Introduction

Non-state actors have emerged as standard setters in the globalised system without, in any formal sense, being legitimated by, or accountable to, those over whom they claim to exercise political authority. This has led to complaints of a ‘democratic deficit’, notably at the 1999 Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization when the ‘international system's lack of transparency, accountability, and citizen inclusiveness became a major political issue’. Global governance institutions are viewed as ‘remote, bureaucratic, elite-driven and unresponsive to popular will’. To their critics, they appear to allow political and economic elites ‘to bypass the onerous processes of persuasion and consensus-seeking that democracy requires’. The focus of this chapter is the democratic deficit experienced by the citizens of democratic states as policy issues are decided outside of their direct control. It outlines the domestic and international aspects of sovereign law-making, before examining the phenomenon of international governance by non-state actors, which sits outside of the Westphalian paradigm of state as ‘self-legislator’.

The work argues that the political authority of non-state actors is provided by a recognition of their institutional competence and epistemic authority, which is concerned with ‘who should be believed, under what circumstances, and with respect to what issues’. At the level of domestic government, epistemic authority is provided by democratic law-making procedures. Non-state actors do not enjoy inherent epistemic authority: they must make a claim to know better than anyone else what should be done, that is, which normative standards should be applied to which actors in what circumstances.