International Organizations as Orchestrators of Represented Constituencies: The Case of the Global Compact on Refugees

doi:10.1017/9781009710558.012

11 - International Organizations as Orchestrators of Represented Constituencies: The Case of the Global Compact on Refugees

from Part III - Democratic Representation by International Organizations

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Terry Macdonald

Edited by

Samantha Besson

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Samantha Besson: Affiliation:
Collège de France, Paris

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Summary

This chapter examines how IOs can contribute to the development of representative practices that strengthen global institutional legitimacy. More specifically, it argues that global representative practice can contribute to democratic legitimacy through a distinct set of constitutive representative activities, which function to cultivate – within socially and institutionally emergent groups holding democratic representative claims – those ties of political recognition, integration, and commitment required to constitute them as active and legitimizing democratic constituencies. IOs can engage in this constitutive representation through the orchestration of represented constituencies: intervening in relationships among representatives and their emergent constituents in ways that cultivate their collective legitimating qualities of political recognition, integration, and commitment. These claims are illustrated through an examination of the roles of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as orchestrators of a transnational represented constituency of refugees, via their work in supporting a range of democratic commitments within the Global Compact on Refugees. Overall, this analysis shows how concepts of representation can be brought into closer alignment with the functional demands of democratic legitimation in the complex and dynamic political circumstances of contemporary global politics.

Keywords

Constitutive representation constituency democratic legitimacy global democracy refugee representation Global Compact on Refugees

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Type: Chapter
Information: Democratic Representation in International Organizations , pp. 223 - 248

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009710558.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2026
Creative Commons: This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

11 International Organizations as Orchestrators of Represented Constituencies: The Case of the Global Compact on Refugees

11.1 Introduction

International organizations (IOs) now perform many crucial political functions within the interconnected governance systems of the twenty-first century global political order. In recognition of their powerful roles, IOs have been subject to increasing politicization over recent decades,Footnote ¹ accompanied by widespread challenges to their legitimacy,Footnote ² and calls for democratizing reform.Footnote ³ This political concern about IOs’ democratic deficits is deeply implicated in wider legitimacy crises facing democratic institutions worldwide – emanating in part from unsettling transformations to democratic States and national societies wrought by global economic, social, and political integration.Footnote ⁴ The institutions of the United Nations (UN) system, in particular, loom large in the conspiracist imaginaries of many populist political movements – cast as emblems of aloof and rapacious global elites, and envisioned as threats to longer-standing democratic practices of legitimate national self-determination.Footnote ⁵ Against this political background, the question of how best to assess and strengthen the democratic legitimacy of IOs – and of the roles they play within wider governance systems – sits at the centre of broader debates about the prospects and pathways for reviving democratic legitimacy across the global political order.Footnote ⁶

Some established theoretical work on the democratic legitimacy of IOs has argued that a promising route towards remedying legitimacy problems may be found in strengthening practices of democratic representation, since representative democratic instruments can be more successfully adapted to the vast scale and complexity of global governance processes than alternative participatory models.Footnote ⁷ Others, however, have advanced more sceptical assessments of representative practices as vehicles for legitimacy in global institutions. Sociological legitimacy scholars have presented empirical evidence that (at least some) established representative instruments fail to improve attitudinal indicators of IO legitimacy.Footnote ⁸ In parallel, some normative theorists have argued that strong legitimacy can only be achieved through public participation in democratic deliberation,Footnote ⁹ or other forms of active political engagement absent from established representative models.Footnote ¹⁰ Underlying these sceptical challenges is a recognition that many transnational groups with democratic claims to representative inclusion, in virtue of their experiences of ‘affectedness’ or ‘subjection’ by international institutions,Footnote ¹¹ currently lack those background social and institutional ties that have historically sustained legitimacy within the representative institutions of consolidated democratic States.Footnote ¹² Whereas contemporary representative theories and practices have mostly been developed to operate with the social relationships that comprise sovereign or self-determining national ‘peoples’, many represented groups in global institutions are fluid and contested transnational assemblages of diverse political actors, lacking such established social and institutional ties. In their absence, the worry is that practices of democratic representation and legitimation become politically uncoupled.

My aim in this chapter is to offer a theoretical account of how these challenges to representative democratic legitimation in global institutions may be (at least partially) overcome, and how IOs can contribute to the development of the kinds of representative practices best equipped to strengthen global institutional legitimacy. More specifically, I argue that global representative practice can contribute to democratic legitimacy not only through the representation of groups whose shared claims to representative inclusion are accompanied by established social and institutional ties, which enable their collective judgement and decision as active democratic ‘constituencies’.Footnote ¹³ It can contribute further through a distinct set of constitutive representative activities, which function to cultivate – within socially and institutionally emergent groups holding democratic representative claims – those ties of political recognition, integration, and commitment required to constitute them as active and legitimizing democratic constituencies. IOs, more specifically, can engage in this constitutive representation through political practices I describe as the orchestration of represented constituencies: intervening in relationships among representatives and their emergent constituents in ways that cultivate their collective legitimating qualities of political recognition, integration, and commitment.

In what follows, I develop these arguments in three steps. First, I examine in greater depth the relationships and tensions between concepts and practices of democratic legitimation, on the one hand, and representation, on the other; and based on this analysis, I consider how distinctive practices of constitutive representation may foster in represented constituencies the qualities of active democratic agency required for sustaining legitimacy (Section 11.2). Second, I examine how IOs can contribute to these practices of constitutive representation – extending established understandings of IOs as orchestrators of collective political action to the democratic practices of constituting represented constituencies (Section 11.3). Third, I illustrate and assess these theoretical ideas through an examination of the case of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR): here I examine the roles of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as orchestrators of a transnational represented constituency of refugees,Footnote ¹⁴ via their work in supporting a range of democratic commitments within the GCR (Section 11.4).

Taken together, these arguments have significance for both theoretical and practical debates about pathways towards global democratic legitimacy. Theoretically, they show how concepts of representation can be brought into closer alignment with the functional demands of democratic legitimation in the complex and dynamic political circumstances of contemporary global politics. And practically, they highlight a new way in which democratically legitimating forms of representation can be instituted by IOs – extending their representative reach not only through participation in external lawmaking processes, but further through supporting the constitution of represented groups as active democratic constituencies – whose agency alone confers democratic legitimacy on the governance institutions of the global order.

11.2 Representation as an Instrument of Democratic Legitimacy

Over the course of its modern history, democratic theory has developed a rich conceptual vocabulary for describing both the justificatory normative grounds, and the operational institutional instruments, required to realize democratic ideals within the vast and complex political orders of modern world society. The concept of legitimacy has risen to prominence as a frame for understanding modern democracy’s normative grounds; while the concept of representation has come to occupy a parallel position in understanding its operational institutional instruments. Despite their proximity as central organizing concepts in modern democratic projects, the ideas of legitimacy and representation have been developed in recent theoretical work with increasing detachment from one another; and their estrangement has nowhere been starker than in theories of democracy within international institutions. In order to develop a model of international representation capable of strengthening global democratic legitimacy, we must therefore begin by considering in more detail: how our concepts of democratic legitimacy and representation have come apart in contemporary theory and governance practice; and how to bring them back into closer political accord.

