Deliberative safeguards and global governance: a market-based approach to address Garrett W. Brown's 'deliberative deficit' within the global fund

Garrett W. Brown has argued that donor voting caucuses produce a deliberative deficit between donor and non-donor members in the Global Fund International Board. Although we agree with this assessment, in our research on low-transaction cost alternatives to cope with consistent deliberative conditions (i.e. low-cost arrangements to bring about the exchange among Board members in a certain way) we have found that deliberation and interest-based preference maximisation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as long as we manage to stop donor members from behaving like monopolists. To this end, we have to open up the Board from its present state of non-transparency, so that new input can be obtained from new constituents. This will also soften the current principal-agent structure that links members to their donors, easing the transition to market-driven governance rules that provide for the replacement of Board members if they do not fulfil the new constituents' expectations. Keywords: deliberative democracy, Global Fund, governance rules, multisectoralism, preference maximisation, voting caucuses
Introduction The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (hereafter the Global Fund) has attracted attention from scholars and policy makers concerned with multisectoralism and public-private partnerships to mobilise [...]