Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal Recursivity in Creative Commons’ Transnational Standard‐Setting
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12462 |
| Author | Markus Lang,Sigrid Quack,Leonhard Dobusch |
Open to Feedback? Formal and Informal
Recursivity in Creative Commons’Transnational
Standard-Setting
Leonhard Dobusch
Universit€
at Innsbruck
Markus Lang
Universit€
at Heidelberg
Sigrid Quack
Universit€
at Duisburg-Essen
Abstract
In this article, we examine how non-membership organizations that claim stewardship over a transnational public or common
good, such as the environmental or digital commons, develop combinations of formal and informal recursivity to develop and
maintain regulatory conversations with their dispersed user communities. Based on a case study of Creative Commons, an
organization that developed what have become the most widely used open licenses for digital content, we show how rhetori-
cal openness to informal feedback from legitimacy communities in different sectors and countries can improve the feasibility
and diffusion of standards. However, as long as the standard-setter’s methods of making decisions on the basis of such feed-
back remains opaque, its communities are likely to raise accountability demands for more extensive ex post justifications.
Policy Implications
•Voluntary stewardship organizations that seek to exercise stewardship for a transnational public or common good have to
balance the advantages and disadvantages of informal feedback in their standard-setting procedures.
•Insofar as such organizations combine informal but open feedback with formalized but opaque decision-making proce-
dures, they have to address rising demands for ex post explanation and justification of their decisions.
•To counterbalance biases towards self-selection of the most active communities inherent in informal feedback, steward-
ship organizations should develop targeted measures to include groups affected by their standards that would otherwise
likely remain absent from the feedback process.
In the debate on transnational economic governance, vari-
ous forms of non-state standard-setting are often proposed
in cases where international regulation is missing or per-
ceived as inadequate (Bartley, 2007; B€
uthe and Mattli, 2011;
Dobusch and Quack, 2013). However, standards are not only
a tool for transnational governance, but also require gover-
nance of the process through which they are produced in
order to ensure that they are accepted as effective and
legitimate by those who are expected to follow them.
Hence, for governance of continuously changing issues, par-
ticularly in fields driven by highly dynamic technological
change, standard-setting and diffusion are a recursive activ-
ity (Braithwaite, 2002).
As highlighted in the introduction to this special section,
recursive standard-setting varies significantly in terms of
design and organization of membership, feedback channels
and decision-making rules. Furthermore, to fully understand
the existing variety of recursive standard-setting, it is also
necessary to examine how users provide feedback and how
standard-setters actually respond (see Malets and Quack, in
this volume). This article contributes to one important but
understudied dimension of organizing recursivity, which is
the interplay of formal and informal feedback and decision-
making processes in transnational standard-setting.
In the literature on recursivity in transnational governance,
we find contributions that emphasize either formal or infor-
mal ways of organizing such iterative interaction processes
between rule-setters and their addressees. In their work on
the recursivity of global law, Halliday and Carruthers (2007,
2009) focused on how international organizations, profes-
sional associations and national governments participated in
developing global legal norms for cross-border insolvency,
Global Policy (2017) 8:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12462 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 3 . September 2017 353
Special Section Article
To continue reading
Request your trial