The legitimacy of decision-making within international institutions increasingly is the subject of both policy and academic discourse. This essay addresses that subject with respect to international institutions involved in implementing the concept of sustainable development by way of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and which in that process engage in normative development. The question of the legitimacy of decision-making arises in this context, in particular, because developed states have ‘outsourced’ their obligation, to transfer financial means to developing states for purposes of implementing MEAs, to the World Bank and institutions associated with the Bank, such as the Global Environment Facility. This essay analyses the manner in which the legitimacy of decision-making is addressed in relevant policy and academic-legal discourse and sets out the relevant institutional and decision-making structures through which the concept of sustainable development attains normative content. It concludes that the interactional theory of international law and the principle of good self-regulation, or eunomics, offer valuable insights into what is at stake when considering the legitimacy of decision-making in the implementation of sustainable development by way of MEAs, insights that are relevant within the wider context of decision-making by international institutions.

The war on Iraq has fuelled the debate about the nature and meaning of the international security system premised on the United Nations. This paper begins by examining the nature and subsequent modification of the UN collective security system. It focuses on the practice of Security Council authorisations to use force and the expanded notion of self-defence. It identifies as causes of such transformation the changing security environment, power asymmetries and the structural inability of the UN to adapt accordingly. The paper examines the failings of such a system and concludes by offering a framework for an international security system based on legitimacy interpreted as the congruence between processes, actors, claims and practices.

The government has the duty to promote the development of the international legal order, says Article 90 of the Netherlands Constitution. Although somewhat similar provisions occur in other constitutions, only the draft Constitution of the European Union contains an identical provision. This essay analyses the precise meaning of the constitutional duty in the Netherlands. It traces the history of the relevant provision and sketches how it developed from a provision on the use of peaceful means for settling international disputes into a general provision on the duty to promote the development of the international legal order. The meaning and content of the duty contained in this provision is distinguished by analysing the overlapping twin notions of abidance by versus promotion of international law, of international society and the international legal order, of serving international and the national interest, and by discussing the attributive versus the regulative nature of Article 90 of the Constitution. The case-law on this provision is discussed separately, and describes the development from reviewing the compatibility of state action with public international law to considering it a programmatic provision with limited justiciability.

In its dynamic function, focussing on promoting the development of an international legal order, the provision has a critical, exhortatory function; it does not regard actual facts, but is about desirable futures. It should foster discourse about the structural weaknesses in the present political and legal international order and should highlight the discussion on whether certain policy choices actually promote the latter's development.

Traditionally, international law has barely paid attention to the democratic legitimacy of its most important subjects – states –, having been concerned only with relations between states and not within them. The neutral position of international law vis-à-vis a state's internal form of government changed after the collapse of communism. The question of whether the citizen could claim democratic governance, made headway. The normative value of democracy has also deeply influenced the foreign policy of a large number of states: since the 1990s, respect for democracy has at times been considered a condition for recognizing a new state and it is increasingly a prerequisite for membership of international organizations. A forcible imposition of democracy is however doubtful. Finally, the article examines whether international law itself is made in a sufficiently democratic manner. The formation of international law through treaties or custom, for instance, is inherently suffering from a democracy deficit, even though some remedies seem possible. There are likewise problems of democratic deficits in the decision-making processes in international organizations. Powerful states are able to use decision-making to their advantage by using all kinds of formal and informal mechanisms. The article explores, as a case-study, the situation in the World Trade Organization.