Description
Under the current polycentric global governance, situations of regime complexity have proliferated, requiring diverse actors to establish coordination among overlapping, and sometimes, conflicting regimes. Conversely, such institutional density could make us find new issue areas that we are not fully aware of by through the linkage and uniting of related regimes. This paper focuses on an emerging approach to recognize a new issue, coordinate related regimes, and guide actors' behavior, that is, to establish "guiding principles" as soft law. Guiding principles are generally defined as an idea-based compilation of several regimes, to recognize an issue area that has been overlooked, to prevent conflicts and create synergies among these regimes, and to "lead" actors to an appropriate behavior under the issue area. Under what conditions do actors create guiding principles, and what characteristics and advantages do guiding principles have? To answer these questions, this study compares two guiding principles by illustrating their creation and implementation processes: Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This comparison reveals that guiding principles can shed light on overlooked or ignored issues, reduce sovereign costs, and be effective for solving issues and producing synergies based on the existing legal order.
