Compromises of embedded knowledge: Standards, codes, and technical authority in global governance

ALMOST TWO DECADES AGO, in a remarkably influential and insightful contribution to a collection of articles on international regimes, John Ruggie (1982) managed to capture key conceptual and practical features of global governance of that period through his development of the concept of "embedded liberalism." The concept was powerful not only in the way it highlighted the complementarity of domestic protections for citizens and international economic liberalization, but also in how it linked this arrangement to an argument regarding the importance of considering social purpose together with power in analyzing governance internationally. In doing this, Ruggie enhanced our sensitivity to the constitutive impact of norms in a way that would later make him a founding figure on the constructivist side of the main bifurcation of the field of international relations today (Ruggie 1998a). This chapter argues that while Ruggie's meta-theoretical arguments remain as relevant today as they were twenty years ago, the practical and empirical correlates of these arguments are very different. Today, as before, market interactions need to be embedded in a set of institutional arrangements that stabilize them and that offset their negative effects to a degree sufficient to render them acceptable to those actors who might otherwise destroy them through political means. In this respect, the constructivist insistence on the way in which institutions and norms constitute and enable rationalistic interactions continues to be crucially important. However, in contrast to the earlier period, this process of "embedding" and of "compromise" increasingly takes place in globalized knowledge networks (Sinclair 2000)1 rather than territorial states. In this process, standards, codes, and technical authority become more important elements of embedded compromises than they were in the period about which Ruggie was writing. This argument challenges three prevailing perspectives on the character of contemporary global governance. First, it challenges state-centric perspectives, including Ruggie's 1982 concept of the compromise of embedded liberalism, that see bargains or norms developed among competing territorial states as the primary source of global order. Ruggie's contribution to this book, in highlighting the importance of non-state actors, moves in a similar direction to the present chapter. Second, it challenges liberal economic perspectives that see fluid market forces or atomized rationalistic actors as undermining or bypassing states and independently shaping the development of the global political economy. Third, it challenges perspectives that see powerful states and market actors as uncompromisingly shaping a globalized world without regard for the need to resolve conflicting preferences, not just among powerful actors but between those actors and others with less power as well. Any effort to assess theoretical claims about something as big as global governance inevitably runs up against methodological difficulties. One difficulty is that if an emerging trend exists, it may be taking place among traditional arrangements. Thus, it is easy for skeptics to point to the persistence of those arrangements as evidence of their greater importance. A second difficulty is that subtle changes in international arrangements, such as increased linkages among national representatives in international discussions, may lead to significant changes in the relationship of states to other institutions even if these are not reflected in the formal and more easily observable features of these arrangements, such as founding treaties or articles of agreement. Nevertheless, some supporting or contrary evidence with respect to the above argument should be possible to find through an examination of particular arrangements that are likely to be emblematic of the relationships in question. This chapter starts, then, with a conceptual discussion in which I develop and elaborate the reasons behind the assertion that "embedding" and "compromise" increasingly occur in globalized knowledge networks. It then turns to an examination of particular arrangements in finance and trade and how these have changed since the period to which Ruggie applied the label embedded liberalism. © 2007 State University of New York. All rights reserved.