States and international organizations are central to global governance, and are significant formative agents of justice (and injustice), in advancing, sifting, or undermining principles. Despite their formal authority, states and international organizations cannot be relied upon to promote global justice. States in practice often veil their material self-interest in the language of justice. International organizations too can promote their own interest, as well as adhering rigidly to dominant discourses such as neoliberalism that restrict the kind of justice they can advance. Thus states and international organizations should primarily act as effectors of global justice whose task is to ensure the outcomes determined in more extensive deliberation are implemented. Some of their problematic formative agency aspects can be ameliorated by deliberative democratic means. The Open Working Group that finalized the content of the Sustainable Development Goals is indicative of the possibilities here, as it embodied novel deliberative features that curbed polarization, overcame impasse, and facilitated common-interest justifications. Engagements with civil society of the kind now glimpsed in global climate governance can open international organizations to deliberating competing conceptions of justice. This chapter concludes by showing how states and international organizations might expand their deliberative engagements.

Chapter two examines how postcolonial states respond to ethno-nationalism in general and minorities in particular. I argue that nationalist ruling elites conceive of the postcolonial state itself as an ‘ideology’, claiming that the unified national state, its liberal constitutional structure, and the developmental agenda will end the troublesome ethnic parochialism and, therefore, solve the problem of minorities. The ideological making of the postcolonial state not only obscures and glosses over the real reasons for the problem, but also shift attention to issues that help maintain asymmetric power relations. To substantiate this argument, I first explain John Thompson’s notion of ‘ideology’ as a set of ways in which ideas and meanings help create and sustain relations of domination. I then develop my argument that the ideology of the postcolonial state functions in three different forms: the postcolonial ‘national’, ‘liberal’, and ‘developmental’ state. Working through these three ideologies, the postcolonial state demands the submission of the minority cause to the greater ‘national’, ‘liberal’, and ‘developmental’ interests of the state, thereby legitimising the oppression of minorities. I demonstrate these ideological functions of the postcolonial state with historical examples: the discourse used in Indian Constituency Assembly debates to discuss minority rights.

This chapter is concerned with how a claim to global authority over land and resources in the Global South has been invoked and the shape or form it has been given. It shows how the designation of both climate change and tropical deforestation as matters of ‘common concern’ has operated to authorise global authority over activities within national states that contribute to these processes. It interrogates how climate change has come to be understood in specific ways as an ‘object’ or ‘problem’ for law, and how this has given a distinctive shape to the climate regime. Finally, although forests have historically been subject to competing claims of international, national and local ownership, it shows how the focus on the capacity of forests to sequester carbon and function as carbon sinks has made it possible for the issue of deforestation, and thus also forest management, to be understood as a matter of global, rather than simply local or national, concern.

In Latin America, goods substitution dynamics are evident in states that have recently opposed US hegemony, such as Venezuela and Ecuador. However, the case of Colombia – one of the USA’s closest allies in the region – shows how asset substitution dynamics come to operate under conditions of hierarchy. Colombia does not seek to challenge the USA directly. Rather, Colombia is consistently seeking to diversify its ties with the USA, thereby increasing its leverage and autonomy and hedging its bets from within a hierarchical arrangement. Colombia is a “least likely” case for the theory of goods substitution, and there is limited evidence of actual Chinese goods substitution in Colombia. Yet, China’s increasingly central role in a global goods ecology is a new context in which Colombian hedging strategies are used to threaten with goods substitution. This chapter shows that the mere threat of exiting or hedging strategies has the potential to effect policy change, particularly when combined with domestic political context – a diversification of ties interacts with domestic and international politics, with one area having possible unintended effects on the other.

This chapter turns to consider questions of scale by interrogating the multilayered system of governance that REDD+ envisions, as established through the allocation of forest resource rights to diverse social actors at the local, national and international levels. It reads debates about carbon rights in REDD+ alongside broader trends relating to natural resource governance, common property regimes (CPRs) and community resource management to show how frameworks for the allocation of layered, or nested, rights in the forest carbon economy is another legal technology through which authority over land is transferred to international actors and away from people who live in and around forested areas.

