NETWORKED GOVERNANCE, TRANSNATIONAL BUSINESS & THE LAW

- KYUSHU UNIVERSITY, FACULTY OF LAW, 8TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE -

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DATE: Feb. 10-11, 2013
LOCATION: Nishijin Plaza, Fukuoka, Japan

THEME

A distinctive feature of the post-1970 globalization of business regulation has been the emergence, across diverse fields of economic and business law, of regulatory “networks” involving routinized transnational cooperation – both formal and informal – between institutional actors. These transnational networks are of different types, some involving cooperation between public bodies, others entailing interaction between public, private & quasi-public institutional actors. Moreover, these networks perform various different functions: e.g. “enforcement networks” designed to make enforcement more efficient across international borders, “information networks” aimed at promoting information exchange and “harmonization networks” seeking uniformity in substantive and procedural normative standards.

The resulting global web of regulatory networks has transformed the legal environment in which business enterprises now operate. The classic liberal system of nation states coordinating activities at the government level has been displaced by a more fragmented system of “multi-level” networked governance in which new institutional and normative forms have proliferated.

As a consequence, the contemporary global legal order is more uncertain, de-centered and interconnected, as the multiplicity of regulatory networks create unprecedented coordination problems and increasingly complex interactions between legal systems.

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from different fields of economic and business law in order to map this emerging order of transnational regulatory networks. The conference will seek to identify the main actors within a range of different networks and to identify and evaluate the diverse functions performed by such networks. Moreover, since networks raise a number of normative concerns (e.g. domination by experts, lack of transparency and circumvention of traditional democratic procedures / sources of legitimacy), networked governance requires a new normative foundation. Finally, the conference will examine the meaning, value and limits of the “network concept” as an analytical tool for understanding and critically evaluating the emergent transnational regulatory order.