11.2.1 Legitimacy, Democracy, and Democratic Legitimacy

The concept of legitimacy, first, is commonly invoked as a frame for capturing the underlying normative value that democratic institutions should be designed to deliver. The etymological roots of the legitimacy concept can be traced back to the Latin root lex, meaning ‘law’, and derivatives such as legitimus, meaning ‘according to law’.Footnote ¹⁵ But in the early modern period the legitimacy idea evolved to take on more specialized political meanings: first capturing lawfully delegated political powers,Footnote ¹⁶ and hereditary rights of ruling monarchs;Footnote ¹⁷ and subsequently expanding to allow scope for subjecting even lawful power to critique in the name of some autonomous set of political agents or reasons.Footnote ¹⁸ While the precise sources of legitimacy’s distinctive political normativity remains a matter of ongoing dispute,Footnote ¹⁹ most theorists understand legitimacy standards as functioning in some sense to remedy political problems of normative dispute over the rightful institutional terms of political rule.Footnote ²⁰ Remedying such legitimacy problems is commonly valued for helping reconcile political rule with the normative judgements and commitments of free individuals,Footnote ²¹ and further for helping sustain beneficial political cooperation at low enforcement costs.Footnote ²²

This modern idea of legitimacy thus captures not any ideal institutional model of political rule, but rather a distinctive normative standard against which institutional models can be judged and designed. It is through this application that the idea of legitimacy has come to be commonly aligned with a reinvigorated modern interpretation of the old Greek idea of democracy – defined as a form of political rule or empowerment (arche) through which a political community or ‘people’ (demos) engages in collective self-governance. The compound idea of democratic legitimacy captures what results when democratic institutional instruments successfully function as political remedies to underlying legitimacy problems – resolving normative disputes over the institutional terms of political rule through the collectivization of power in democratic decision-making processes.

Not all contemporary justifications of democratic institutions appeal in this way to their value as instruments of legitimation: sometimes democracy is justified instead as a vehicle for some thicker moral conception of justice,Footnote ²³ or another instrumental moral purpose.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, the concept of ‘legitimacy’ is sometimes appended to democracy in a more descriptive sense – denoting not its conformity to any substantive normative standard, but rather a generic attribution of political justifiability or acceptability, on whatever terms these may be understood.Footnote ²⁵ But it was as an instrument of legitimacy in its substantive normative sense that institutional ideals of democracy first gained widespread uptake in modern political thought and practice, under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proposed collectivist solution to the legitimacy problems of consolidating European States.Footnote ²⁶ And in this same Rousseauvian tradition, deliberative democratic models have attained contemporary theoretical support as instruments of normative legitimacy – entrenching the pairing of democracy with legitimacy as political solution and problem, as these function within the State-based institutional orders of modern political life.Footnote ²⁷

11.2.2 Democracy, Representation, and Transnational Legitimacy Problems

Alongside this normative idea of legitimacy, the concept of representation has had enormous theoretical influence in reshaping models of democracy for operation in the modern political world. Like the idea of democracy itself, the concept of representation marks out a model of the relationships and structures of political rule, without entailing any particular account of their (justifying or legitimizing) normative grounds. Most broadly, the concept of representation means ‘making present’ in a new sense something which is, in another sense, absent;Footnote ²⁸ as such, it has many meanings and applications outside the domain of political life. But when applied to the political context of democratic governance, the concept captures those political relationships and practices through which members of democratic constituencies can be made present in the activities of political rule – even when (due to constraints such as time, distance, resources, competence, or motivation) they do not participate in these directly.Footnote ²⁹

At the heart of all models of democratic representation is some kind of relationship between: the democratic constituencies who are (at least in some direct participatory sense) absent from activities of political rule, yet democratically entitled to be present; and their democratic representatives, whose characteristics and activities within sites and processes of political rule can make their represented constituencies in some sense present again. Competing theoretical models of democratic representation then vary in how they characterize these political agents and relationships, across several dimensions: the elements of constituencies’ attributes or activities that representative processes seek to make present; the elements of representatives’ attributes or activities through which this presence is fostered in sites and processes of political rule; and the features of the political relationships between representatives and constituents through which these representative practices are sustained.Footnote ³⁰

In designing and justifying models of political representation along these several dimensions, theorists have not typically undertaken systematic analysis of their implications for political problems of legitimacy, in the substantive normative sense of interest here. Rather, a standard analytical strategy has been to assess representative models against the intermediary concept of ‘democracy’ – assuming that whatever can be upheld as democratic warrants an accompanying attribution of normative legitimacy. For some representative theorists an assumption of such equivalence is merely implicit. Others, however, have argued explicitly that the normative assessment of representative institutional designs requires no appeal to any standards exogenous to the concept of democracy itself, but can rather be assessed simply for its ‘democraticity’ – meaning conformity with the conceptual constraints of the democratic idea.Footnote ³¹ More concretely, this has meant that the assessment of representative designs has mostly focused on the democratic function of representative inclusion – aimed at ensuring participants in political rule (arche) include all other members of their political community (demos) in their decision-making processes.Footnote ³² In this democratic interpretation of the representative challenge, normative evaluation and prescription focuses primarily on the attributes and activities of political representatives, whose responsibility it is to include, through their activities of rule, all ‘affected’ or ‘subjected’ populations with democratic claims to representation as members of the ‘demos’.Footnote ³³ The capacity of represented populations to exercise collective judgement and influence as democratic agents within representative processes has received much less attention: although the question of constituency agency has received some attention in broader debates on the constitution of the ‘demos’ in global democratic practice,Footnote ³⁴ its implications for the theory of global democratic representation have not been systematically examined.

An important question left open by much of this work concerns the capacity of representative practice to sustain democratic legitimacy in contemporary political governance institutions. Some recent work on international and transnational representation invokes the language of legitimacy – suggesting that some prescribed representative innovations, addressed to the remedy of democratic deficits, will also have the advantage of strengthening legitimacy.Footnote ³⁵ Such claims have merit insofar as representative practices can fulfil not only the inclusive political function of democraticity, but also the distinct political function of legitimization: resolving normative disputes over the institutional terms of political rule, through the subsumption of divergent individual judgements within a unified institutional framework for collective political agency.Footnote ³⁶ One key prerequisite for legitimizing functionality is that the parties to normative disputes over the terms of institutional rule – in democratic terms, those who claim a political ‘stake’ in its powers as affected parties,Footnote ³⁷ or those subjected to demands for institutional compliance or supportFootnote ³⁸ – are included in the collective democratic decision-making processes that offer some political remedy for these disputes. Insofar as representative innovations are successful in fostering such inclusion – through better aligning the boundaries of governance processes with the boundaries of collective democratic agency – their claim to be contributing to strengthened legitimacy in international institutions can be upheld.

The complex political function of legitimation requires more, however, than merely aligning the boundaries of represented constituencies with those of legitimacy problems – representing all democratic claimants in normative disputes over the institutional terms of governance power. For representative inclusion to contribute to remedying legitimacy problems, there is an additional requirement for represented populations to be actively engaged in representative processes, to the degree required for sustaining the legitimizing conversion of normative dispute among democratic claimants into collective democratic agency in the shared exercise of governing power (thus converting diffuse populations of democratic claimants into active democratic constituencies). With the shift from participatory to representative democratic models, the expectation for active political engagement of democratic constituents does not extend to their direct involvement in all the activities of political decision-making and implementation that constitute political rule itself. But to foster legitimacy through these democratic practices, representatives must still bring their constituents along through sufficient active political engagements to motivate and guide their support for governing institutions in the ways captured by the distinct normative concept of legitimacy.

