The global governance of human cloning: the case of UNESCO

Since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, the question of whether human reproductive cloning should be banned or pursued has been the subject of international debate. Feelings run strong on both sides. In 2005, the United Nations adopted its Declaration on Human Cloning to try to deal with the issue. The declaration is ambiguously worded, prohibiting “all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life”. It received only ambivalent support from UN member states. Given this unsatisfactory outcome, in 2008 UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) set up a Working Group to investigate the possibility of a legally binding convention to ban human reproductive cloning. The Working Group was made up of members of the International Bioethics Committee, established in 1993 as part of UNESCO’s Bioethics Programme. It found that the lack of clarity in international law is unhelpful for those states yet to formulate national regulations or policies on human cloning. Despite this, member states of UNESCO resisted the idea of a convention for several years. This changed in 2015, but there has been no practical progress on the issue. Drawing on official records and first-hand observations at bioethics meetings, this article examines the human cloning debate at UNESCO from 2008 onwards, thus building on and advancing current scholarship by applying recent ideas on global governance to an empirical case. It concludes that, although human reproductive cloning is a challenging subject, establishing a robust global governance framework in this area may be possible via an alternative deliberative format, based on knowledge sharing and feasibility testing rather than the interest-based bargaining that is common to intergovernmental organizations and involving a wide range of stakeholders. This article is published as part of a collection on global governance

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur

Interest groups in multiple streams:specifying their involvement in the framework

Although interests inhabit a central place in the multiple streams framework (MSF), interest groups have played only a minor role in theoretical and empirical studies until now. In Kingdon’s original conception, organized interests are a key variable in the politics stream. Revisiting Kingdon’s concept with a particular focus on interest groups and their activities—in different streams and at various levels—in the policy process, we take this argument further. In particular, we argue that specifying groups’ roles in other streams adds value to the explanatory power of the framework. To do this, we look at how interest groups affect problems, policies, and politics. The influence of interest groups within the streams is explained by linking the MSF with literature on interest intermediation. We show that depending on the number of conditions and their activity level, interest groups can be involved in all three streams. We illustrate this in case studies reviewing labor market policies in Germany and chemicals regulation at the European level

Smoke screen? : The globalization of production, transnational lobbying and the international political economy of plain tobacco packaging

In 2012, Australia became the first country in the world to introduce plain tobacco packaging in an effort to reduce tobacco consumption. This move was vehemently opposed by the tobacco industry, which challenged it on several levels: nationally, bilaterally and multilaterally at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The political behaviour of the tobacco companies in this case is puzzling both in terms of scale, operating at multiple levels at the same time, and in terms of the countries mobilized in their defence. WTO litigation is typically the result of multinational enterprises (MNEs) lobbying their own government, but here third countries were mobilized. Lobbying in third country contexts, with the objective of accessing multilateral dispute settlement systems, has been little studied. We thus know very little about the driving factors behind such activities, how target governments are selected and what lobbying strategies are used. This article draws on emerging research on transnational lobbying and a case study of the plain packaging case to explore these issues in detail and, by doing so, aims to further our theoretical understanding of the political economy of international trade in the context of increasing regime complexity and globalization of production. In addition, the article sheds new light on advocacy in the context of disputes about cross-border challenges to domestic regulation