Carole Anne Senit

In the last decade, debates about isolationism and deglobalization have pervaded politics at the level of the nation-state and found an important echo among national publics. Donald Trump’s slogan ‘America First’ in the United Sates, the success of the Leave arguments abundantly relayed by the United Kingdom Independence Party prior to the Brexit referendum, or the breakthrough of the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections, all show that populist, nationalistic ideologies and parties are thriving. A common argument, levelled consistently by the representatives of these parties, is that globalization undercuts their country’s sovereignty. Whether or not we adhere to the argument that globalization dilutes national authority and legitimacy, the fact remains that the partial transfer of power into global forms of governance have created democratic deficits whereby policymaking is increasingly conducted beyond the accountability and oversight of national publics.

In order to increase the democratic legitimacy of global policymaking, international institutions have created participatory mechanisms for citizens or their representatives to express their views and preferences on policy issues that affect them or for which they hold a stake. This participatory turn in the management of global affairs finds its most accurate expression in the sustainability domain, which has been a laboratory for experimenting with face-to-face or virtual, direct or representative, consultative or deliberative mechanisms to increase the participation of citizens or their representatives in policymaking. By providing a vehicle for reconnecting global institutions with the citizens of nation-states, participatory mechanisms that include citizens or their representatives in intergovernmental policymaking could therefore palliate the democratic deficit and legitimacy crisis of global governance.

However, whether global participatory mechanisms fulfill this promise is a subject of debate for two main reasons. The first one questions the democratizing potential of the actors of civil society that represent the interests of all the citizens affected by a collective decision in global governance. The second one is skeptical about the democratic legitimacy of participatory mechanisms, in particular regarding their inclusiveness, their influence on intergovernmental policymaking, and, assuming they do have influence, their ability to increase the quality of policy outputs.

Relying on a diverse set of methods including statistical analysis, document analysis, process tracing, discourse analysis, and interviews, the PhD contributes to the academic debate of whether and to what extent the mechanisms for the participation of civil society in intergovernmental policymaking on sustainable development issues make the existing global system more democratic. After reviewing the scholarship on global democracy in Chapter 1, including the contributions of different theories and their limitations, the dissertation introduces in Chapter 2 the empirical and methodological framework for the research. Specifically, it focuses on three participatory mechanisms conducted during the negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): the Rio+20 Sustainable Development Dialogues, the civil society Hearings of the Open Working Group on SDGs, and the MYWorld Survey. Then, in subsequent chapters, the dissertation answers to the research question and unfolds its argumentation in four parts.

First, the PhD dissertation assesses in Chapter 3 the contribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the democratization of global politics. ICT are increasingly used to engage civil society in intergovernmental negotiations on sustainable development and are often considered as a silver bullet to the democratic legitimacy deficit that pervades traditional mechanisms for civil society representation, and ultimately, global policymaking. The Internet, in particular, appears to be an ideal channel to provide civil society with direct access to intergovernmental policymaking, given its character as a low-cost horizontal means of communication that transcends barriers of space and time. However, many observers have contested the benefits of ICT for democratization on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Yet no study had been performed at the international level. Taking the numerous online Dialogues of the Rio+20 Conference as a case study, the dissertation demonstrates that despite its promise, ICT reinforce rather than reverse embedded participatory inequalities in a global context. Specifically, the use of the Internet may reinforce exclusion and favor the participation of the most powerful and well-organized civil society organizations based in developed countries over that of a broader and unspecialized public. In addition, ICT fail to substantially increase transparency and accountability in intergovernmental negotiations on sustainable development issues. In particular, although Internet use allows for greater access to and sharing of substantive information, the diversity from which this information is provided remains limited and may eventually constrain the exchange of diverse and competing arguments, which is however deemed necessary to foster democratization. Besides, by anonymizing interactions, Internet use might have even reduced the capacity of civil society participants to hold governments and international organizations accountable concerning the input they provided. This prevents, in turn, a meaningful participation of civil society in intergovernmental negotiations.

