Governance across Borders

Transnational Fields and Transversal Themes

Contemporary globalization has made economic, social and political developments increasingly interdependent across the world, yet local and national actors and processes still matter to how globalization unfolds. This raises important questions about how private, civil society and state actors from different locales, nations and regions engage in governance efforts across borders. What is global and what is local in contemporary capitalism? How can we regulate global markets, multinational companies and cross-border production? Who has access to regulatory knowledge? What is considered as relevant expertise in transnational governance? The book addresses these and similar questions, which all too evidently escape an analysis constrained by national borders and thematic boundaries, through a specific focus on transnational institution-building. An analysis of transnational governance fields as diverse as finance and accounting, labor and the environment, copyright and public domain, and microfinance and development reveals how social and political struggles between actors with different culturally and institutionally shaped perceptions, aims and strategies influence the direction and outcomes of transnational institution-building. They likewise highlight the importance of interactions between transnational rules and local practices, pointing to the fact that in the end it is the implementation on the ground which matters for effective transnational institution-building. Assembling the best contributions by 14 scholars from Europe, the USA and India, published on the research blog governance across borders, the book invites readers to browse and delve deeper into a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of cross-border regulation in the making.