Promoting Public Value Through International Organization
Authors:   Korea Association for Public Value, Howe Brendan 
Published: June 2023

Purpose: This article explores the evolution of practical global governance measures aimed at promoting public values in an anarchic (in the sense of without government) international operating environment. The process of international organization has occupied a central position in the discourse, and the physical manifestations of various formal international organizations and informal institutions have provided practical experiments in policy implementation. From the starting point of the universal lowest common denominator of values generated by an overlapping consensus of competing epistemological traditions (that of avoiding interstate war), the process of international organization has gradually expanded to embrace non-traditional security public values. Middle powers have played a key role in the expansion of the global governance paradigm, and aspirations for more comprehensive public value generation. The centrality of multilateralism and the roles of middle powers have, however, increasingly come under pressure from the realities of great power contestation in the international operating environment. The relatively new “minilateral” manifestations of international organization are also demonstrated as coming up short when providing public value promotion. This article, therefore, asks and attempts to answer the central global governance question of how can public values be promoted in the international operating environment in the absence of a central governing authority?
Method: This research project used a qualitative approach consisting of literature review and document analysis. The results of this study should be supplemented by quantitative and qualitative studies in the future. The literature review consists of a comprehensive assessment of scholarly academic publications from competing perspectives in the fields of political and moral philosophy, public administration, and international relations. The document survey is mainly related to the policy documentation output of national governments and international organizations, as well as media reports.
Results: The research identifies how new practical challenges to established multilateral manifestations of international organization and the global normative aspirations of middle powers, as well as shortcomings of the more recent minilateral arrangements require radical out of the box thinking. Hence, new modalities and conceptualizations are proposed to address the challenges of public value provision through the process of international organization. These include non-traditional security minilaterals, regional international commissions, and a central role for the new conceptualization of “second-tier” powers.
Conclusion: Global public values are generated at the international level, in the absence of global government, through the process of international organization. Various models of practical manifestation of the related theoretical concepts have been proposed, and have been implemented, with varying degrees of success. In a time of increased great power contestation, however, multilateral institutions and middle powers, their chief proponents, have been undermined. The proliferation of minilaterals and minilateralism has proven to be an inadequate procedural replacement. Hence the need to explore additional agencies of “disruptive innovation.”