Benedict Kingsbury & Nico Krisch

The papers in this symposium address, often critically, the possibilities and problems of global administrative law in global governance. They cover various areas of regulation, such as government procurement, international investment, supervision of commercial banks, markets for forest products, urban water services, and export garment industries; three pieces address general issues of the democratic theory, administrative law sources, and political ordering functions of global administrative law. The papers were written as part of a broader research project at New York University Law School’s Institute for International Law and Justice.1 Initial versions were presented at NYU and at an NYU-Oxford University workshop held at Merton College; the support of these three institutions is gratefully acknowledged. As conveners of this project (jointly with Richard Stewart), we can make no claim to detachment. Not surprisingly, we see an overall picture of widespread, and growing, engagement with principles of transparency, participation, reasoned decision and review in global governance. Nonetheless, the pattern that emerges from the case studies in the project so far is by no means uniform or coherent: administrative law mechanisms and principles operate in some areas and not in others, many are not more than embryonic, and they diverge widely in their forms. At the theoretical level, the perspectives taken in the various papers in this symposium raise significant questions about both the meaning and the normative justifications of the core concept of global administrative law we have preliminarily espoused. In this Introduction, we first outline briefly the guiding assumptions underlying the idea of a global administrative law (Section 1). In Section 2, we canvass some themes in the various papers by distilling approaches the different contributors take to the normative potential and problems of global administrative law. In Section 3, we seek to draw from the analyses presented by the contributors, who in most cases are specialists in fields of law or politics other than traditional international law, some challenges that the regulatory governance of global markets and the emergence of a global administrative space may pose to standard inter-state, consent-based models of international law.