The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a much cited but little studied institution, and its role in international governance is poorly understood. Nevertheless, the OECD plays an important role in the emerging structure of global governance. Focusing upon the OECD's core functions, contributors to this volume trace the OECD's history, structure, and role in international governance as well as its function as a "policy ideas generator" and purveyor of "best practices" in a variety of economic and social policy domains.

When we speak of global governance today, we no longer mean simply state-to-state diplomacy, international treaties, or intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. Alongside these ‘traditional' elements of global politics are a host of new institutions ranging from global networks of governmental officials, to private codes of conduct for corporations, to action-oriented partnerships of NGOs, governments, corporations, and other actors. These innovative mechanisms offer intriguing solutions to pressing transnational challenges as diverse as climate change, financial governance, workers' rights, and public health. But they also raise new questions about the effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational governance. An expanding body of scholarship has sought to identify and assess these new forms of governance, but this young body of work has lacked a sense of the larger picture. This volume seeks to fill that need by presenting a comprehensive overview of new forms of transnational governance. This resource is essential for those who want to explain why transborder governance has changed and to understand what implications these changes have for global politics.

As globalization continues to spread and evolve, so nation-states attempt to govern financialization, tax evasion, corruption, terrorism, civil and military conflicts and environmental dangers, social polarization and the complexities in human rights implementation, by institutional and transnational means. This volume discusses these issues from different legal perspectives and highlights the challenges of governing human activity in an age of remarkable interconnectedness. Covering a broad range of policy areas and analysis of emerging forms of governance from liberal to critical and Marxist, the chapters are legal in their approach and form an important contribution to the growing study of emergent forms of authority, coordination and power developing in response to the challenges presented by some of the key contemporary governance issues in the first half of the twenty-first century.

Pollution, resource depletion, habitat management, and climate change are all issues that necessarily transcend national boundaries. Accordingly, they and other environmental concerns have been a particular focus for international organizations from before the First World War to the present day. This volume is the first to comprehensively explore the environmental activities of professional communities, NGOs, regional bodies, the United Nations, and other international organizations during the twentieth century. It follows their efforts to shape debates about environmental degradation, develop binding intergovernmental commitments, and—following the seminal 1972 Conference on the Human Environment—implement and enforce actual international policies.

This book explores the history of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its place within capitalist development. Since 1948, the OECD and its forerunner, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) worked on almost every subject of interest to national governments ranging from economic growth to education (PISA rankings), statistics, to the environment. With varying success the OEEC/OECD thus played a key role as a warden of the West and of capitalist development. However, it has remained one of the least understood international organizations. Bringing together a number of case studies by scholars from around the world, this first source-based volume on the history of the OEEC/OECD in global governance offers not only a new understanding of the Organization’s key areas of activities, but also its multiple relations to member states, other international organizations, and private networks. The volume thus critically re-examines postwar international history, most importantly decolonization and the Cold War, through the prism of one international organization in its various contexts.

Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.

This comprehensive Companion analyses the relevance of the OECD as a transnational policy maker, idea broker and standard setter. Bringing together diverse disciplines and methodologies, it establishes the influence of the OECD on modern understandings of governance.

This book represents a set of critical analyses of educational reforms where issues of transnational governance are of vital concern. It focuses on different aspects of, and practices in educational reform-making, and in particular on governing techniques and the working of new agencies such as supranational and multinational organizations. In addition, the book examines contemporary issues of immigration/immigrants in the politics of schooling, by reflecting on matters of migration, and problematizing how concepts such as exclusion and abjection make the migrants appear “failed”, “insufficient” and even “dangerous”. The book provides theoretical insights into critical relations between knowledge and power, governance and governmentality, and notions concerning educational systems, as well as how these are compared. The central themes of the book are models for organizing and reflecting on transnationalization and educational reforms. In its discussion of those themes, the focus lies on changing conceptions of education and the educational system; on how school or teacher education is adapting to discourses of effectiveness and efficiency; and on their transformation according to standardized templates. Such changing conceptions define the meanings of education and educational progress; they are important for the identification and analysis of educational knowledge, and for critical discourses on education in society.

This book analyses the role of the OECD in diffusing policy innovations. Through the study of regulatory impact analysis (RIA), it shows how transnational networks affect national policy process. De Francesco's analytical framework encompasses the institutional features as well as internal and international determinants of a policy innovation such as RIA. Drawing on original data sets, three empirical analyses assess to what extent government decisions to adopt, implement, and evaluate RIA were driven by the OECD. Transnational Policy Innovation argues that concepts of policy innovation diffusion provide a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of transnational governance. It shows that the OECD has been successful in framing and diffusing a template of evidence-based decision making. However, downplaying RIA as an instrument of political control has limited the influence of the OECD's peer review and comparative indicators on the administrative and institutional setting.

This volume considers novel emerging issues in international economic law, as well as new methodological approaches to more familiar topics. It brings together a diverse range of contributors from five continents, who share invaluable perspectives on a wide range of issues in international economic governance. In doing so, this volume delves deeply into some of the most challenging emerging areas in international economic law, approaching them from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together legal, economic, and political analysis. Intended for academics and practitioners at all stages of their careers, many of the areas considered in this volume are either entirely new or are being revisited after periods of dormancy. It is our hope that these contributions will yield fresh insights into these new and “classic” areas of IEL. We consider diversity and inclusivity foundational values in IEL. The wealth of ideas showcased in this volume present us with an opportunity to appreciate different facets of originality and rigour in legal academic writing, further highlighting the range of methodological and stylistic preferences of emerging legal scholars in IEL. In June 2022, forty emerging international economic law scholars were selected to present their papers at PEPA/SIEL, where they received feedback from senior members of the SIEL community and beyond. The discussions were lively, stimulating and enriching, leading the editors of this volume to propose putting a selection of the papers into a published book.