This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

When I first began this research, I thought of rescue as an idea that needed reframing. Too often, it rendered workers passive, erasing their histories as migrants and citizens. My aim was to challenge this erasure, to recover the agency of rescued workers by positioning them not only as survivors of exploitation but also as active agents navigating complex social, economic, and political landscapes.

Yet, as I followed rescued workers through courtrooms, shelters, construction sites, and city streets, it became clear that ‘rescue’ was not a single moment, nor a simple misrepresentation; it was an entire terrain of interaction among workers, NGOs, police, lawyers, and bureaucrats. In this terrain, harm and help were often entangled, and survival depended less on the moment of rescue than on what came after. Over the course of the research, however, the field pulled this project in new directions. The politics of access, the anxieties of representation, and the layered realities of post-rescue life demanded that I treat ‘rescue’ not as a solution to be critiqued, but as a site of power relations in its own right, an arena where the lines between harm and help are constantly negotiated.

Thus, the doctoral project from which this book evolved aimed at reclaiming the agency of rescued workers by framing them as both citizens and migrants, rather than as victims of trafficking. I sought out organizations that recognized the importance of migration in workers’ experiences.

It was another unremarkable day at the NGO office, one of those where the hours drag by in a haze of paperwork and quiet monotony. No courtroom hearings to attend, no site visits to meet workers—just stacks of legal documents to comb through.

Atul and I sat side by side, the silence punctuated by the occasional rustle of paper and the sluggish hum of the overhead fan. The air hung heavy, humid, and stifling, the fan offering little respite.

The quiet was broken when two men entered the office—Amal and Akash. Their exhaustion was etched on their faces, a mix of weariness and resolve. Their feet, cracked and dry from endless hours of toil in the brick kiln, were barely protected by tattered plastic slippers, frayed at the edges.

They wore beige shirts, the fabric clinging to them in a patchwork of dirt and sweat, stained and unwashed for days. Mud from the kiln had settled into the fabric, becoming part of its texture. Their hair was unkempt, sticking up in uneven tufts as if abandoned to its own devices. Their hands, calloused and dry, bore the unmistakable marks of relentless, backbreaking labour.

They stood before us, hesitant yet determined, as though weighing the gravity of the decision that had brought them here. In their silence, their bodies spoke volumes—a testament to the gruelling life they had endured and the hope, however fragile, that they had placed in this visit.

This chapter explores the genesis, structure, and potential of the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs), a cornerstone of the Digital Services Act (DSA) aimed at regulating social media platforms. As a manifestation of Governance by Emulation, ODSs blend public law principles with private governance, emulating individual rights adjudication to hold platforms accountable. This chapter examines the political context behind their creation, tracing the EU’s regulatory evolution and the legislative battles that shaped Article 21 of the DSA. While hailed as innovative tools for ensuring accountability, ODSs face significant structural limitations, such as non-binding decisions, weak cost incentives, and a narrow enforcement focus. Nonetheless, they present a promising avenue for resolving disputes efficiently and experimenting with integrating large language models in decision-making. Early implementation highlights a mix of creativity and challenges, offering insights into the EU’s broader regulatory ambitions to administrify platform governance and set global standards. By analyzing ODSs’ hybrid institutional design and initial practices, this chapter illustrates their dual potential: advancing accountability while exposing the risks of emulating public law mechanisms in private contexts. It concludes by reflecting on ODSs’ role as Emulated Guardians and their implications for future governance of digital public spaces. European Union

Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework that underpins the book. It argues that politicians in developing democracies face a dual incentive: they need competent bureaucrats who can implement programs effectively, yet they also desire control over those bureaucrats to secure loyalty and political advantage. As a result, politicians often recruit based on merit but retain formal or informal levers of influence, such as control over promotions or geographic transfers. The chapter distinguishes between programmatic and non-programmatic distribution, emphasizing that politicians often require bureaucratic loyalty to engage in non-programmatic distribution. Further, politicians have greater incentives to engage in non-programmatic distribution when local elections are highly competitive. Accordingly, I expect that intense local electoral competition will result in worse governance outcomes, including higher levels of corruption and partisan allocation of public goods. This framework provides the theoretical lens to interpret the empirical evidence presented in subsequent chapters and situates the book’s contribution within broader debates on state capacity, bureaucratic autonomy, clientelism, and democratic accountability.

There is a story we like to tell about rescue—a story of triumph, of justice served, of victims transformed into citizens, their suffering redeemed by the promise of freedom. It is an uplifting narrative, a denouement that reassures us: the world, though flawed, can be set right. Yet, as the dust settles and the headlines fade, the lives behind these stories continue, marked not by closure but by uncertainty, loss, and the slow, grinding weight of reality— the reality of social structures that constrict individuals’ choices, creating conditions that limit their options and make them work in exploitative conditions in the first place. The moral landscape of these stories also tends to oversimplify the roles of various actors involved. Stories of emancipation rarely delve into the lives of traffickers, some of whom may themselves be impoverished workers, or victims-turned-traffickers, or young people willingly migrating into arduous forms of labour.

Kumud's arrest in 2015 was supposed to be a turning point. In the eyes of the world—non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the media, even myself—it was a victory: a trafficker brought to justice, a symbol of progress. But what did freedom mean for Kumud? Ten years on, the answer is written in debts that never shrink, in the deaths of her daughters who could not be saved, and in a life reduced to selling alcohol on the margins of a city that no longer has a place for her. She waits, not for freedom, but for the end of a legal process that has exiled her from the only home she knew. ‘I am wishing for the case to get over, so I can come back to G. B. Road. I don't have anywhere else to go.’

In this chapter, we first provide an overview of health and mental health outcomes across the different types of street segments studied to assess whether residents of crime hot spots have more adverse health issues compared with residents living on street segments with little or no crime. We find that there are strong relationships between mental and physical health and living in crime hot spots as opposed to non-hot spots. We then examine whether negative health outcomes are a consequence of living in a crime hot spot. We find that hot spots of crime are not simply places with high crime rates; they are also places with strong physical and mental health deficits. After accounting for selection, several physical and mental health problems are found to result from living in a crime hot spot.