Description
As global governance regimes grow and become a more invasive authority in domestic policy processes, and in normative deliberations on global issues at the domestic level, questions about their political legitimacy have become increasingly important. In their call for a third generation of global governance research Coen and Pegram (2018) place such boundary conflicts of transnational authority as one of the key future topics in IR scholarship, including identifying better what constitutes global in global governance. As Zurn argues (2018) the lack of clarity in how to arrange, or prioritize, transboundary criteria of highly fragmented authority systems (e.g. between the local and the global) where multiple actors are involved in the governance of a complex global issue, is throwing up very difficult legitimacy questions. This is especially true where global governance regimes have expanded their reach and power to create opportunity structures for INGOs to mobilise within such governance regimes to influence policy processes (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2018; Haddid 2018). Under the aegis of international institutions INGOs have evolved into a significant global authority, yet, at the same time little attention has been paid to what states as domestic political authorities think of this power expansion of INGOs as a global political authority, including when said authority is located outside of typical IO state-led structures. Not all states are viewing this development as a positive phenomenon, and many are pushing back with the aim to place effective limits on INGOs’ power (Thrandardottir and Mitra, forthcoming). At the centre of the concerns raised by states about the power of INGOs as global actors is a rhetoric that depicts INGOs as ‘foreign funded’, ‘anti-national’, and a threat to national security.
Our research project is a case study of this type of transboundary conflicts in Hungary and India. We explore how they responded to a perceived infringement by INGOs upon state sovereignty. We explore how this transboundary conflict took place through the prism of a socio-political legal case study comparing the Indian Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) 2010; and the 2017 Hungarian Act on the Transparency of Organisations Supported from Abroad (TOSA), often dubbed the ‘Stop Soros’ law. The aim is to identify the characteristics of this emerging paradigm in INGO regulation and what conditions these may impose on INGOs’ legitimacy as global actors. The tentative argument in our draft is that using domestic legislation to hedge against INGOs as a global authority can have a detrimental effect on global civil society as a whole because it has the potential to erode the principles underpinning their threshold legitimacy as set out in e.g. articles 19 and 20 of the UDHR and other international instruments on freedom of expression and association.
