Re-ordering the World:Transnational Regulatory Governance and its Challenges

Taking transnational regulatory governance seriously, we treat it in this chapter as a dependent variable. Processes of emergence and stabilization are of particular interest. We emphasize the complex, step-by-step, sometimes bumpy and highly historical dimension of these processes. Regulatory change, as it characterizes our contemporary transnational world is generally associated with struggles, conflicts, resistance, negotiations and painful integration. It is often incremental and nevertheless potentially highly consequential, with a strong transformative impact. We propose that a contemporary frontier for social scientific research is to extend and reinvent our analytical tools in order to approach regulatory governance as a complex and fluid compound of activities bridging the global and the local and taking place at the same time within, between and across national boundaries. In order to characterize the dynamics of transnational regulatory governance, we revisit some key conceptual debates. A combination of perspectives allows us to better capture the multiple levels and dimensions of transnational regulatory governance in the making. We conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the more recent challenges to transnational governance, particularly in a post-crisis world