More specifically, successful legitimation requires that represented groups have capacities to: recognize themselves as democratic constituents of ruling institutions, and as represented by participants in these governance processes;Footnote ³⁹ engage (communicatively or collaboratively) with one another, in creatively defining the common interests or problems that integrate them as members of democratic constituencies;Footnote ⁴⁰ and commit to political responsibilities for democratic burden-sharing and compromise, without which the legitimizing shift from normative contestation to democratic collaboration could not be motivationally sustained.Footnote ⁴¹ Agentic political capacities of these minimal kinds are acknowledged functional requirements already of some theoretical models of ‘formal’ political representation, which require represented constituents to engage collaboratively and responsibly in activities of authorization and accountability within their representative relationships.Footnote ⁴² As such, these formal representative instruments can make especially clear contributions to legitimation processes. But even with ‘substantive’ and ‘descriptive’ representative practices, which are more reliant on the agency of representatives to articulate and embody constituency interests and identities, legitimacy will still depend on constituents possessing these forms of active agency: without constituents’ active recognition, integration, and commitment operating in the background, representative rule would not convert to legitimizing support from institutions’ democratic claimants.

There is a longstanding and live democratic debate about whether representative legitimation of these kinds can realistically be achieved in political practice. An influential tradition of thought on democratic legitimacy – originating in Rousseau’s well-known claim that the democratic general will cannot be represented – contends that representative practices are incapable of empowering and sustaining adequate capabilities of these kinds for the exercise of legitimizing democratic agency.Footnote ⁴³ The contemporary political circumstances of transnational democratic projects produce some compelling grounds for supporting such sceptical views. Current configurations of global governance institutions – viewed systemically, as subsuming all governance levels and institutional types interacting within the overarching global order – are complex and dynamic, with uneven and shifting impacts on local and transnational populations.Footnote ⁴⁴ As a consequence, many populations of democratic claimants are themselves diffuse and dynamic – with contested and shifting boundaries, dispersed and diverse memberships, and weak political relationships to their purported representatives within governance institutions. This systemic disjuncture between populations of democratic claimants, and those connected socially and institutionally as active democratic constituencies, produces significant challenges for the development of legitimate representative instruments of global democracy.Footnote ⁴⁵

11.2.3 Constitutive Representation As Remedy for Transnational Legitimacy Problems

Given these challenges, proponents of representation as an instrument of global legitimation must consider further what instruments within representative practices can best foster and sustain the requisite dimensions of active democratic agency within represented constituencies. Here I propose that such practices can be helpfully conceptualized as a variant of what is sometimes called constitutive (or in more common terms, ‘constructivist’) representation .Footnote ⁴⁶ This idea captures the creative potential that arises in any representative process, which re-presents its subject in a new and different form from its original condition:Footnote ⁴⁷ not just describing or displacing a subject already adequately formed, but re-constituting the represented subject itself through the representative process. Established theoretical accounts of constitutive representation have been mostly concerned with the symbolic dimensions of representative practice – that is, the ways in which cultural categories of political interest and identity can be creatively constructed by representational activities of depiction, narration, and interpretation, prior to the wider ideational uptake of these categories by institutionally affected or subjected democratic claimants.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some theorists have deployed these representative concepts to capture the way self-appointed representatives can call forth or mobilize new constituencies in dynamic and contested governance contexts, such as those emerging in response to new transnational or global political problems.Footnote ⁴⁹

Here, I propose that this established concept of constitutive representation can be expanded to capture the practices through which representatives operate to constitute not only cultural categories of political membership, but further political capabilities for the exercise of legitimizing democratic agency. More specifically, we may consider how constitutive representation can function to cultivate, among members of fluid and emergent transnational constituencies, those capabilities for constituency self-recognition, communicative or collaborative engagement, and responsible political commitment, which we have established are required to support the active political agency that is the source of democratic legitimacy in representative practice. First, representatives may support the constitution of represented constituencies in the dimension of self-recognition by creatively interpreting and projecting latent or contested group identities – metaphorically, painting a portrait rather than holding up a mirror; in doing so, they may help constituents gain stronger recognition of their political status as a collective, and their democratic claims against international governance institutions. Second, representatives may support the constitution of represented constituencies in the dimension of communicative or collaborative engagement by supplying the interactive infrastructures and attentional salience required to bring disparate constituents together into creative political engagements of their own – building new and dynamic understandings of the content of shared interests in their governance institutions. And third, representatives may support the constitution of represented constituencies in the dimension of responsible political commitment by brokering engagements between their own represented constituents and other groups with competing represented interests – thus helping to contain partisanship among their represented subjects within the bounds and burdens of political responsibility to the wider democratic order.

More work needs to be done, however, to consider how such constitutive representation may function in practice in international institutions, to help remedy problems of legitimacy arising across the transnational constituencies of the global democratic order. It is accordingly to these more concrete political issues that we must turn our attention next; and in doing so, we will take up more directly the question of the role played by IOs in fostering these distinctive representative practices.

11.3 The Representative Function of IOs as Orchestrators of Democratic Constituencies

So far, we have been discussing issues about the functions of democratic and representative instruments, as remedies to political legitimacy problems, at a very general level of theoretical analysis. With this broad conceptual framework now in place, we are ready to turn to the more specific questions that focus inquiry in this volume – concerning the role of IO representation in fostering democratic legitimacy within international lawmaking processes. As set out in this volume’s framing introductory discussion,Footnote ⁵⁰ IOs contribute to international lawmaking processes in a variety of important ways, and correspondingly serve as institutional hubs for diverse representative practices. As others in the volume are discussing, practices of political representation with legitimizing democratic qualities can be supported: inside IOs, when representative inclusion is cultivated within their internal decision-making processes; through IOs, where IO processes serve as sites for collaborative decision-making involving outside representative parties; and by IOs, where IOs themselves serve as agents of representative practice within wider processes of international lawmaking.

Here I am considering the third of these modes of IO representation; though the instrument for this role that I will describe is less direct than some other instances of representation by IOs, such as when IOs take on representative roles as members of other IOs, or as participants in external lawmaking processes. More specifically, I will examine in what follows how IOs can represent transnational constituencies through the indirect process of orchestrating the constitution of represented constituencies within international lawmaking processes, in circumstances where constituencies may otherwise lack the political capacities for participation in representative legitimation of international law. Before moving on to illustrate this kind of representative practice, with the case of IO orchestration of refugee constituencies through the GCR, it is helpful to begin by explaining in more detail the proposed political instruments of these constitutive practices of IO representation. This requires saying more: first about the idea of orchestration, as an instrument of IO agency in representative political practice; and second about the concrete activities through which IOs can orchestrate the constitution of represented constituencies as democratic agents in international lawmaking processes.

11.3.1 Orchestration as an Instrument of IO Representation

The traditional conceptual categories of modern political analysis are notoriously challenged by the theoretical task of capturing the distinctive forms of political agency embodied in IOs, as they now function within the complex governance systems of our contemporary global order. Modern theories of political power, legitimacy, and democracy have built conceptual apparatuses around the governance systems of sovereign States – drawing a clear conceptual line between the governing agency of political rule (centred on the lawmaking and enforcement powers of the State), and the democratic agency of the ruled (exercised collectively through representative or other practices of democratic legitimation). IOs do not fit neatly on either side of this conceptual divide, as they are both instruments and subjects of the sovereign powers of States, which invest them with their varied organizational powers. Moreover, any delegated ruling powers invested in IOs by States are subject further to the structural dynamics of a complex global governance system, in which a multiplicity of political agents must navigate and negotiate competing aims and powers to advance their governing or legitimizing aims.Footnote ⁵¹ Any theoretical account of IOs’ political agency within a democratic global order – whether focused on the side of governance or legitimation functions – must grapple with these systemic complexities.

