Strategy Options of International Governance: NGOs and Good Governance

The project models and explores the legitimacy of NGOs and their potential contribution to the good governance of global politics (as unfolding within the United Nations system). Thus, one of the three models of transnational order developed within the project "Strategy Options of International Governance" – a system of transnational network governance – is investigated more thoroughly from a normative point of view. A model of "discursive global governance" which draws on conceptions of deliberation and discursive democracy is designed to model legitimate global governance. From this point of view, NGOs and their transnational networks ideally induce 1) a communicative political process within different UN policy regimes and 2) a variety of interconnected political spaces linking global politics and its potential societal adressees. Empirical research focuses on a transnational women's network that has emerged around the principle "women's rights are human rights". The case study investigates the contribution of the feminist human rights discourse and of the women’s network advocating it to the formation of a horizontally and vertically integrated political space with global scope. This can be considered an important prerequisite for discursive global governance.