Decentralized Global Legal Ordering

Abstract

The movement toward inclusivity in global soft law making is set out against a backdrop of historically uneven representation in global institutions. An innovative effort to advance participation in soft law development began in 2012 with the establishment of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) Regional Centre for Asia and the Pacific (“UNICTRAL RCAP”). With this regional presence, this article theorizes the emergence of a new form of decentralized global legal ordering associated with growing regional engagement and participation in global soft law design. This form of engagement contrasts with historically centralized global legal ordering characterized by uniform and limited engagement in soft law development through centralized meetings conducted solely at global headquarters such as the United Nations offices in New York and Vienna. In arriving at this assessment, this paper tests the proposition that the presence of regional centres facilitates both the perception and experience of expanded stakeholder engagement in global soft law development. Analysis of in-depth country case studies following the formation of the UNCITRAL RCAP in 2012, a survey of 50 legal practitioners involved in regional legal reform and empirical analysis of UNCITRAL working group participation logs between 2000 and 2018, suggests that regional centers such as the UNCITRAL RCAP, while still in their early development, have corresponded with a 63% increase in the total number of Asia-Pacific regional contributions in UNCITRAL Working Group II meetings, an 8% increase in official Asia-Pacific representation in UNICTRAL WG II and an average increase of 32% in perceived levels of engagement and participation amongst regional stakeholders. The substantive findings of this study, alongside methodological contributions in the design of a new set of indicators tracking regional participation, provide useful insights supporting the expansion of Regional Centres in areas with historically limited representation in global law making including from within Africa, the Middle East and South America.