Towards the optimal authority allocation in global governance: a normative and empirical analysis

Peng, Wan (2024) Towards the optimal authority allocation in global governance: a normative and empirical analysis. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis explores what are optimal authority allocations in global governance across diverse issues from the perspective of public good provision and examines how and how far the reality deviates from optimality. To do so, this study employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating formal modeling, machine learning, and quantitative analysis using novel data collected from an expert survey. Formal models theoretically reveal that functional features—externalities, economies of scale, and cost structures—drive public goods towards provision by higher level of governance institutions, while the social feature—preference heterogeneity—performs inversely. A Named Entity Recognition algorithm applied to the latest annual reports of 21 representative international organizations systematically identifies international public goods as the appropriate units of subsequent empirical analyses, with methodically delineating the scope of global governance. Furthermore, this study distinguishes three operational stages of public goods—means for provision, intermediate goods, and final goods. An original expert survey distributed to 885 scholars yielded 75 valid responses for 30 public goods, capturing diversity in gender, age, region, and academic position. Quantitative analyses systematically measure the four features and estimate optimal authority allocations for 30 public goods based on both formal models and estimation models. Comparing reality and optimality, I find that most public goods should be reassigned to higher governance levels to improve provision efficiency and the roles of regional institutions should be strengthened. Two factors, political conflicts and provision complexity, significantly contribute to the gap between reality and optimality, with heterogeneous effects across issue areas. Distributional conflicts, domestic politics, absence of strong institutions, and lack of awareness among governments or citizens also influence the gap. By integrating normative and empirical perspectives, this dissertation offers a unified framework to understand what an efficient multilevel global governance architecture is and provides actionable insights into adjusting authority allocations at supranational levels to enhance governance effectiveness.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Wan Peng
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
Supervisor:	Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4841

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