Governing with Limited Learning Capacity?The Question of Institutional Learning and Global Governance’s New Legitimacy Challenge

Abstract

The rise of international organizations (IOs) as public authorities in global governance has reinvigorated the debate about IOs’ legitimacy. Efforts to address legitimacy concerns raised by IOs’ increased role have drawn on IOs’ perceived epistemic strength, suggesting that the rationality and soundness of their responses to governance needs lend them legitimacy. Yet, IOs’ recent crisis responses have cast a shadow on this popular view. Using the state as the foil, this paper aims to cast light on the relationship between IOs’ institutional learning and legitimacy through investigating IOs’ intervention in recent transnational emergencies. It advances a two-fold argument. First, IOs’ institutional learning is limited because it lacks the democratic-reflexive and executive modes of learning, which have grown out of the quest for constitutional legitimacy in state formation and underpinned the state’s epistemic strength. Second, given that IOs’ institutional limits originate in their non-sovereign constitutional status, to improve their institutional learning on the model of constitutional legitimacy in the state will need to rest IOs on a constitutional framing—the societal foundation required of which is still eluding global governance. Such a constitutional project only exacerbates IOs’ legitimacy malaise without re-establishing their epistemic superiority or delivering legitimacy for global governance.

Speaker

Ming-Sung Kuo  - University of Warwick

Bio

Dr Ming-Sung Kuo is a reader in law at University of Warwick (United Kingdom). His scholarship on theory of public international law, global constitutionalism and global administrative law, constitutional theory, and comparative constitutional law and politics, has appeared in leading journals in these areas, including Constellations, International Journal of Constitutional Law (I·CON), European Journal of International Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Leiden Journal of International Law, and Modern Law Review. He is the recipient of the 2020 I·CON Best Paper Prize for his article ‘Against Instantaneous Democracy’ (2019) 17 (2) I·CON 554. He has held visiting positions or fellowships at University of Turin, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore, University of Copenhagen (iCourts), European University Institute (MWP), among others. He earned his JSD and a second LLM from Yale after receiving his LLB and an LLM from National Taiwan University.