Barnett and Finnemore also study three salient features of the role of “expert authority” in IOs, namely its role in authorizing IOs to define and categorize the social world, its role in helping IOs to get other actors, including states, to defer to them through a combination of coercion and consent, and its role in generating the forms of power that lend them status as autonomous actors. They argue and demonstrate empirically that, through expert knowledge and authority, IOs exercise power to regulate the social world by changing the incentives of state and non-state actors. Moreover, IOs can use their power to establish and shape social relations by creating new interests, actors, and social activities. In this way, they “help create social reality,” and thereby “help determine the kind of world that is going to be governed.” This entails the authority to decide, for example, “not only who is in violation of human rights, but what human rights are.”

To further illustrate this point, Barnett and Finnemore provide case studies of how the IMF, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and the UN Secretariat have employed IO authorities as experts to fix social meanings, constitute the social world so that IOs can act upon it, and act as agents autonomous of states. But this same authority to constitute and regulate the world can generate pathological behavior that is quite inconsistent with their primary missions. They detail in their work how this definitional and rule-making authority of IOs, for example, led to IMF decisions that may have actually made financial crises in developing countries worse, led the UNHCR to repatriate various refugees at severe risk to their personal safety, and led the UN Secretariat to establish “safe havens” for ethnic minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina that turned out to be killing zones for “ethnic cleansers” due to UN-defined rules of engagement.

Private Authority in Global Governance

In the contemporary international system, particularly since the end of the Cold War, we have seen the ascendancy of private actors and transnational market forces with the globalization of liberalism. The sovereign state has yielded, and continues to yield, its once sovereign domains to fundamentally private actors, and new non-state private actors have arisen to challenge the ascendancy of private market actors. I have explored this process with my co-author and co-editor Thomas Biersteker of Brown University, as well as numerous colleagues interested in the devolution of state authority to private actors and its transmission into private authority in our recent study, The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance. In the study, resulting from a workshop held at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, we discovered that the boundaries of public authority are being challenged by at least three major forms of emerging private authority, which Biersteker and I call “market authority,” “moral authority,” and “illicit authority.” I will briefly discuss the social and economic bases of each form of authority and provide examples that arose in our study.

Market Authority: Private International Regimes

We found that what we refer to as the “market authority” of private actors stems from two dominant sources. The first regards the capacity to successfully establish manufacturing, productive, regulatory, and reporting standards that become recognized by others and that are subsequently adhered to by others. We call this “institutional market authority.” The second form regards the increasing acceptance by people, particularly in advanced industrialized countries, of market based decision-making over politically based decision-making, often both on efficiency and normative grounds. We refer to this as “normative market authority.”

Examples of institutional market authority include the setting of Open Source Initiative standards and the myriad of standards and regulatory environments defined by corporate non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and networks of transnational corporations. They also include what political scientists A. Claire Cutler, Tony Porter, and Virginia Haufler, in their book Private Authority and International Affairs, call “private international regimes,” which consist of a private network of global governance associations and practices. The actors and practices that comprise these private regimes can include a bewilderingly complex array of informal industry norms and practices, coordination service firms, production alliances and subcontractor relationships, cartels, and business associations.

Cutler develops this concept considerably in her recent book, Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global Political Economy. Cutler argues that the system of global governance is undergoing a fundamental transformation with the creation of a new private transnational legal order that has historical antecedents in prior international systems. Terming this new order “the law merchant,” she observes three dominant trends that she suggests are responsible for the ongoing transformation, namely an increase in the juridification of international social life, an increase in heterogeneity among forms of governance, and an increase in the significance of governance in the private sphere.

As a consequence of these processes, Cutler argues that we are witnessing three transformations. First, the welfare state is being replaced by the “competition state” as the globalization of liberalism induces states to adjust to a neo-liberal global environment. Second, the world is moving from national to transnational patterns of capital accumulation characterized by a third transformation. This third transformation, in turn, is the emerging dominance of “flexible accumulation” constituted by a combination of capital mobility and a high degree of flexibility in transnational production arrangements. The new “law merchant” abets these transformations, according to Cutler, by generating publicly binding sources of private international commercial law through networks of private actors.

Moral Authority: NGOs

This form of private authority may also be found in the authority that some IOs exercise. Biersteker and I, along with our colleagues, have found three subdivisions of “moral authority” in the forms of international authority exercised by private actors. First is the capacity to provide expertise that is also developed in Barnett and Finnemore’s work on IOs. We call this the authority of “authorship.” A second form of moral authority we observed in private actors is also found in Barnett and Finnemore’s work on IOs, in different terms. This is the authority adhering to non-state actors such as NGOs that, per the example provided in our study by Professors Ronnie Lipschutz and Cathleen Fogel, engage in “eco-labeling” and certify that products were produced in an environmentally friendly or sustainable fashion, by virtue of their claim to be neutral, or non-self-interested, actors. We refer to this as the authority of the “referee.”