The Democratic Legitimacy of Public-Private Rule Making: What Can We Learn from the World Commission on Dams?

This article attempts to provide answers to one specific and one general question: How should we evaluate the performance of the World Commission on Dams in terms of its democratic legitimacy? And what does the evaluation of the commission's performance tell us about the legitimacy of global rule making in more general terms? Based on these questions, the article comes to two main conclusions. First (measured in terms of its inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability), the democratic legitimacy of the World Commission on Dams' standard-setting process can be challenged in several ways. Second, the difficulties in determining the commission's legitimacy in relation to other mechanisms of rule making demonstrate that we still lack a theoretical understanding of what the idea of democratic governance beyond the nation-state would entail in practice. Achieving a better understanding of this normative aspect of world politics will remain a major task for contemporary political theory.