These theoretical challenges have been the focus of significant attention from International Relations scholars seeking to account for the distinctive forms of political agency IOs exercise within processes of global governance – or in other terms, in activities of institutional rule. While many IOs still engage heavily in traditional State-centred forms of governance activity – such as negotiation of treaties, operation of interstate dispute resolution mechanisms, or monitoring of compliance – there is now wide recognition that their governance performance is often improved by utilization of soft and indirect forms of political agency, operating through the mobilization of ‘intermediary’ actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, transgovernmental networks, transnational partnerships, and other IOs, in support of their governance goals. The concept of ‘orchestration’ is often used to describe these indirect modes of IO influence – serving as an umbrella concept for a wide variety of political strategies IOs use to support, facilitate, coordinate, and steer global governance activities via intermediary actors operating across a complex global institutional system.Footnote ⁵²

Some theoretical attention has been given to the question of how IO orchestration in global governance practices can itself be legitimized or democratized, as an instrument of institutional rule.Footnote ⁵³ But there has been less consideration of how the indirect forms of IO political agency captured by the orchestration concept may also help model IOs agency exercised on the other side of the democratic leger – in new kinds of representative practices that adapt democratic instruments to the complex social and institutional order of twenty-first century world politics. Here I propose that the concept of orchestration can instructively be applied in this latter way, to capture some important roles IOs can play in supporting, facilitating, coordinating, and steering a range of intermediary actors engaged in activities of constitutive representation – which cultivate in emergent constituencies, across the global order, the qualities required to support their roles in representative legitimation. Through so doing, IO orchestration activities can potentially support not only the functional efficacy of global governance practices, but also their democratic legitimacy.

11.3.2 How IOs Can Orchestrate the Constitution of Represented Constituencies

What, then, are some of the political activities through which IOs can orchestrate the constitution of represented constituencies, as democratic agents in international lawmaking processes? In exploring these activities, we can extrapolate and apply established theoretical work on the varied techniques of IO orchestration commonly deployed through intermediaries in support of global governance goals – exploring how these techniques may further be utilized in practices of constitutive representation.Footnote ⁵⁴ While IO orchestration capabilities and techniques are diverse, and vary greatly across contexts, existing orchestration scholarship has identified several with especially wide application: convening engagements among intermediaries, to catalyse collaborations; agenda-setting for programmes of collaborative work; financial and administrative assistance, to expand the material capabilities of intermediary actors; endorsement, to raise profiles or status of intermediary activities; and coordination, to increase collaborative synergies and impact.Footnote ⁵⁵ To map out how such orchestration techniques may be applicable within practices of constitutive representation, we can consider how they may operate to support the constitution of each of the legitimizing capabilities within transnational constituencies identified earlier: democratic self-recognition, engagement, and commitment.

First, IO orchestration activities may contribute to the constitution of democratic self-recognition within represented transnational constituencies – supporting the interpretation and projection of latent or contested identities among constituents who have been brought together not by longstanding historical trajectories of shared culture, but rather by more recent impositions of institutional affectedness or subjection producing a shared democratic claim. Two important orchestration techniques IOs can deploy to support these constitutive representative practices are convening and endorsement: here IOs can leverage their access to a range of (contextually varying, public or private) influential actors in their governance domains to identify representative intermediaries with inspirational visions and leadership capabilities; and they can further supply these representatives with the institutional platforms and networks required to project their visions across audiences wider institutional stakeholder constituencies. Administrative and financial assistance will typically be a further essential component of orchestration activities of this kind – whether this supports the convening of high profile representative public events or forums, or the brokerage of ongoing relationships between visionary representatives and their wider constituencies at more localized levels, which allow for wide political transmission of representative interpretations of collective democratic identities.

Second, IO orchestration activities may contribute to the constitution of communicative or collaborative engagement within represented transnational constituencies – supplying not only platforms for representatives to disseminate inspirational visions of the democratic identities and claims of their represented constituencies, but further opportunities for disparate members of transnational constituencies to contribute themselves to defining the political interests associated with these memberships. As above, orchestration techniques of convening and assistance can play important roles in supporting these constitutive practices. Here, however, the emphasis will be less on support for high profile platforming of representative visions, and more on support for deliberative network infrastructures and local community engagements diffused across the wider memberships of represented constituencies. To provide structure and focus for these diffused political processes of communicative and collaborative engagement, there may often be roles also for orchestration techniques of agenda-setting and coordination. Here, IOs can support the deliberative articulation of constituency interests by helping to frame questions, establish deliberative forums and processes, and create shared records of dialogues among members of transnational constituencies, in support of these legitimizing forms of collective democratic engagement.

Third, IO orchestration activities may contribute to the constitution of responsible political commitment within represented transnational constituencies – by fostering understandings not only of their internal democratic identities and interests, but also their political responsibilities to others across the wider global political order, with whom legitimate settlements must be reached through shared governance institutions. Supporting the constitution of wider political commitments of this kind may require an array of orchestration techniques – with agenda-setting playing an especially important role in framing representative engagements around problems and challenges of common global concern, as distinct from narrower partisan issues, and coordination helping to define clear norms for responsible political engagement of constituents with the wider governance institutions and communities through which their interests are to be advanced. These responsible political engagements can be aided further through building and disseminating more knowledge about constituencies’ mutual vulnerabilities and interdependencies, and through building capacity for secure and strong political leadership structures within represented constituencies. Here, assistance may also be a crucial feature of IO orchestration activity in this area – insofar as IOs’ financial, administrative, and technical resources can make valuable contributions to these knowledge- and capacity-building practices.

11.4 IO Orchestration of Represented Refugee Constituencies: The Case of the Global Compact on Refugees

The democratic roles that IO orchestration can play, in supporting legitimizing practices of constitutive representation in global governance, can be illustrated by examining the work of the UNHCR and the UNGA in the development and implementation of the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR). The GCR is a framework of principles, formulated to guide international cooperation among IOs, governments, NGOs, and other refugee and host community stakeholders in the pursuit of more equitable and effective global responsibility-sharing for supporting refugees and their host communities. Its development was motivated by increasing international recognition of the deficiencies of existing global governance instruments for addressing the escalating refugee crises of the early twenty-first century – catalysed in particular by the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 – and a corresponding shared commitment to strengthening international cooperation in refugee protection and assistance.Footnote ⁵⁶ The GCR was formally adopted by the UNGA on 17 December 2018, following over two years of consultations with UN Member States, IOs, refugee communities and leaders, civil society and private sector stakeholder organizations, and academic experts, led by the UNHCR.Footnote ⁵⁷

As momentum was built through this process for international commitments to developing stronger institutional instruments for political governance of refugee protection and assistance, increasing attention turned to the question of how these new international principles and processes could achieve legitimacy – of the loosely democratic kind associated with commitments to participatory and representative principles of political inclusion.Footnote ⁵⁸ Commitments to legitimizing principles of stakeholder participation, representation, and localization were by this time already well-entrenched within international governance practices in a range of humanitarian and development fields.Footnote ⁵⁹ But their importance in the field of refugee protection and assistance is heightened further by the special political situation of refugee populations – being alienated from the routine avenues for participatory and representative inclusion associated with secure State citizenship. As a result, these principles gained prominence within international discussions on the design and legitimation of this emerging governance architecture – led by the emphasis placed on this issue by refugee communities themselves.Footnote ⁶⁰

