comparative politics and international relations to the studies of legitimacy and legitimisation of global governance. The focus is on agents of global governance, including political elites within international organisations and transnational or non-state actors and public opinion.