Sub-State Agency in Global Governance: A Relational Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract How do sub-state entities become actors in global governance? Global governance and sub-state diplomacy (also known as paradiplomacy) scholarship acknowledges that sub-state entities are global governance actors but not how they acquire international agency. We argue that sub-state agency is not an inherent disposition but rather the product of complex relational interaction between established and emerging global governance actors. We adapt Hofferberth and Lambach’s relational agency framework to sub-state entities and apply this new framework to a case study of Quebec’s agentification towards la francophonie conferences and institutional efforts from the 1960s until the 2000s. We find that sub-state entities’ defining actorness characteristic is that as constituent units of sovereign states, sub-state entities are simultaneously sovereignty-bound and sovereignty-free. This status endows them with unique structural constraints and opportunities as global governance actors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".