In the decades leading up to the establishment of the GCR, significant work had already been done – by refugees themselves, and by other organizations and analysts – to establish the idea that refugees may have democratic claims to recognition as a distinctive constituency within international society, entitled to some forms of democratic representation operating independently from State-based vehicles for political inclusion.Footnote ⁶¹ This idea had been advanced in three institutional contexts in particular: first, in work towards strengthened refugees’ democratic inclusion in the governance of refugee camps;Footnote ⁶² second, in debates about refugees’ rights to vote or otherwise participate within host community democratic processes;Footnote ⁶³ and third, in proposals for direct representation of refugee communities within UNHCR decision-making processes.Footnote ⁶⁴ As the scope of the framework for international cooperation on refugee issues expanded through the development of the GCR, refugee leaders advocated strongly for the parallel expansion of international commitments to principles of refugees’ democratic inclusion – to include the wider range of local and transnational contexts in which key issues affecting the lives of refugees are politically settled.Footnote ⁶⁵ These broad commitments were ultimately codified within the GCR itself, which prescribes that:

[R]elevant actors will, wherever possible, continue to develop and support consultative processes that enable refugees and host community members to assist in designing appropriate, accessible and inclusive responses. States and relevant stakeholders will explore how best to include refugees and members of host communities, particularly women, youth, and persons with disabilities, in key forums and processes, as well as diaspora, where relevant.Footnote ⁶⁶

While these very general commitments to refugees’ democratic inclusion have gained international endorsement within the GCR framework at the level of principle, there is nonetheless wide recognition that their implementation in practice faces significant political obstacles. Even leaving aside difficulties associated with conflicts of interest between these democratic principles and other political goals that States and non-State actors bring to their cooperative activities on refugee issues, there are some significant barriers to democratic inclusion associated with aspects of refugee constituencies themselves. These arise because many of the same features of refugee situations which generate the imperative for international refugee protection and assistance, in the first place, also undermine some important social prerequisites for the exercise by refugee constituencies of legitimizing democratic agency. Though many individuals live with the precarity of refugee status for extended periods, membership of a transnational refugee constituency is nonetheless fluid and dynamic – lacking the secure integration and commitment of permanent citizenship; refugees as a transnational constituency are geographically dispersed, and culturally and linguistically diverse, posing barriers to political communication; and perhaps most crucially, the physical, economic, social, and cultural vulnerability and estrangement experienced in many situations of refugeehood can deter or preclude taking on the additional risks and burdens that accompany political engagement.

Achieving political legitimacy in the global governance of refugee issues thus requires addressing such barriers through systematic political interventions to support the development and preservation of refugees’ capabilities for democratic political agency. As David Owen has put it, this involves at the most basic level supporting the constitution of refugees as agents ‘who can make choices and plans about their futures that are not simply driven by the urgent requirements of practical necessity and who have some ability to shape the social environment in which those choices and plans are made’.Footnote ⁶⁷ More specifically, it requires some practices of the kind described earlier as constitutive representation: political interventions aimed at cultivating within refugee constituencies the capabilities of democratic self-recognition, engagement, and commitment – established earlier as the minimal forms of collective political agency required to sustain democratic legitimacy through representative practice.

In response to this demand for legitimacy in their governance operations, the UNHCR and the UNGA have engaged in a range of activities, through their work in developing and implementing the GCR framework, which can be characterized as orchestration of constitutive representation – or to put this differently, orchestration of refugee constituencies as represented collectives of active democratic agents. Through these orchestration activities, the role of IOs in representative practices goes beyond opening up IOs’ internal decision-making processes and institutional spaces to access by established refugee representatives; it extends further to external interventions in the political relationships among members of refugee communities and their political representatives, with the aim of strengthening their legitimizing capacities.

To illustrate these activities, we can first examine how the UNHCR and UNGA have helped to orchestrate the constitution of democratic self-recognition within refugee constituencies, through supporting the activities of refugee leaders in interpreting and projecting mutual understandings of refugeehood as a democratic political identity with legitimate claims to international representation. Some of the most important IO contributions here have deployed orchestration techniques of convening and endorsement – leveraging access to their organizational networks and prestige to bring together visionary and well-connected refugee leaders from across disparate geographical and cultural contexts, and to raise the political profiles of their democratic political advocacy. An important example of such activities is the UNHCR’s work in convening and endorsing the 2018 Global Summit of Refugees,Footnote ⁶⁸ and the subsequent Global Refugee Forums, hosted annually from 2019 as platforms for the collective promotion of new ‘forms of behaviour and identity’Footnote ⁶⁹ more conducive to representative international decision-making on refugee issues. This prominent support from UNHCR, and the high-status endorsement from the UNGA through its adoption of the GCR framework, has in turn inspired wider commitments to refugee participation and representation among other governmental and NGO actors,Footnote ⁷⁰ thus expanding the scope of refugees’ political recognition as a transnational democratic constituency. The provision of administrative and financial assistance to refugee leaders, and to the other actors supporting these developing representative practices at more local levels, has been another important element of IO orchestration techniques in this area – with significant investments of resources by the UNHCR to support the elevation of refugee voices through these new international forums and networked engagements.Footnote ⁷¹

Second, the UNHCR and UNGA have helped to orchestrate the constitution of communicative and collaborative engagement within refugee constituencies: extending support beyond the platforming and endorsement of selected refugee leaders advocating for refugees’ democratic empowerment; and further fostering the involvement of wider members of refugee communities in defining the substantive refugee interests to be represented by leaders in protection and assistance operations. Here orchestration techniques of convening and assistance can be seen in some material support UNHCR has provided for grassroots refugee networks and local community groups to expand the scope of refugee participation in the design and delivery of refugee assistance programmes, within refugee camps as well as some transit and resettlement situations.Footnote ⁷² In addition to such support for widening the participatory base of political engagement within refugee communities, the UNHCR has also orchestrated the empowerment of refugee agency through agenda-setting and coordination activities, which help to frame, endorse, and disseminate new principled frameworks and recommendations to guide the work of other governmental, civil society, and business actors in fostering opportunities and supports for refugee participation. These include the broadly democratic principles that are incorporated (with UNGA endorsement) in the GCR itself; and they further include those more detailed recommendations that have been developed within independent refugee-led forums convened with IO support,Footnote ⁷³ such as the Representation and Participation Working Group of the International Refugee Congress – a non-profit organization initially established with UNHCR support.Footnote ⁷⁴

Third, these IOs have helped to orchestrate the constitution of responsible political commitment within refugee constituencies, by working to support political engagements not only within refugee communities, but also between refugees and their host communities, and other global stakeholders in refugee protection and assistance. Orchestration techniques of agenda-setting and coordination have been deployed here via the emphasis placed in GCR principles upon a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to responsibility-sharing for refugee protection and assistance,Footnote ⁷⁵ and related orchestration instruments such as proposals within the GCR for future ‘solidarity conferences’ and platforms, intended to bring refugees and other stakeholders together in community-building dialogue around responsibility-sharing commitments.Footnote ⁷⁶ This principled approach to responsibility-sharing identifies the intersecting contributions required from varied social actors – State and non-State, local and international – and further seeks to balance an emphasis on refugee rights with a discourse of mutual and shared political responsibility between refugees and other stakeholders in refugee governance instruments.Footnote ⁷⁷ IO support for constituting these dimensions of refugee agency is advanced further through extensive assistance invested in data-collection and scholarly analysis of collective refugee protection and assistance instruments, aimed at building stronger capacities within and beyond refugee communities for upholding these shared responsibilities.Footnote ⁷⁸

