Transnational Governance Through Standard Setting: The Role of Transnational Communities

This chapter explores the role that community forms of social organization play in transnational standard setting. The chapter compares the evolution of two cases through time — the International Competition Network/Community and the Creative Commons Community. Those two transnational communities exhibit quite distinct features and character. The International Competition Network has been, from the start, a selective and exclusive community bringing together public or quasi-public agencies to buttress an existing and dominant agenda. The Creative Commons community, on the other hand, emerged as a bottom-up, civil society based social movement, constructed around a challenger agenda with an inclusive grass-roots philosophy. The comparison of those two quite different cases shows that each of those communities deployed strategies to deal, through time, with their own particular weaknesses and that both have been quite successful in their overall objective to strengthen and spread a given standard across multiple boundaries