Second, looking comparatively at the Rio Dialogues, the OWG Hearings, and the MYWorld Survey, the dissertation assesses in Chapter 4 the democratic legitimacy of civil society consultations formally commissioned within the framework of the negotiations on the SDGs. While such consultations are often uncritically accepted as a way to strengthen democratic safeguards in intergovernmental policymaking, their lack of inclusiveness and limited capacity to strengthen accountability between citizens, international institutions, and governments ultimately hinder their democratizing potential. Additionally, the dissertation investigates the causes of this phenomenon by exploring the relationships between the design of consultations and their democratic legitimacy. It unveils that such relationships are sometimes unexpected. Extensive material resources and open access conditions have not systematically enhanced the legitimacy of the studied consultations, as exemplified in the Rio Dialogues and the OWG Hearings. Conversely, the case of the MYWorld Survey has shown that it is possible to overcome resource constraints and enhance inclusiveness when the organizers of the consultation develop partnerships with grassroots actors from civil society and the public and private sectors, and delegate its rollout from global policymaking centers to national and local communities, prioritizing the voices of the most marginalized.

Third, the dissertation analyzes the influence of civil society participation on the negotiations on the SDGs. Chapter 5 pictures an overall moderate impact of civil society participation. Although civil society interventions were influential in preventing some issues from being dropped from the negotiations and in developing a culture of participation in global policymaking on sustainable development, they had only a marginal effect on issue-framing, on shifting the positions of governments, and on the final agreement. The formulation of Goal 10 on reducing inequalities exemplifies such limited influence. Despite many interventions, civil society failed to move away the framing of income inequality as a matter of reducing both poverty and extreme wealth. Similarly, although civil society succeeded in ensuring the existence of the inequality goal in the final agreement, their interventions failed at securing ambitious targets within this goal. Although confirming previous research on civil society influence in intergovernmental policymaking, the dissertation still provides an original argument to explain influence by focusing on the role of the participatory space. Acknowledging that civil society influence results from a combination of interventions within many participatory spaces, the dissertation nonetheless demonstrates that civil society is more likely to influence within informal and exclusive participatory spaces, and when these spaces are provided early in the negotiations, with several iterations throughout the policymaking process. This ultimately questions the democratizing potential of civil society participation in intergovernmental policymaking, as the actors with the capacities to engage repeatedly and informally with the negotiators are seldom those that are most representative of global civil society. Also, this contradicts the initial assumption of this research, according to which governments were expected to be more responsive to civil society demands when these reflect the preferences of a broad and representative sample of actors. In the end, ten million responses in the MYWorld Survey have had far less impact on the negotiations than the long-term lobbying of a handful of professionalized civil society representatives based in New York and well-acquainted with the political dynamics of intergovernmental negotiations at the UN.

Finally, recognizing that the participatory mechanisms set up by international institutions and governments have fallen short of answering to academic and empirical demands for global democratization, the dissertation examines in Chapter 6 discursive representation as a way to advance democracy in a global context and overcome the shortcomings of actor-based representation. Deliberative democrats indeed argue that discursive representation can redeem the promise of global democracy when the participation or representation of all affected by a collective decision is infeasible. As discourses may foster cross-constituency coalitions, discursive representation has therefore the potential to advance inclusiveness through ideas and concepts instead of actors, and further global democratization. Chapter 6 thus focuses on mapping the different discourses on sustainability conveyed during the elaboration of the SDGs and explores the extent to which each of these discourses were represented in the negotiations and by whom. It reveals that in the shaping of the SDGs, exclusiveness in participation has precisely led to similar imbalances in discursive representation: the negotiations on the SDGs ultimately failed to represent a civil society – and popular – discourse that radically departs from the status quo. Specifically, the negotiations mainly conveyed a progressive sustainability discourse, according to which development is essentially growth-based and nature is external to human societies and economies, and which calls for a reorientation of existing institutions and norms to foster equity between developed and developing countries, yet with limited recognition of the importance of the participation from a broader range of actors. This chapter further shows that discourses remain strongly tied to the actors that deliver them. In other words, the potential of the negotiations to foster cross-constituency coalitions to channel the ideas and concepts of the actors that are underrepresented in policymaking has not materialized, thus indicating the limits of discursive representation for democratization above the nation-state.

