Research in the Theory and Practice of Governance (CBR project)

Overview

Background

A generous donation made it possible to establish a CBR Governance Fund to support a research project on the theory and practice of governance. The project takes a comparative and global perspective, comparing emerging forms of governance in China with those in Europe and north America. It is also examining trends in global governance with a focus on international agencies and their role in the production of global public goods.

Aims and objectives

We define governance broadly as the processes through which a polity or entity responds to risks in its environment, with a view to ensuring its continued effectiveness. Critical to this is the capacity of a system of governance to process information about its context, embed that information in its internal processes, and adapt in response to external shocks.

This perspective builds on a number of different but complementary theoretical approaches that stress the cognitive and evolutionary dimensions of governance, including the new institutionalism of Ostrom, North and Aoki; Luhmann’s theory of social systems; the French schools of the economics of conventions and pragmatic sociology; and Foucault’s theory of governmentality, or the ‘art of government’. We aim to develop this theoretical framework and apply it through empirical observation of national, regional, and global trends in governance.

Progress

The project has focused on 2 principal themes. The first is the institutional development of China’s economy, including the evolution of its system of property rights and the emergence of the Belt and Road Initiative and its potential to generate common regulatory standards and frames of reference for transnational trade and the movement of people and resources in and beyond the Eurasian region.

The second is the response of governments around the world to the COVID-19 crisis, with a particular focus on the measures taken in China following the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in late 2019 and on those adopted in other countries from January 2020.

Simon Deakin and Gaofeng Meng completed a working paper on the governance of COVID-19 in September 2020, which was subsequently published in the Industrial Law Journal in December 2021. During 2021, they worked on a paper concerning the evolution of property rights in China. The paper received conditional acceptance from the Journal of Institutional Economics in August 2021 and was published in August 2022.

During the 2022/23 academic year, the project team completed an assessment of the state of the rule of law in Cambodia for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In addition, Simon Deakin, together with co-authors David Gindis and Geoff Hodgson, took part in an exchange with Jean-Philippe Robé on the theory of the firm.

In 2025, Gaofeng published a review of Paddy Ireland’s book, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, in Contributions to Political Economy. In 2026 Gaofeng and Simon worked on a paper examining the evolution of property rights in China.