Skip to content
Menu
Technical University of Munich
Technical University of Munich

Participation in Global & Democratic Governance and Technology Governance

Project Overview

Abdel Alshadafan, Tim Büthe and Henk de Vries investigate the consequences of institutional reforms at the International Electrotechnical Commission, which were supposed to increase participation from countries of the Global South in technology governance through technical standards. They also analyze specifically the behavior of Chinese firms and government representatives in international technical standard-setting, through which China has long sought a greater role in global technology governance, which Western political and business leaders fear may be a thinly-disguised ploy for Chinese political and commercial dominance of key technologies. Ernesto Cruz Ruiz's dissertation examines the drivers and consequences of "democratic innovation," especially in Latin America, which seek to increase, broaden and deepen democratic participation in setting the agenda for governments and in public policy-making. Cindy Cheng and Sebastian Klotz examine the consequences of increased participation by traditionally marginalized countries in the global governance of food safety for the efficiency of rule- and decisionmaking of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, drawing on an original dataset of almost 900 Codex meeting reports from 1963 to 2019. These projects build in part on Tim Büthe's earlier work on international standard-setting as a political process (The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy) and the recently completed project on Rethinking Participation in Global Governance: Voice and Influence after Stakeholder Reforms (Oxford UP 2022), which theorizes and empirically examines the relationship between participation and effectiveness as well as legitimacy in global governance.

Project Members

  • Tim Büthe
  • Abdel Alshadafan
  • Ernesto Cruz Ruiz
  • Cindy Cheng

+ Prof. Dr. Joost Pauwelyn (Geneva), Prof. Dr. Martino Maggetti (Lausanne), Dr. Ayelet Berman (NU Singapore), Prof. Dr. Henk de Vries (Rotterdam) and Dr. Sebastian Klotz (Bern)

To top