
WG Hart Legal Workshop — A Paper on Civil Society and Globalization of Administrative Law
The W. G. Hart Legal Workshop is a major annual legal research event organised and hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of London. Over the years this eponymous workshop series, subsidised by funds from the W. G. Hart Bequest, has focused on a wide range of comparative and international legal issues and topical interests.
The 2017 WG Hart Legal Workshop explores political, institutional, economic and cultural factors that influence (or have in the past influenced) the emergence and development of legal regimes for controlling administrative power. For the purposes of the Workshop, a regime for controlling administrative power encompasses legal rules and principles (‘administrative law’), and also institutions and practices relating to control of administrative power. Administrative power is understood broadly in terms of any and all of the multifarious functions and activities associated with modern ‘governance’.

The paper I will present aims at portraying the commonalities (and discussing the controversies) of common methods of administrative governance pertaining to supranational regulatory regimes and regulators — e.g. the European Union, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization.
NB. The full paper is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2999767
The analysis focuses on the role of coalitions of civil society actors in favouring policy convergence between different supranational regulatory regimes. The following three aspects will be explored: first, the nature of the described coalitions of civil society actors and the activities in which those coalitions are engaged; second, the capacity of such coalitions to operate as drivers of harmonized principles of administrative governance (e.g. transparency, due process in decisions affecting private parties and review mechanisms to ensure legality) across different supranational regulators; and, third, the controversies raised by these coalitions.
This paper will make an attempt to answer two main questions: (1) how the convergence of administrative principles among supranational legal regimes is encouraged by coalitions of civil society actors? This paper suggests that the cooperation between coalitions of civil society actors and supranational regulators encourages convergence of administrative rules through attractiveness and imposition. Attractiveness signifies learning and voluntary imitation of a superior model perceived as more functional or legitimate, whereas convergence conveyed through imposition is based on the use of authority and power that bring to a compulsion to conform; (2) which are the main controversies raised by coalitions of civil society actors? Possible tensions are those related to the functioning and flexibility of coalitions of civil society actors, especially when they grow bigger (and the likeliness of controversial positions increases). Other tensions may come from competition among different coalitions, or lack of experimentation in developing new principles or standards.
The paper proceeds as follows. The first section describes civil society coalitions and briefly illustrating the reasons motivating their existence. The second section focuses on the role of coalitions of civil society actors in spreading principles of administrative governance across supranational legal systems. The third section shifts the focus of analysis to the problematic aspects related with civil society coalitions as drivers of convergence of principles of administrative law at the supranational level.
