Loading...
The Pledging World Order
Durkee, Melissa J.
Durkee, Melissa J.
Collections
Files
Loading...
YJIL 48_1.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.98 MB
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 materialized in the international legal response to climate change and
in other diverse sites. It crosses and blurs the public-private divide. It erodes
distinctions between multilateralism and localism, law and not-law, and progress
and stasis. It is both a symptom of and a contributor to the dismantling of the
Westphalian and postwar orders. Its report card is mixed: While pledging can be
highly ineffective as a legal technology, the pledging world order may respond
to some legitimacy concerns that attach to earlier orders. And this may 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 a variety of standard
forms of international lawmaking. Second, it casts pledging as a trans-regime,
trans-substantive ordering device that appears both 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.