In this chapter, Alexander Cooley details how Central Asian countries use the competing and overlapping infrastructure of external powers to consolidate their own domestic political standing. In the 2000s, after 9/11 and a string of “Color Revolutions,” Russia and China established themselves as alternative providers of public goods in a region hitherto seen as consisting in countries in “democratic transition” under US influence. Consequently, with alternative goods providers available, Central Asian countries themselves leveraged their relationship to the West to achieve political and economic aims and to push back against criticism about human rights abuses and authoritarian policies. Cooley’s example of how Russia deploys and supports alternative election observers to post-Soviet countries drives home the point that the rise of alternative providers and goods substitution has undermined US hegemony and eroded the policies, norms, and institutions of the US-led liberal international order. As the chapter demonstrates, these dynamics escalated very quickly in a region, originally categorized as “post-Communist,” at the outer boundary of the US-led Western sphere of influence.

This chapter explores a key effect of REDD+, namely that it recasts how the North–South differentiation in the climate regime is understood and how questions of responsibility and capacity for climate mitigation are conceptualised. This has the effect of enabling the countries of the Global North – who bear the greater responsibility for GHG production – to evade necessary action to ameliorate the climate crisis. Simultaneously, an emphasis on the presumed lack of capacity of Global South countries to act on climate disruption has provided a justification or authorisation for greater international intervention in the name of assisting them to act on climate change. This chapter examines debates over the contentious principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capacities in the climate regime and explores changes in how the principle is interpreted and enacted over time. It also shows how the adoption of flexibility mechanisms within the regime transformed how differentiation is operationalised in practice. Finally, this chapter shows how the discourse of ‘capacity building’ in the climate regime has facilitated the establishment of regulatory and legal infrastructure to support neoliberal markets, especially through REDD+-readiness programs.

This introductory chapter first reviews the major categories of goods: private, public, common-pool, and club, and discusses the concept of good specificity – essentially, the number of possible suppliers – which matters to the politics of substitution. It then turns toward a discussion of how this volume defines and understands international order: An important feature of international order is its “goods ecology” – that is, patterns in the production, supply, quality, and nature of international goods. The next major section elaborates the logic of goods substitution, which serves as the common framework for the chapters in the book, before illustrating how many of the goods in international politics are cultural or symbolic in character and having performative dimensions. The chapter concludes by laying out the plan of the volume and the contents of each of the chapters.

Goods are not only tangible things, like military hardware or trade goods, but may also be normative in nature. In this chapter, Rumelili and Towns emphasize the centrality of international symbolic and normative goods in maintaining or challenging hegemony. International orders may be characterized by different systems of supply of normative goods and status. They analyze the role played by ranking organizations and the country performance indices they produce in transforming norms into a set of normative goods. Such country performance indices provide moral value in three ways: They supply public and comparative information, which constructs moral hierarchies; they define norms by assigning moral value to specific indicators; and they distribute moral status to states through the ranking systems they employ. States may acquire normative goods to challenge the dominant position of the United States, or they may challenge the existing set of normative goods to undermine the liberal normative order that undergirds US hegemony. Conceiving of norms as goods alerts us to a distinct terrain where hegemony is challenged in a bottom-up and gradual fashion, through putatively technical measures and standards.

This chapter provides a background to and analysis of REDD+ from multiple angles and across a number of different registers. Firstly, it traces the history of REDD+ as a legal agreement that provides the framework through which activities to address deforestation and forest degradation can be measured, reported and verified as ‘result-based action’ and made legible in the rubric of one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent. Secondly, this chapter examines REDD+ as constituted through experimental practices, preparatory and market-construction activities. Thirdly, it analyses REDD+ as a concept or idea arising from the field of environmental economics, namely, that forest protection can be ‘incentivised’ through the financial valuation of nature and payment for environmental services schemes, including potentially the inclusion of forests in international carbon markets. Fourthly, it provides an overview of the activities that are promoted through REDD+ and interrogates the history of both conservation and sustainable forest management. Finally, it outlines how the scope of REDD+ programmes and projects has extended beyond its initial environmental focus, so that REDD+ has now also become a social project concerned with ‘co-benefits’ such as poverty alleviation, tenure reform and rights for people living in and around forested areas.