These various activities undertaken by the UNHCR (some with endorsement and other support from the UNGA) have made some meaningful impact: both in building international recognition of the legitimate claims of refugee communities to inclusion in the governance of those refugee protection and assistance issues that affect their lives; and in taking first steps in a larger programme of work towards the empowerment of refugee’s political agency as participants in representative decision-making practices. As instruments for establishing the representative democratic legitimacy of political decision-making around refugee protection and assistance, however, they are limited in several important dimensions. First, IO efforts to orchestrate refugee constituencies’ democratic self-recognition raise questions about whether those refugee leaders selected for invitation through IO networks can reflect the wide diversity of refugee experiences – particularly including experiences of those in the most marginalized and vulnerable positions; moreover, there are worries that refugees may be ‘tokenized’ through IO orchestration activities,Footnote ⁷⁹ without parallel inclusion in the more ongoing and mundane protection and assistance activities that impact refugee lives.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the same time, IO orchestration instruments for fostering refugees’ political engagement at such localized levels are typically not sufficient to overcome the deeper sources of physical vulnerability, economic precarity, social exclusion, and future uncertainty, that work to undermine secure opportunities for refugees’ communicative and collaborative political participation.Footnote ⁸¹ Work to orchestrate refugee constituencies’ responsible political commitment faces related constraints, due to the risks that political discourse around shared responsibility may be used, in contexts of persistent power asymmetries, to shift burdens prematurely and inappropriately onto refugee communities without adequate capacity and support to uphold them.Footnote ⁸²

Some aspects of these challenges may be partially overcome through greater investment of political capital and material resources by IOs in the scope of their orchestration efforts. Others, however, have deeper structural drivers that cannot be adequately overcome through IOs acting within siloed fields of governance responsibility – since the social prerequisites for legitimizing democratic agency traverse many functional and territorial governance fields and corresponding political constituencies. The democratic work of constituting legitimizing capability within represented constituencies must accordingly always retain a commitment to some cosmopolitan principle of ‘whole-of-society’ global responsibility, such that IOs pursue this orchestration work as a coordinated part of much wider global projects of collaborative political change.

11.5 Conclusions

Just as IOs play important roles in international lawmaking, and political governance more broadly, the analysis here has shown one way in which they can also play important roles in legitimating practices of political representation. Just as IOs’ roles in global governance are often indirect – orchestrating intermediary governmental, civil society, and other social actors instead of imposing direct political control – so too their roles in legitimizing representation can operate indirectly, through practices of representative orchestration. The orchestration practices examined here have been addressed to one particular element of representative practice that IOs are particularly well-positioned to support: activities of constitutive representation, which cultivate within transnational constituencies those forms of political recognition, integration, and commitment required to support democratic legitimacy. Examining these practices as undertaken by the UNHCR and UNGA, in their work around the development and implementation of the GCR, has illustrated some valuable democratic contributions, alongside significant structural limitations, of IO efforts to foster stronger democratic agency and legitimacy in global governance. Taken together, these remind us that even while the activities of democratic governance and legitimation can take diverse political forms for different actors and in different operational contexts, the political work of establishing the shared democratic identities, relationships, and commitments required for strong legitimacy will always demand persistent attention to the collective problems and responsibilities that connect stakeholders across the global order as a whole.

Footnotes

¹ Michael Zürn, Martin Binder and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, ‘International Authority and Its Politicization’ (2012) 4(1) International Theory 69–106.

² Dominik Zaum, ‘International Organizations, Legitimacy, and Legitimation’, in Dominik Zaum (ed.), Legitimating International Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 3–2510.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672097.003.0001; Jonas Tallberg and Michael Zürn, ‘The Legitimacy and Legitimation of International Organizations: Introduction and Framework’ (2019) 14 Review of International Organizations 581–606.

³ Klaus Dingwerth, Henning Schmidtke and Tobias Weise, ‘The Rise of Democratic Legitimation: Why International Organizations Speak the Language of Democracy’ (2020) 26(3) European Journal of International Relations 714–741.

⁴ Carolien van Ham, Jacques Thomassen, Kees Aarts and Rudy Andeweg (eds.), Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis: Explaining Trends and Cross-National Differences in Established Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)10.1093/oso/9780198793717.001.0001; Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (London: Verso Books, 2019).

⁵ Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum, ‘Populist (De)Legitimation of International Organizations’ (2023) 99(3) International Affairs 1023–104110.1093/ia/iiad048.

⁶ Terry Macdonald, ‘Reviving Democracy: Creating Pathways out of Legitimacy Crises’ (2023) 22(1) European Journal of Political Theory 181–19110.1177/14748851211020625.

⁷ Terry Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation beyond Liberal States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235001.001.0001; Andrew Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders: Justice and Representation in Global Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)10.1093/0199274908.001.0001; Jonathan W. Kuyper, ‘Systemic Representation: Democracy, Deliberation, and Nonelectoral Representatives’ (2016) 110(2) American Political Science Review 308–324; Laura Montanaro, ‘The Democratic Legitimacy of Self-Appointed Representatives’ (2012) 74(4) The Journal of Politics 1094–110710.1017/S0022381612000515; Jennifer C. Rubenstein, ‘The Misuse of Power, Not Bad Representation: Why It Is Beside the Point That No One Elected Oxfam’ (2014) 22(2) Journal of Political Philosophy 204–23010.1111/jopp.12020.

⁸ Lisa Maria Dellmuth and Jonas Tallberg, ‘The Social Legitimacy of International Organisations: Interest Representation, Institutional Performance, and Confidence Extrapolation in the United Nations’ (2015) 41(3) Review of International Studies 451–47510.1017/S0260210514000230.

⁹ Jens Steffek, ‘The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach’ (2003) 9(2) European Journal of International Relations 249–275; Eva Erman, ‘In Search of Democratic Agency in Deliberative Governance’ (2013) 19(4) European Journal of International Relations 847–868.

¹⁰ Jens Steffek, Claudia Kissling and Patrizia Nanz (eds.), Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance: A Cure for the Democratic Deficit? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Anne Norton, Wild Democracy: Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

¹¹ Jochen von Bernstorff, ‘New Responses to the Legitimacy Crisis of International Institutions: The Role of “Civil Society” and the Rise of the Principle of Participation of the “Most Affected” in International Law’ (2021) 32(1) European Journal of International Law 125–15710.1093/ejil/chab028; Archon Fung and Sean Gray (eds.), Empowering Affected Interests: Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)10.1017/9781009453981.

¹² David Miller, ‘Against Global Democracy’, in Keith Breen and Shane O’Neill (eds.), After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 141–160.

¹³ Here I reserve the term ‘constituencies’ for groups that are represented not only in the sense of being spoken for by others within international governance processes, but further in the more demanding democratic sense of participating as collectives in the processes of common judgement and action that sustain what can be called the democratic agency of the represented within representative practices. By democratic ‘agency’ here, I mean the exercise of political judgement combined with some substantive power to influence political outcomes in light of that judgement – albeit often indirectly, through complex collective processes such as democratic representation. For further discussion of these concepts see: Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)10.7208/chicago/9780226842806.001.0001; Terry Macdonald, ‘Democratizing Global “Bodies Politic”: Collective Agency, Political Legitimacy, and the Democratic Boundary Problem’ (2017) 10(2) Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 22–42.

