This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

The “All Affected Interests Principle” (AAIP) and the related “All Subjected Principle” (ASP) articulate principles of political legitimacy that can serve as potent instruments for evaluating the legitimacy of non-state institutional orders. However, while both are useful for evaluating the legitimacy of already-existing institutional orders, many of most important democratic legitimacy failures of our age arise not only from the undemocratic character of already-constituted orders but also from the fact that in many key domains we lack any institutionalized capacity to address the urgent collective action problems we face. How can such institutions be established in a democratically legitimate way, as an exercise of democratic collective agency? The chapter takes a historicizing turn, arguing that AAIP and ASP creatively retrieve and reconstruct old ideas in the history of democratic thought, liberating them from the presupposition that they can only be actualized within the territorial boundaries of the state. It then argues that we can reconstruct the concept of constituent power as a form of democratic agency to show how democratically legitimate sites of binding collective decision beyond the state can come into being.

Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

International secretariats have increasingly turned toward orchestration as a mode of governance. This chapter analyzes the normative dimensions associated with orchestration, such as democratic values related to participation, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. It argues that orchestration as an indirect mode of governance muddles who should be held accountable for which actions, to which set of standards, and which agents have the right to demand said accountability. Orchestrators need to ensure that their own actions, and those of intermediaries, are democratically legitimated by affected stakeholders. The chapter applies this argument to orchestration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. While previous research on orchestration of the UNFCCC has predominantly focused on effectiveness nonstate action, this chapter shows how and why nonstate climate action requires democratic legitimation. It concludes by discussing the intrinsic and instrumental importance of evaluating orchestration through a democratic legitimacy lens and the implications for international secretariats.

It is clear that, under customary international law, the state that has suffered an armed attack must request aid before other states can provide it with that aid in the exercise of collective self-defence. There are a range of factors that need to be considered that do (or, at least, may) have a bearing on the ‘validity’ of that request. This chapter analyses perhaps the most controversial of them: the question of who can issue a collective self-defence request. In so doing, it examines the view that only states can request aid in collective self-defence and, indeed, further asks whether the issuer of the request must be a UN member. The bulk of the chapter then examines how one identifies the de jure government of the state for the specific purpose of issuing a collective self-defence request. A traditional reference point for the recognition of governments in international law generally has been the effective control of territory. However, this is of minimal – if any – importance to the identification of the entity that can request aid in collective self-defence. Instead, other factors, such as democratic and constitutional legitimacy, are of greater importance.

The authors begin by observing that most obligations of international law are still regarded as ‘based’ on State consent. There are good reasons for this, especially from a democratic legitimacy perspective. Still, the principle of State consent, even in its qualified version of ‘democratic State’ consent, suffers from important shortcomings that call for correctives. The chapter starts by accounting for the democratic value of State consent in International Organizations (hereafter IOs) before addressing some of its democratic deficits. It then articulates several institutional proposals to correct or, at least, complement the role of equal State consent in the institution, the operation and the control of IOs. The authors develop a non-ideal normative argument for the latter’s political re-institution. That re-institution has to start with the replacement of the principle of equal State consent by that of equal public participation in IOs: this does not only avoid reducing State consent in IOs to State veto or refusal rights, but it also extends the personal scope of those participatory rights to other non-State public institutions.

Social Justice Education (SJE) has become the defining orientation of many educators and educational researchers, but is not without its detractors. Because of its overt political investments, SJE has been accused of brainwashing students and violating the terms of democratic legitimacy. In this chapter, I offer a philosophical defense of some SJE. Using Canada as an example and comprehensive liberalism as a framework, I argue that many practices that we wish to protect under the banner of SJE can be defended by appeal to the foundational values that are common to liberal democracies and find expression in contemporary legislation. I suggest five criteria for distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of political education, allowing that not all self-proclaimed SJE will be defensible, and some less progressive education will be. I conclude by anticipating two objections to this strategy.

When we use the term “amendment,” we are analogizing changes that happen outside the four corners of the text to the those that happen within it – and we know that the inside, textual ones happen through specified procedures that have a democratic component. The amendment idea thus suggests democratically legitimate change – a change carried out by the proper procedures, in recognizable ways. Moreover, the term “amendment” generally connotes legitimacy – not just a change, but a change made according to the rules and one that leaves the basic endeavor of democratic constitutionalism in place. If Congress or the president simply began violating the constitution, for instance, few would reach for the word “amendment” to describe what was happening. The idea of amendment also evokes something persistent and distinct from the constant tussle and fluctuations that characterizes ordinary politics. The author therefore proposes that when we talk about amending America’s unwritten Constitution, we are not typically thinking about evolution in our practices and understandings, but are trying to describe a special set of durable changes that we ought to regard as democratically legitimate.

