Durkee: The Pledging World Order

Melissa (MJ) Durkee (Univ. of Georgia - Law) has posted The Pledging World Order (Yale Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

There is an emerging world order characterized by unilateral pledges within a legal or “legal-ish” architecture of commitments. The pledging world order has emerged in the international legal response to climate change as well as diverse sites that cross the public-private divide and blur the lines between them. Pledging as a legal technology is so far distinctly underwhelming. Pledging platforms facilitate incremental, non-disruptive action and do not remedy global justice problems. As a world order, pledging erodes distinctions between public and private, multilateralism and localism, law and not-law, and progress and stasis. The pledging order is both a symptom of and a contributor to the dismantling of the Westphalian and postwar orders. Nevertheless, the pledging approach may improve legitimacy and be the best available method to respond to important global commons problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, orbital debris, and other emerging issues.

This article makes three principal contributions: First, it identifies pledging as a treaty design choice and contrasts it with other forms of international lawmaking. Second, it casts pledging as a trans-regime, trans-substantive ordering device that appears inside and outside of law, in public and private sites, and at all levels of organization. Third, it identifies features of the world order that pledging reflects. Specifically, the pledging world order privileges function over status, departs from the top-down methods of deep cooperation common to the postwar legal order, and embraces a form of coordinated autonomy. Reformers might make design choices to improve this order, try to reclaim features of older orders, or reject both paths and turn to something new.