Institutional Hybrids and the Rule of Law as a Regulatory Project

Abstract

Legal pluralism - as practice and theory - is frequently viewed as a functional response to the diversity of legal culture and practices around the globe. Such a bottom up perspective elides the questions of ‘who’ promotes these experiments and for ‘what’ reason. In essence, we argue that legal pluralism is regulatory project that should be understood as a technology of jurisprudence that provides templates for institutional entrepreneurs such as transnational agencies as they develop novel institutions of legal governance. Regulatory projects grounded in the theory and practice of legal pluralism are attempts to steer ‘rule of law’ programs via the incorporation of private or civic actors within institutional hybrids that use social norms or civic actors to purse ‘rule of law’ programs. Using customary regimes - often around reinvented customary practices - has resonance with regimes of legal governance in the late colonial state through various forms of indirect rule.

Keywords: legal pluralism , regulation ,global law, law and development