Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance: The Private-Public Policy Nexus in the Global Agora

239 Pages·2013·0.93 MB·English

by  Diane Stone (auth.)

Non-Governmental Public Action
Series Editor: Jude Howell, Professor and Director of the Centre for Civil Society,
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Non-governmental public action (NGPA) by and for disadvantaged and mar-
ginalized people has become increasingly significant over the past two decades.
This new book series is designed to make a fresh and original contribution to
the understanding of NGPA. It presents the findings of innovative and policy-
relevant research carried out by established and new scholars working in collabo-
ration with researchers across the world. The series is international in scope and
includes both theoretical and empirical work.
The series marks a departure from previous studies in this area in at least two
important respects. First, it goes beyond a singular focus on developmental
NGOs or the voluntary sector to include a range of non-governmental public
actors such as advocacy networks, campaigns and coalitions, trades unions,
peace groups, rights-based groups, cooperatives and social movements. Second,
the series is innovative in stimulating a new approach to international com-
parative research that promotes comparison of the so-called developing world
with the so-called developed world, thereby querying the conceptual utility and
relevance of categories such as North and South.
Titles include:
Barbara Bompani and Maria Frahm-Arp (editors)
DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICS FROM BELOW
Exploring Religious Spaces in the African State
Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle
Environmentalism, Resistance and Solidarity
The Politics of Friends of the Earth International
Dena Freeman (editor)
PENTECOSTALISM AND DEVELOPMENT
Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa
David Herbert
CREATING COMMUNITY COHESION
Religion, Media and Multiculturalism
Jude Howell and Jeremy Lind
COUNTER-TERRORISM, AID AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Before and After the War on Terror
Jude Howell (editor)
GLOBAL MATTERS FOR NON-GOVERNMENTAL PUBLIC ACTION
Jude Howell (editor)
NON-GOVERNMENTAL PUBLIC ACTION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Jenny Pearce (editor)
PARTICIPATION AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Tim Pringle and Simon Clarke
THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSITION
Trade Unions in Russia, China and Vietnam
Diane Stone
KNOWLEDGE ACTORS AND TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE
The Private-Public Policy Nexus in the Global Agora
Andrew Wells-Dang
CIVIL SOCIETY NETWORKS IN CHINA AND VIETNAM
Informal Pathbreakers in Health and the Environment
Thomas Yarrow
DEVELOPMENT BEYOND POLITICS
Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana
Non-Governmental Public Action Series
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–22939–6 (hardback) and
978–0–230–22940–2 (paperback)
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Knowledge Actors and
Transnational Governance
The Private–Public Policy Nexus in the
Global Agora
Diane Stone
Murdoch University, Western Australia, and University of Warwick, UK
© Diane Stone 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-02290-5
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First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-43797-9 ISBN 978-1-137-02291-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137022912
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For Richard
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations xii
Introduction 1
1 The Global Agora: Privatising Policy Processes
in Transnational Governance 15
2 Knowledge Networks/Policy Networks 37
3 Think Tank Thinking 62
4 RAPID Knowledge 85
5 Translating Foundation Ideas 107
6 Informal Diplomacy of the ASEAN-ISIS Network 130
7 Bankrolling Knowledge Networks 152
Conclusion: The Rise of Knowledge Networks and
the ‘Turn’ of Think Tanks 175
Notes 196
Appendix 200
References 202
Index 217
vii
Preface and Acknowledgements
Global Agora brings together and examines perspectives on knowledge
networks, global governance and the think tanks that have burgeoned
around the world over the last two decades. Advice, advocacy and
argumentation have become key elements in the fashioning of policy
programmes and structure of governance, especially within the rapidly
evolving institutions and networks of transnational governance.
The book is reflective of the growing salience of these actors and
agents in transnational governance. At its broadest, the book rep-