¹⁴ As discussed at fn. 13 above, a refugee ‘constituency’ is constituted through the development of those social and institutional ties required for refugee populations to exercise the collective judgement and influence we can call democratic agency within representative processes. I take it that whether such agency requires (or is best achieved through) recognition in public law is an empirical rather than a normative or conceptual question – since my account of political legitimacy presented in this chapter understands law as just one among many instruments of social and institutional integration that can support democratic legitimation processes. As such, the optimal democratic role for public legal recognition of refugee constituencies may vary across different political contexts within the global order.

¹⁵ Walter W. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 290.

¹⁶ Jean-Marc Coicaud, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 19.

¹⁷ Shane P. Mulligan, ‘The Uses of Legitimacy in International Relations’ (2006) 34(2) Millennium 349–375, at 358–35910.1177/03058298060340021801; Arthur Isak Applbaum, Legitimacy Without Illusions: The Right to Govern in a Wanton World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 82.

¹⁸ Mulligan, fn. 17, at 359–360; Applbaum, fn. 17, pp. 81–82.

¹⁹ Ben Cross, ‘Normativity in Realist Legitimacy’ (2021) 19(3) Political Studies Review 450–46310.1177/1478929920917834; Eva Erman and Niklas Möller, ‘Distinctively Political Normativity in Political Realism: Unattractive or Redundant’ (2022) 25 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 433–44710.1007/s10677-021-10182-8; Matt Sleat, ‘Realism and Political Normativity’ (2022) 25 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 465–478.

²⁰ Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, ‘The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions’ (2006) 20(4) Ethics & International Affairs 405–43710.1111/j.1747-7093.2006.00043.x; Terry Macdonald, Global Political Legitimacy: A Normative Theory of Pluralist World Order, unpublished manuscript.

²¹ Alexander Kaufman, ‘Reason, Self-Legislation and Legitimacy: Conceptions of Freedom in the Political Thought of Rousseau and Kant’ (1997) 59(1) The Review of Politics 25–5210.1017/S0034670500027145; Philip Pettit, ‘Legitimacy and Justice in Republican Perspective’ (2012) 65 Current Legal Problems 59–8210.1093/clp/cus016.

²² Christian Reus-Smit, ‘International Crises of Legitimacy’ (2007) 44 International Politics 157–174.

²³ Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023)10.7208/chicago/9780226777122.001.0001.

²⁴ Thomas Christiano, ‘An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy’ (2011) 39(2) Philosophy & Public Affairs 142–176.

²⁵ Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 13310.1093/oso/9780198798873.001.0001.

²⁶ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 2nd ed., translated and edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Macdonald, Global Political Legitimacy, fn. 20, Chapter 1.

²⁷ Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); Jack Knight and James Johnson, ‘Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy’ (1994) 22(2) Political Theory 277–29610.1177/0090591794022002004.

²⁸ Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 3.

²⁹ It is a contested matter whether direct participation in political rule produces stronger democratic legitimacy than participation as a constituent in representative democratic practice, and some theorists of democratic representation have argued that it does not – for instance Urbinati, fn. 13. My view on this is that both participatory and representative practices are merely instruments (as distinct from conceptual or normative constituents) of democratic legitimation, and as such their relative utility for legitimation is an empirical question – the answer to which may vary across political contexts.

³⁰ Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, ‘The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory’ (2008) 11 Annual Review of Political Science 387–41210.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053006.190533.

³¹ Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

³² Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)10.1093/0198297556.001.0001.

³³ Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy, fn. 7; Kuper, fn. 7; Benjamin Boudou, ‘Representing Non-Citizens: A Proposal for the Inclusion of All Affected Interests’ (2023) 26(5) Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 747–76810.1080/13698230.2022.2062216.

³⁴ Christian List and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, ‘Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach’ (2010) 38 Philosophy & Public Affairs 76.

³⁵ Montanaro, fn. 7; Sveinung Arnesen and Yvette Peters, ‘The Legitimacy of Representation: How Descriptive, Formal, and Responsiveness Representation Affect the Acceptability of Political Decisions’ (2018) 51(7) Comparative Political Studies 868–89910.1177/0010414017720702.

³⁶ Macdonald, Global Political Legitimacy, fn. 20.

³⁷ Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy, fn. 7.

³⁸ Arash Abizadeh, ‘The Scope of the All-Subjected Principle: On the Logical Structure of Coercive Laws’ (2021) 81(4) Analysis 603–61010.1093/analys/anab041.

³⁹ Eva Erman, ‘The Boundary Problem and the Ideal of Democracy’ (2014) 21(4) Constellations 535–546; Erman, fn 9; Michael Saward, ‘The Representative Claim’ (2006) 5 Contemporary Political Theory 297–318.

⁴⁰ Norton, fn. 10; Macdonald, ‘Reviving Democracy’, fn. 6.

⁴¹ Iris Marion Young, ‘Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy’ (2001) 29(5) Political Theory 670–69010.1177/0090591701029005004; Michael Goodhart, ‘Interpreting Responsibility Politically’ (2017) 25(2) Journal of Political Philosophy 173–195; Avia Pasternak, ‘The Collective Responsibility of Democratic Publics’ (2011) 41(1) Canadian Journal of Philosophy 99–123.

⁴² Pitkin, fn. 28; Macdonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy, fn. 7.

⁴³ Nadia Urbinati, ‘Rousseau on the Risks of Representing the Sovereign’ (2012) 53(4) Politische Vierteljahresschrift 646–667; Robin Douglass, ‘Rousseau’s Critique of Representative Sovereignty: Principled or Pragmatic?’ (2013) 57(3) American Journal of Political Science 735–74710.1111/ajps.12020.

⁴⁴ Michael Zürn, A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)10.1093/oso/9780198819974.001.0001; Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green and Robert O. Keohane, ‘Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance’ (2016) 70(2) International Organization 247–27710.1017/S0020818315000338.

⁴⁵ Gerald Gaus, The Open Society and Its Complexities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)10.1093/oso/9780190648978.001.0001; Kate Macdonald and Terry Macdonald, ‘Liquid Authority and Political Legitimacy in Transnational Governance’ (2017) 9(2) International Theory 329–35110.1017/S1752971916000300.

⁴⁶ Lisa Disch, Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)10.7208/chicago/9780226804477.001.0001; Lisa Disch, Mathijs van de Sande and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Urbinati, fn. 13.

⁴⁷ Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1997); Saward, fn. 39.

⁴⁸ Judith Squires, ‘The Constitutive Representation of Gender: Extra-Parliamentary Re-Presentations of Gender Relations’ (2008) 44(2) Representation 187–20410.1080/00344890802080464; Michael Saward, ‘Authorisation and Authenticity: Representation and the Unelected’ (2009) 17(1) Journal of Political Philosophy 1–2210.1111/j.1467-9760.2008.00309.x; Disch, fn. 46.

⁴⁹ Kuyper, fn. 7; Saward, ‘Authorisation and Authenticity: Representation and the Unelected’, fn. 48; Eline Severs, ‘Representation as Claims-Making: Quid Responsiveness?’ (2010) 46(4) Representation 411–42310.1080/00344893.2010.518081; Montanaro, fn. 7.

⁵⁰ See also Besson, Chapter 1 in this volume.

