Chapter 3 analyses the three selected challenges facing international tribunals – managing change, reviewing State conduct for compliance with international law, and dispute resolution – in the environmental case law of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and arbitral tribunals constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS tribunals have often interpreted the Convention in a manner that takes account of relevant developments in international law. This is partly due to features of UNCLOS itself, including that it contains many generic or open-ended terms. The chapter demonstrates that the standard and method of review are significant issues in the environmental case law of UNCLOS tribunals, in the context of the Convention conferring on coastal States discretionary powers. These issues raise similar functional questions to those seen in the other adjudication contexts studied, for example regarding the rationales for some deference to domestic authorities. Finally, the chapter demonstrates that UNCLOS tribunals often adjudicate in a facilitative, forward-looking manner, aiming to assist the parties to rebuild their relationship.

Chapter 6 draws together and extends the comparative analysis that has unfolded across the prior chapters. It explains why tribunals’ practices differ across the regimes studied, focusing on contextual differences between the selected tribunals. It also assesses to what extent the practices of the selected tribunals provide insights into wider problems facing international adjudication and legal techniques that are potentially transferable across contexts. Structurally, the chapter discusses consecutively my findings in relation to the three challenges confronting international tribunals analysed throughout the book: managing changes in international law or relevant facts, calibrating the appropriate standard and method of review when scrutinising State conduct for compliance with international law, and contributing to broader processes of dispute resolution. The chapter finishes with some final remarks that close the book, concerning its contribution to our understanding of the role of international adjudication in contemporary international law and its implications for future studies in this field.

The aim of this volume is not to provide or test a single theory of informal global governance but rather to provide a set of analyses that speak to a common set of theoretical, empirical, and methodological questions. More broadly, the aim is to advance the emerging research agenda on informality in world politics. We conclude the volume by highlighting four productive avenues for future research on informality, based on the insights of the empirical chapters.

Understanding contemporary global governance requires a focus on informality. States increasingly govern through informal intergovernmental organizations, transnational public–private governance initiatives, and other informal institutions. Even within formal institutions, informal practices complement or override formal rules. And diverse informal groupings operate in the orbit of governance institutions, framing novel issues and placing them on policy agendas. We address these three aspects of informality – of, inside, and around global governance institutions. We first trace the nature and extent of the shift toward informal governance. We then consider a range of factors that may be driving the shift, drawing on major streams of International Relations (IR) theory; we treat these as candidate explanatory variables. Finally, we summarize the findings on those variables, and other theoretical insights, from the empirical chapters of this volume.

Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

Chapter 2 analyses the three selected challenges facing international tribunals – managing change, reviewing State conduct for compliance with international law, and dispute resolution – in World Trade Organization (WTO) adjudication, focusing on environmental disputes. WTO tribunals have often been faced with potential changes in international legal norms or changes in relevant facts. The chapter analyses the approach to the standard of review developed under the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. While this approach avoids WTO adjudicators determining questions of scientific correctness, it requires them to decide what counts as an adequate risk assessment process. The chapter then analyses the necessity tests developed by WTO adjudicators for scrutinising measures that pursue a permissible regulatory aim but also restrict a treaty-protected interest in trade liberalisation. Finally, the chapter interrogates an aspect of the WTO’s ‘chapeau jurisprudence’ that many commentators have read as a desirable example of international tribunals engaging in a procedural form of scrutiny and pushing regulating States to consider affected foreign interests.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.