Max Planck Institute project on international bureaucracies

Scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, in Heidelberg, Germany, are coming to the end of an extensive and ambitious two-year research project into the law of international bureaucracies. The project's website - for all those who speak better German than I do - is available here; although it is worth noting that the results of the project, to be presented at a seminar at the Institute in April of this year, will be in English.

The main bulk of the project consists in around twenty detailed case-studies of international administrations and the law regulating them. These include international organisations that produce binding norms or decisions (such as ILO, UNHCR, Security Council); those that produce non-binding norms (certain aspects of the World Bank, OECD, OSCE and FAO); treaty regimes (CITES, Kyoto); networked regimes (dealing with issues of security, migration and energy); and hybrid organisations (ICANN). A full(er) list of the case studies can be found on this workshop programme (in English) from earlier in the project.

Plans are, it seems, to first publish some of the case studies in the German Law Journal (an excellent, free, monthly online academic publication), and then to follow thus up with a more comprehensive book on the subject later in the year. Of course, we'll keep you informed as these come out.