Towards a Standard of Legitimacy for Global Governance Institutions

This chapter discusses a number of concrete potential criteria for the legitimacy of global governance institutions. With regard to criteria relating to policy outputs, it argues that such criteria usually do not hold for every kind of global governance institution. With regard to decision-making, a number of different potential procedures are discussed: independent electoral procedures, the participation of representatives of civil society organisations in informal democratic procedures, and procedures that give states the central role in decision-making. I argue that all of these decision-making procedures suffer from important limitations and shortcomings. Combining different forms of decision-making can sometimes help to compensate for the deficits of each individual form. But still, no combination of criteria related to policy outputs and these different forms of decision-making procedures can be a suitable standard for the legitimacy of every kind of global governance institution. Criteria of legitimacy have to be specific to the institution in question. The concept of legitimacy as the right to function opens up the conceptual space to accommodate this insight. If the right ascribed to an institution by judging it to be legitimate depends on its function, this suggests that legitimacy criteria for institutions with different functions will usually not be the same.