The dissertation concludes in Chapter 7. While reflecting on the results, it first considers how the studied recent empirical developments in civil society participation have contributed to theoretical innovations in the scholarly work on global democracy. Each existing theory defines its own normative pathway to advance democratization at global level, with varying loci and scopes of change. Specifically, democratic intergovernmentalists argue that global democracy stems from the democratization of the nation-states. Deliberative and radical democrats claim that global democratization is to be induced in the transnational public sphere, and cosmopolitans and the advocates of a world government claim that democratization encompasses the creation of formal global institutions. This dissertation, however, has shown that global democracy cannot emerge from siloed proposals. All agents (i.e. the citizens, institutionalized civil society actors, the private sector, governments, and international organizations) and all spaces (i.e. informal, formal, at local, subnational, national, regional, and international levels) of governance need to organize around, or be bound by, democratic values for inducing global democratization. This research particularly focused on the values of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, influence, and discursive representation in global policymaking and documented how different civil society participatory spaces help induce (or undercut) these democratic principles. Besides, by conceptualizing global democracy into different democratic values to be pursued in many loci by a myriad of agents, the dissertation improves our understanding of how these values relate to one another, and the extent to which they nurture each other, or conflict with one another in different contexts. In the latter case, the dissertation claims that, if provided with the appropriate socioeconomic preconditions for participation and democratic skills, citizens have the potential to solve some of these conflicts and catalyze global democratization.

The conclusion also advances a set of recommendations that aim to guide the future action of practitioners in strengthening democratic safeguards in global policymaking. First, while acknowledging that the extent to which a civil society participatory mechanism is inclusive and influential is highly context-dependent, the dissertation draws out broad lessons to guide policymakers through the choices they must make when designing a mechanism for civil society participation at global level. These include, inter alia: developing clear objectives for the participatory process and formally binding it to the negotiations; combining face-to-face representative participation in global negotiating hubs with face-to-face deliberative forums involving citizens at local level, and online participation; involving civil society in the design and dissemination of a global participatory mechanism at national and local levels; allocating adequate and timely resources to participants; and encouraging the participation of government representatives to the participatory process. Second, despite their limitations, civil society actors should still engage in global participatory mechanisms. Indeed, the dissertation shows that these mechanisms have substantial effects, other than their potential direct impact on the negotiations and the substance of global norms and agreements, that contribute to build the basis for a more vibrant democratic life, both inside and outside decision-making centers, at global and national levels. Specifically, global participatory mechanisms trigger interaction, learning and mutual understanding among civil society actors. They also build the democratic skills of civil society participants, by improving their understanding of the United Nations system and the procedural rules framing the negotiations and civil society participation on the one hand, and on the other hand by raising awareness about the sustainable development issues addressed in the negotiations. As they increase citizens’ procedural and substantive knowledge, global participatory mechanisms ultimately empower them to take an active role in the national and local implementation of global norms and agreements. The dissertation specifically draws on the example of the MYWorld Survey, which has been used as an informative tool to raise awareness on the SDGs and to foster discussion on the actions participants could undertake – or ask their national government or local authorities to undertake – to address the issues they marked as their priorities in the survey.

Finally, the dissertation considers some of the pathways for future research in global democratic theory and practice. These include, for instance, studying what could be the role of citizens in the implementation of global norms and agreements on sustainability in an age of digitalization. More specifically, this encompasses documenting the extent to which citizen-generated data through ICT could foster the legitimacy of global norms and the accountability of international institutions. Because monitoring an agenda as broad as the SDGs cannot only be carried out by national governments and national statistics offices, data provision through ICT offers an opportunity for enhancing the participation of citizens in global governance. In addition, the dissertation proposes that future IR and political science research in global democracy engages with psychologists, behavioral economists, and researchers from the Information Technology community to increase our understanding of the social-psychological factors explaining the act of participation, and to assess how computer science tools could be harnessed for citizen participation in global policymaking. Developing these tools through research to enable a meaningful and constructive participation of citizens in global policymaking and implementation seems all the more important in the contemporary era. In a time when untrue – not post-truth – politics are gaining ground and rely on ICT to disseminate erroneous – not alternative – facts, the academic community needs today more than ever before to engage in transdisciplinary research and in its dissemination to policy practice to contribute to building citizens’ democratic skills and critical thinking, without which any effort to safeguard democracy at national level and advance global democratization will be in vain.