This chapter outlines the structural diversity of public speech that democratic government requires, and the claim that democracy entails positive freedom of communication, not only a negative freedom or liberty. The state has obligations to support communicative freedom; both positive and negative dimensions of free speech need protection for democracy to have substantial communicative legitimacy. This book, often using historical comparative material, examines speech and varied forms of democracy; what it would mean for society to have a voice, formulate judgments and make claims of government that are heard; and free speech law’s role in the voice, judgments and claims. The chapter explains terminology, challenges in the approach and sources used: media studies, human rights, political theory and legal writing and case law. Further possible sources are considered, including analyses based on communication rights and republican freedom. The book is not an exegesis of any one legal system but explores ideas and techniques relevant to positive dimensions of free speech. The aim is show how law should treat positive free speech and raise questions for democratic systems.

This chapter examines the outcomes and limitations of co-creation. Promotors of co-creation are sometimes satisfied with having stimulated civic voluntarism and created processes that are gratifying for the participants, but it is also paramount to consider the collective impact of co-creation on societal problems and challenges. A systematic literature review reveals that while the drivers and dynamics of co-creation have been the subject of numerous studies, the outcomes of co-creation have received scant attention. To compensate for this neglect, this chapter aims to explain what kinds of outcomes co-creation may produce. Since co-creation is intrinsically linked to value production, we discuss the outcomes of co-creation in terms of public value outcomes. This discussion is balanced against a consideration of some of the obvious problems and limitations associated with collaborative processes of co-creation.

Making property law means more than identifying a legitimate and substantively appealing conception of property. It also requires answering three further (and somewhat related) questions. First, what are the appropriate institution(s) for creating, interpreting, and developing property law (the institutional question)? Second, to what extent can a legal system that embraces the liberal conception of property also comply with the rule of law? Third, what are the limits (if any) of the authority of property law’s architects?

In most legal systems, courts perform two basic tasks: they resolve disputes in accordance with the law, and they formulate general rules to interpret, implement and enrich the existing body of law. Arbitration, in contrast, is not designed to contribute much to the lawmaking process by way of precedents. Its main function is dispute-resolution. The shortcomings of arbitration in jurisprudential terms are not problematic, in so far as courts are in a position to decide a sufficient number and variety of cases, in order to produce the pertinent case law. Accordingly, the high degree of political independence that arbitrators exhibit, when compared to courts, is not objectionable, given the limited part they play in the generation of norms.

Orchestration is a soft mode of governance, in which a ‘governor’ enlists the voluntary cooperation of intermediary actors to carry out governance functions that further the governor’s goals. Environmental issues figured prominently in the origin of the orchestration concept, and orchestration has since played a significant role in earth system governance research on architecture and agency. This chapter summarizes key empirical findings of this research, especially on sustainable development and climate change. It also identifies contributions of earth system governance research to orchestration theory: for example, concerning the conditions for successful orchestration, the role of orchestration platforms and orchestration’s role in institutional complexity. The chapter then engages with critiques and normative concerns, particularly relating to power, accountability and legitimacy. The chapter concludes with thoughts on an orchestration research agenda that can support the transformative goals of the new earth system governance science plan.

We examine the debate around the creation, in the near term, of a World Parliamentary Assembly (WPA), a body intended to enhance the democratic character of the UN. Representing the interests of the global citizenry, a WPA could bring fresh perspectives on a broad array of unresolved global problems and become an effective catalyst for advancing processes of reform and transformation at the United Nations itself, playing a role in reinforcing democratic tendencies in the world, and fostering a new planetary ethos of an interdependent global community. Taking the evolution of the European Parliament as a model, several pathways to the setting up of a WPA are discussed, arguing that it would not be essential to have the consent of all states to get it launched. In time, as the WPA gained democratic legitimacy, it could be integrated into the international constitutional order, attached as an advisory body to the General Assembly. If UN Charter amendments enabling a system of weighted voting in the General Assembly are a longer-term goal, a WPA with extensive advisory powers would be a sensible preparatory step for the eventual emergence of a General Assembly with legislative powers.