Deliberative Equality and the Transgovernmental Politics of the Global Financial Architecture

Revisiting the concept of transgovernmentalism, originally developed by Keohane and Joseph Nye, can shed considerable light on the nature interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance. Transgovernmentalism highlights how certain technocratic policy communities, of finance ministries, central banks, and regulators, dominate the financial architecture. It also provides insights into the political and basis of these actors’ interactions and deliberations. Most importantly, the concept of transgovernmentalism brings the participatory in the current global financial architecture into sharp focus and points in the direction of a workable reform agenda that would expand inclusion participation. This article advocates basing future reform on efforts to a closer realization of the principle of “deliberative equality.” Unfortunately, “transgovernmentalism” is incompatible with deliberative equality, meaning that it is precisely the transgovernmental characteristics of the global financial architecture that have to be challenged and overturned if we are to arrive at anything approximating deliberative equality.