Democracy and Dissent: The Challenge of International Rule Making (repost)

Frank Vibert examines the fundamental issues involved in attempts to rethink international institutions and their rule making procedures. He analyses the basic problems with the existing system and the main approaches to its reform.

The book repudiates the idea that there are any simple institutional 'fixes' for current problems, such as relying on the G20 to coordinate global rule making, and also rejects more ambitious attempts to prescribe new general organizing principles for world governance. It calls instead for specific remedies for specific problems. The author recommends new procedures for all international rule making, so that both expert groups and governments are subject to much stronger external checks on what they do.

Democracy and Dissent will be essential reading for both academics and postgraduate students of risk management and regulation in economics, international relations, international business, political science and international law for the discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of expert rulemaking groups and their procedures. Practitioners in international organisations, NGOs and domestic regulatory bodies will also find this timely resource invaluable. The book opens up new areas for empirical investigation and in the discussion of theory.

Contents: Introduction; 1. 'How False were our Postulates'; 2. Managing Strain – Styles of International Rule Making; 3. Analytic Frameworks; 4. The Choice of Venue; 5. The Choice of Instruments; 6. The Sources of Failure; 7. Diagnosing the Democratic Deficit; 8. Challenge Systems and the Rule Makers; 9. Dissonance and Democracy; 10. Conclusions; Annex A: List of Acronyms; Annex B: Transaction Costs and Styles of Organising; Annex C: Definitions of Selected Cognitive Terms; Bibliography; Index