PhD thesis defence by Antonino Cirillo
In an increasingly interconnected world, the provision of global public goods by international institutions is impaired by widely acknowledged supply failures, including on climate change mitigation, pandemic prevention and knowledge diffusion. In the face of such failures, existing economic, socio-political and legal literature on global public goods has mainly focused on how to facilitate international cooperation. Less attention has been paid to how regulatory design can affect provision.
This thesis seeks to fill this gap. It revisits public goods theory by investigating the regulatory dynamics involved in the supply of global public goods and the effects that hegemonic behaviour by regulatory actors has on it. The theoretical framework of nodal regulation or governance is employed to conceptualise both global public goods’ complex provision path and the 'hegemonic supply problem' that endemically affects it, hampering the capacity of the current international order for effective and legitimate provision.
Eventually, a nodal analysis of a highly complex global public good, the Internet technical infrastructure, and the origins and operation of the multistakeholder organisation that manages it, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is performed. Such an analysis is based on extensive fieldwork conducted by means of semistructured interviews and direct attendance of ICANN’s meetings. Its purpose is twofold: first, to provide an empirical application of the nodal theoretical framework adopted in this thesis, showing examples of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic behaviour in the regulation of global public goods; second, to refine such theoretical framework and identify innovative governance directions for countervailing hegemony.
The pluralisation and specialisation of governance nodes allowed by multistakeholder governance arrangements are eventually identified as key regulatory factors for the provision of global public goods in a more effective and legitimate way than the classical model of Westphalian state-to-state cooperation has been able to achieve so far.
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