⁵¹ Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, ‘The Politics of International Regime Complexity’ (2009) 7(1) Perspectives on Politics 13–24; Alexander Betts, ‘Regime Complexity and International Organizations: UNHCR as a Challenged Institution’ (2013) 19(1) Global Governance 69–81; Karen J. Alter and Kal Raustiala, ‘The Rise of International Regime Complexity’ (2018) 14 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 329–34910.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101317-030830.

⁵² Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal and Bernhard Zangl, ‘Orchestration: Global Governance through Intermediaries’, in Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal and Bernhard Zangl (eds.), International Organizations as Orchestrators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 3–3610.1017/CBO9781139979696.002.

⁵³ Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal and Bernhard Zangl, ‘Two Logics of Indirect Governance: Delegation and Orchestration’ (2016) 46(4) British Journal of Political Science 719–72910.1017/S0007123414000593; Karin Bäckstrand and Jonathan W. Kuyper, ‘The Democratic Legitimacy of Orchestration: The UNFCCC, Non-State Actors, and Transnational Climate Governance’ (2017) 26(4) Environmental Politics 764–788.

⁵⁴ For further discussion see Samantha Besson, ‘Democratic Representation within International Organizations: From International Good Governance to International Good Government’ (2022) 19(4) International Organizations Law Review 489–52710.1163/15723747-19030001.

⁵⁵ Abbott et al., International Organizations as Orchestrators, fn. 52, pp. 14–16.

⁵⁶ Gillian D. Triggs and Patrick C. J. Wall, ‘“The Makings of a Success”: The Global Compact on Refugees and the Inaugural Global Refugee Forum’ (2020) 32(2) International Journal of Refugee Law 283–33910.1093/ijrl/eeaa024.

⁵⁷ UN, Global Compact on Refugees (New York: United Nations, 2018). www.unhcr.org/media/37797, last accessed 1 June 2023.

⁵⁸ Dana Schmalz, Refugees, Democracy and the Law: Political Rights at the Margins of the State (London: Routledge, 2021).

⁵⁹ Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao, Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013); Hugo Slim, ‘Localization Is Self-Determination’ (2021) 3 Frontiers in Political Science 110.3389/fpos.2021.708584.

⁶⁰ Stefan Rother and Elias Steinhilper, ‘Tokens or Stakeholders in Global Migration Governance? The Role of Affected Communities and Civil Society in the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees’ (2019) 57(6) International Migration 243–257.

⁶¹ Schmalz, fn. 58.

⁶² Felix Bender, ‘Should Refugees Govern Refugee Camps?’ (2021) 27(4) Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 441–464; Jennifer Hyndman, ‘A Refugee Camp Conundrum: Geopolitics, Liberal Democracy, and Protracted Refugee Situations’ (2013) 28(2) Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 7–1510.25071/1920-7336.36472; Schmalz, fn. 58; Jennifer Hyndman, ‘Refugee Self-Management and the Question of Governance’ (1997) 16(2) Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 16–22.

⁶³ Ruvi Ziegler, Voting Rights of Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)10.1017/9781316671443; Felix Bender, ‘Enfranchising the Disenfranchised: Should Refugees Receive Political Rights in Liberal Democracies?’ (2021) 25(1) Citizenship Studies 56–7110.1080/13621025.2020.1825625.

⁶⁴ Carolina Moulin and Peter Nyers, ‘“We Live in a Country of UNHCR”: Refugee Protests and Global Political Society’ (2007) 1(4) International Political Sociology 356–37210.1111/j.1749-5687.2007.00026.x; Haqqi Bahram, ‘Between Tokenism and Self-Representation: Refugee-Led Advocacy and Inclusion in International Refugee Policy’ (2020) 58 RESPOND Working Paper Series Global Migration: Consequences and Responses 1–18; Bahati Kanyamanza and Emily Arnold-Fernandez, ‘Meaningful Representation Starts at the Top: Refugees on UNHCR’s ExCom’ (2022) 70 Forced Migration Review 21–24.

⁶⁵ Rother and Steinhilper, fn. 60; Triggs and Wall, fn. 56.

⁶⁶ UN, Global Compact on Refugees, fn. 57, para. 34 (emphasis original).

⁶⁷ David Owen, ‘Refugees, Legitimacy and Development’ (2021) 14 Ethics & Global Politics 86–9710.1080/16544951.2021.1926082.

⁶⁸ Mauricio Vilori, Diana Ortiz, Najeeba Wazefadost and Mohammed Badran, ‘The Global Summit of Refugees and the Importance of Refugee Self-Representation’ (2018) 59 Forced Migration Review 62–63.

⁶⁹ Triggs and Wall, fn. 56, at 321.

⁷⁰ Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Political Participation of Refugees: Bridging the Gaps (Stockholm: Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2018).

⁷¹ UN High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘Budget and Expenditure’ (2017). https://reporting.unhcr.org/dashboards/budget-and-expenditure?year=2017, last accessed 18 September 2023.

⁷² Kate Pincock, Alexander Betts and Evan Easton-Calabria, The Global Governed?: Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)10.1017/9781108848831; Evan Easton-Calabria and Kate Pincock, ‘Refugee-Led Social Protection: Reconceiving Refugee Assistance’ (2018) 58 Forced Migration Review 56–58; Kate Pincock, Alexander Betts and Evan Easton-Calabria, ‘The Rhetoric and Reality of Localisation: Refugee-Led Organisations in Humanitarian Governance’ (2021) 57(5) The Journal of Development Studies 719–73410.1080/00220388.2020.1802010.

⁷³ International Refugee Congress, ‘International Refugee Congress 2018 Consultation Report’ (2018).

⁷⁴ Refugee Congress, ‘About Refugee Congress’. https://refugeecongress.org/about-refugee-congress, last accessed 2 June 2023.

⁷⁵ Tamara Domicelj and Carolina Gottardo, ‘Implementing the Global Compacts: The Importance of a Whole-of-Society Approach’ (2019) 60 Forced Migration Review 79–82; UN, Global Compact on Refugees, fn. 57.

⁷⁶ Bhupinder S. Chimni, ‘Global Compact on Refugees: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’ (2018) 30(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 630–63410.1093/ijrl/eey067; Alexander Betts, ‘The Global Compact on Refugees: Towards a Theory of Change?’ (2018) 30(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 623–62610.1093/ijrl/eey056.

⁷⁷ Matthew Gibney, ‘The Duties of Refugees’, in David Miller and Christine Straehle (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Refuge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 132–15310.1017/9781108666466.008.

⁷⁸ Chimni, fn. 76; Volker Türk, ‘The Promise and Potential of the Global Compact on Refugees’ (2018) 30(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 575–585; Jeff Crisp, ‘A Global Academic Network on Refugees: Some Unanswered Questions’ (2018) 30(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 640–64210.1093/ijrl/eey050.

⁷⁹ Sana Mustafa, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us: Why Refugee Inclusion Is Long Overdue’, Refugees Deeply, 20 June 2018. https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/refugees/community/2018/06/20/nothing-about-us-without-us-why-refugee-inclusion-is-long-overdue, last accessed 18 September 2023.

⁸⁰ Mustafa Alio, Shaza Alrihawi, James Milner, Anila Noor, Najeeba Wazefadost and Pascal Zigashane, ‘By Refugees, for Refugees: Refugee Leadership during COVID-19, and Beyond’ (2020) 32(2) International Journal of Refugee Law 370–37310.1093/ijrl/eeaa021; Rother and Steinhilper, fn. 60.

⁸¹ Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, fn. 70.

⁸² Pincock et al., The Global Governed?, fn. 72; Pincock et al., ‘The Rhetoric and Reality of Localisation’, fn. 72.

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