Mapping Management: The Missing Link in International Legal Work

International legal workers (lawyers, civil servants, scholars) largely look to legal tools when addressing global challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, lawyers and academics focused on the effectiveness of the International Health Regulations in containing cross-border transmission. In regulating marine pollution and human displacement, scholars also emphasise the role of treaties or soft law instruments. Yet institutions like the World Health Organisation or the UN Environment Programme also rely on management ideas and practices to address global challenges. In 2019, the WHO adopted a ‘risk management approach’ to epidemic preparedness, while UNEP arranges goals and resources according to a Medium-Term Strategic Plan. Lawyers are heavily involved in interpreting and applying these managerial ideas and practices. Nonetheless, scholars and practitioners continue to ignore this managerial turn, leaving a limited understanding of its emergence and effects and a partial, unreflective account of professional practice.

This project responds to that gap by mapping the linkages between managerial and international legal expertise across three governance regimes: global migration, marine pollution, and pandemics. These regimes are chosen for the
diversity of their challenges, and of the actors, purposes, and legal frameworks comprising them. Tracing the emergence and consequences of their managerial turns reveals changing patterns of international legal work.

Building on my previous work on law and management, these three maps are plotted, creating a new, accessible dataset of management tools through archival research and semi-structured interviews at the WHO, UNEP and International Organisation for Migration. The project fosters collaboration between institutional actors, critical legal scholars and management experts through my networks at Tilburg, Harvard and elsewhere. It offers a contextualised account of the managerial turn and its effects on professional priorities, activities, and arguments. The result is a new theoretical account of contemporary international legal work as a practice of crisis management

Although global legal professionals use and interpret treaties and other legal tools, they increasingly rely on management tools as well, including strategic plans, auditing, and mission statements to address global problems. This project maps three global challenges (migration, pollution and pandemics) to trace the effect this management turn has had on the profession. Speaking with institutional experts and academics, it changes our view of the profession as a practice of crisis management.