This article examines the evolution of Indonesia's Indo-Pacific policy through the lenses of tactical hedging and network centrality. It argues that, since Marty Natalegawa's 2013 proposal for an Indo-Pacific Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (IPTFC), Indonesia has used foreign policy doctrines not merely as declaratory statements, but as strategic signals to test reactions, preserve flexibility, and cultivate regional influence. Tracing the shift from the Global Maritime Fulcrum (GMF) to the Indo-Pacific Cooperation Concept (IPCC) and, ultimately, the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), the article shows that Indonesia shifted from seeking a central role on its own its own to reinforcing ASEAN Centrality as a more viable means of shaping regional order and pursuing network centrality. This recalibration was driven by domestic constraints, including weak policy coordination and limited institutional capacity, as well as intensifying great-power rivalry. While the GMF failed to generate durable network centrality, AOIP enabled Indonesia to embed its strategic preferences within ASEAN and gain broader acceptance. Yet, ASEAN-based network centrality remains only partially institutionalized, leaving ASEAN-centered approach vulnerable to implementation gaps, uneven external support, and the possible dilution caused by expanding engagements beyond ASEAN under Prabowo.
ABSTRACT Global governance no longer confronts merely a democratic deficit but active delegitimation: International organizations are losing democratic member majorities and facing domestic politicization and defunding, whereas autocracies capture the vocabulary of democratization for statist ends. This article argues that under these conditions, the next step in global democratic design is a participation infrastructure that citizens and civil society can build without prior treaty change. Mapping four strands of global democracy scholarship—cosmopolitan theory, research on the democratization of international organizations, authority diffusion, and legitimacy studies—it shows their diagnoses converging on a shared design criterion: a scalable, continuous, individualized participation layer. Three reform tracks—parliamentary globalism, deliberative globalism, and global civil society—stop short of this criterion in complementary ways, a comparison made operational through the case of tuna fisheries governance. Civil Democracy meets the criterion: citizens rank policy options directly or through revisable, non‐transitive trust in open actors whose disclosed rankings aggregate under auditable rules, producing measurable, issue‐specific transnational mandates. The design is theorized as a contribution to the literature on non‐electoral representation, interpreted as a deliberative system with a transmission layer, and assessed against the documented failure modes of digital participation.
ABSTRACT This article examines how the New Washington Consensus is reshaping industrial policy and international economic law, with particular attention to the implications of unilateral climate‐related trade measures for African countries. Drawing on doctrinal and policy analyses of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the United States Inflation Reduction Act, relevant WTO agreements and African regional instruments, the article identifies a double asymmetry: major economies have greater fiscal capacity to deploy green industrial policies, while African states remain constrained by existing trade rules. The article argues for multilateral scrutiny and differentiated implementation of unilateral climate measures; renewed policy space for development‐oriented subsidies and bounded local content requirements; and closer alignment among WTO reform, the AfCFTA and African industrial‐development initiatives. These reforms would enable African countries to pursue low‐carbon industrialisation and regional value chains without abandoning the multilateral trading system.
ABSTRACT This article examines whether and how the informalisation of negotiations within international organisations (IOs) affects the effectiveness of particular negotiation agendas. Moving beyond broad‐brush diagnoses of multilateral gridlock, it develops a differentiated account of how pockets of effectiveness can be maintained under conditions of intensifying geopolitical contestation. Studying the World Trade Organization (WTO), the article demonstrates how the process of informalisation within IOs can secure some degree of effectiveness on selected issues. Based on 42 interviews with diplomats, WTO officials and trade experts and official documentation of negotiation processes and outcomes, we trace negotiation dynamics across three agendas in the WTO: trade and environment, development and inclusiveness. We find that informal negotiation processes, often linked to deliberation and knowledge exchange, can offer pathways to effectiveness in terms of policy output when formal negotiation channels remain deadlocked. This is particularly evident in the negotiations on trade and environment. Informalisation thus offers one, but not the only, pathway to sustaining ‘selective effectiveness’ under geopolitical pressure. Yet, we also find limits, as policy output often remains non‐binding and informal processes may become contested. Our findings contribute to the existing literature on global governance by linking informalisation processes within IOs to debates on effectiveness.
