The Rise of Responsibility in World Politics

The opening chapter lays out the conceptual groundwork for respective historical, practical and theoretical case studies across three governance areas in which responsibility has become a core focal point of policymaking over the course of the last three decades: security, environmental, and business governance. Researching the rise of responsibility requires engaging with the simultaneity of formal and informal accountability mechanisms, questions of morality and ethics, and the relations that this practice establishes between a variety of actors in global politics. The general framework of the book holds that moral agency is socially embedded, which paves the way for inquiring into how the normativity of policies plays out in interaction on the ground, particularly in so-termed communities of responsibility. Three results of the case studies stand out: first, there are parallel developments between governance fields, especially the increased formalisation of responsibility in multilateral treaties; second, the observation that responsibility often constituted a compromise in negotiations between states and non-state actors; and third, reliance on human rights as a common point of reference.