In this chapter, I examine attempts to respond to the scenario of unmitigated capitalism, where the rich continue to get richer. This second possibility focuses on how greater economic equality might be created. I discuss four approaches. First, I explore how taxation can be used to redistribute wealth. Next, I introduce the emerging idea of “degrowth” – the purposeful shrinking of some parts of the economy to protect the environment. Third, I examine communism as a means of pursuing economic equality. Finally, I outline socialism as a fourth path toward building more equal societies. I identify and articulate the strengths and limitations of each approach. These reflections lay the foundation for the third and final possibility.

This chapter describes the external environment of a financial institution.

Historically, democratic progress has been widely understood as correlated to the representative quality of institutions. Representativeness has been seen as essential for the social appropriation of institutions in societies analyzed as having a class structure. In the national political order, parties were intended to represent the different social interests, and in the particular context of labour, the recognition of trade unions played this role. It is in this spirit that the International Labour Organization (ILO) included trade unions in its various bodies when it was created a century ago, and, since then, the ILO has served as a reference point for representation at the international level.While this conception of representativeness remains relevant, the scope of its application has become more limited. A growing number of essential issues, such as the conservation of the environment or the protection of privacy, are, in fact, directly political: they structure our common world. In this context, authority and legitimacy carry weight in the public debate. Representativeness, by which we can ‘measure’ the social weight of a speaker, is only secondary. ‘Public voices’ have come to have greater relevance, due to their ability to resonate with, and thereby focus and shape, public opinion. These ‘public voices’ are expressed by expert groups with specific subject-area knowledge, or by individuals who have benefited from the haphazard nature of media coverage. As a result, their integration into international life can no longer be institutionalized in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

‘Democratic representation’ seems to have no explanatory power for the current structure and operation of universal IOs and a weak justificatory value for upcoming political reforms of these IOs. However, under the benefit of a renewed approach to universal IOs functions and deliberation, which is one of their meta-functions, the creation of new subsidiary bodies designed to accommodate delegates from Non-State Actors (NSAs) and enable, or even compel, intergovernmental bodies to take into account other interests and perspectives appears to be both necessary and feasible, without any reference to contentious criteria of representativeness based on a fragile principle of democratic legitimacy in IL. The alternative to ‘democratic representation’ consists in amplifying diffuse attempts to redesign the institutional architecture of universal IOs and harnessing the potential of international institutional law, implied powers and privileges and immunities regimes for the sake of a genuinely international, transnational and transgenerational deliberation. Concretely, people speaking for sub-state communities (e.g. from the Global South), future generations or natural entities for instance should be given an institutional role within consultative subsidiary bodies, in combination with state representatives or scientific experts, or not – depending on what is necessary for the fulfilment of the IOs functions. The current context of exacerbated competition between more democratic and less democratic states, some of them obviously being authoritarian, also pleads for a modest approach to IOs political reform leaving the concept of democracy unaltered.

I provide an overview of the book in this introductory chapter. The scope, limits, and style of the book are outlined. I introduce a central tension: that humanity has never been so prosperous, yet it often feels to many of us as though we never have enough. The view from manywheres is a central organizing principle in the book. The idea is to stay on the move between multiple disciplines, methods, and perspectives to comprehensively understand economic inequality. From this holistic view, I articulate a new vision for economic development – one based on the alleviation of poverty, the creation of fairness in our shared economic systems, and the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities.

In the history of international institutional law questions of legitimate or ‘democratic’ representation, participation and decision-making have somewhat regularly re-appeared in both theory and practice over the last 150 years.1 Concrete controversies usually referred to voting procedures, composition of organs, rules of participation, and the formal status of decisions taken by organs of international institutions. A handful of related dichotomies have structured the associated international legal debates in this field, such as unanimity- versus majority-rule, ‘one State one vote’ versus weighted voting, binding versus non-binding decisions, diplomatic versus civil society-representation, as well as legislative versus individualized or administrative decision-making. Structurally, these dichotomies revolve around the foundational and enigmatic principle of sovereign equality of States, consent-based lawmaking and the concept of international institutions as creations and subjects of international (treaty-) law. Inevitably, these debates have also been framed against the background of contemporary world-historical developments, such as the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN) after the two world wars or the decolonization era.

This chapter describes the main statistics used in the description of distributions and their relationships.

This chapter describes reasons for managing risk, outlines corporate governance and discusses the main models of risk management.

I introduce the “equality–difference paradox.” This is the observation that ethnically homogenous countries like Ireland and Denmark tend to have low levels of income inequality, while countries such as the United States and South Africa, with high levels of ethnic diversity, tend to have higher levels of income inequality. I situate this paradox within the context of historical and contemporary demographic change. I explore possible explanations of the paradox in relation to Sierra Leone, South Africa, Denmark, the United States, China, and India. The paradox draws attention to two broader issues: first, the role of pluralism in complex, globalized, multicultural societies; and second, how ongoing efforts to address the paradox raise fundamental questions about how we organize future societies. I conclude this chapter by closing Part II of the book and orienting towards Part III, which explores three possible futures of economic inequality and capitalism.

These conclusions do not intend to summarize and even less to close the debate but instead to revert to the main issues addressed during the conference and maybe identify further issues for research. All contributors agree that not only a discussion on democracy and representation in and by international organisations is not purely speculative or theoretical, but that it seems necessary today. Despite this, contributors are not all in agreement on the need to use the concept of representation when discussing democratization of international organizations. Some question the link between democracy and representation, or whether using representative systems is even feasible in international organizations. This, in turn, leads to the various definitions of the concept of representation in political science and in law. A multiple international representation system (MIRS) as proposed by Besson and Marti is based on a strict concept of democratic representation and contrasts with other more flexible concepts such as ‘descriptive’ or ‘mimetic’ representation. In the end, the chapters address the merits of various systems, including in existing processes of global governance, for further democratizing international organisations.

Many contemporary international organizations (IOs) are empowered to adopt international law that claims to bind their Member States (and, directly or indirectly, their peoples). Certain IOs have also become members of other Ios or, at least, active participants in international lawmaking processes that claim to bind those IOs and their Member States (and their peoples).Generally speaking IOs play a central role in contemporary international lawmaking: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today, be it through international conferences, international courts, or as IO secondary law. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those Ios may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States’ peoples and, accordingly, under which the international law they have the right or discretion to adopt inside and outside of IO organs and processes may claim to bind those peoples legitimately.

This chapter looks at how to deal with extreme events using extreme value theory.