resents what I hope readers will see as an original and systematic
application of a body of emerging theory in the social and political
sciences to a set of empirical case studies. If they wished, readers
could also see it conversely as the development of my own theoretical
thinking, evolving out of a personal narrative of experience in certain
specific empirical settings. Either way, the assumption prevails that
the development of theory and empirical narrative does not evolve in
isolation from one another. As such, the arguments advanced in this
book are best understood as part of my own intellectual evolution and
the contribution that places and people have made to that process of
evolution. This Preface identifies some of the debts I have incurred in
that evolution.
The original idea for the book first emerged in August 2003, when
I was located in Singapore for six weeks while my husband Richard
Higgott was a visiting professor at the Institute of Defence and Security
Studies at the Nanyang Technological University. The Institute is now
known as the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Here, a
range of people, including Amitav Acharya, Barry Desker, Mely Cabellero
Anthony and Helen Nesadurai, as well as M. Ramesh at the Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy, were all exceptionally kind and indeed
convivial sounding-boards then and later during many other visits to
Singapore, or to Malaysia, over the following decade. The Singapore
sojourn provided me with the kernel of a case study for this volume –
the ASEAN-ISIS group of policy research institutes. A journal article on
the informal diplomacy of this network first appeared in Minerva (Stone,
2011). A heavily revised, extended and updated version is included as
Chapter 6, and permission has been given by Springer to re-produce
substantial sections of the article.
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
The ‘global agora’ idea first surfaced at Central European University’s
tenth anniversary conference in late 2000, and by January 2004 career-
changing developments happened when I took leave from the University
of Warwick to move to Budapest. The book was effectively put into stor-
age for five years. Much thinking, if little writing, was done there during
my tenure as the Marie Curie Chair and foundation Professor of Public
Policy at CEU, although the ‘agora’ concept did eventually appear in
Policy Studies Journal (Stone, 2008) with bits of this article to be reworked
in Chapter 1. Founding a new graduate programme and department was
exciting, exasperating and all consuming, but it did provide me with a
further case study for the book – on the Open Society Institute (OSI) –
CEU’s sister institution. Along the way I gained many friends, colleagues
and helpful critics of my work, including Agi Batory, Viola Zentai, Andrea
Krizsán, Liviu Matei, Heni Griecs, Zsuzsa Gabor, Valentina Dimitrova,
Ivona Malbasic, Nicole Lindstrom, Heather Elms, Eva Porras, Andy
Cartwright, Nick Sitter, Andreas Goldthau and Uwe Puetter, of course
not forgetting the late Yehuda Elkana, then Rector at CEU. In the Local
Government and Public Sector Initiative of the OSI, Adrian Ionescu, Scott
Abrams, Bob Ebel, Lisa Quinn, Kristof Varga and George Guess helped
keep the fledgling degree programme afloat as well as provided entré into
the foundation network. More recently, Heather Grabbe, Tom Carothers
and Jacek Kucharczyk have proved to be wonderful colleagues in the
Think Tank Fund. Outside of work, Karin Bryce, David Keresztes, Geoff
Bennett, Virginia Proud, Mags Kiss and Katherine Ferdinandy found for
me many other distractions in Budapest.
Coinciding with this time at CEU, my term on the Governing Body
of the Global Development Network came to an end just as my involve-
ment with the Researcher’s Alliance for Development began. From this
involvement came a further case study. Even though one network (the
GDN) prospered and the Researchers Alliance for Development (RAD)
floundered, the World Bank parentage of both these networks allowed
me to maintain my links inside this international organisation after
my sojourn at the Bank in 1999 came to an end, especially with Erik
Johnson, Jean-Christophe Bas and Susan Wilder. The several workshops
I convened on the World Bank, and for the Bank, over 2005–2010 led
to my own joint publication with Chris Wright (2006), but this project
was supported by the publication efforts among an informal but inter-
national network of colleagues, including Pascale Hatcher, Asun Lera
St Clair, Susan Park, Celine Tan, Sophie Harman, Kim Maloney, Antje
Vetterlein, Kate Weaver and also Ralf Leiteritz. The project stimulated
my already growing interests in network theory. Those in the GDN and