Bulletin n. 2-3/2012 | ||
October 2012-February 2013 | ||
Catia Gregoratti |
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Transnational Partnerships: What Democracy? Whose Justice? | ||
in Global Society , Vol. 26, Issue 4, , 2012 , 515-534 | ||
This article establishes that transnational partnerships should no longer be conceived as peripheral mechanisms of global governance. They have now become increasingly embedded in the multilateral system and a central component in the architecture of global governance. The intellectual progenitors of the partnership discourse have commonly justified governance by partnering as a means to close democratic deficits in global governance. Deliberative conceptualisations, on the other hand, view in the practice of partnering the emergence of a transnational public sphere populated by equal deliberative agents. This article argues that the ideas of democracy and justice ingrained in liberal and deliberative arguments for partnering are at odds with the concrete workings of these mechanisms of governance, which, above all, reflect asymmetrical configurations of power. Drawing on the insights of neo-Gramscian international political economy (IPE), it suggests that partnerships can be best conceptualised as sites of contested authority and frail legitimacy. | ||