International Governance by Proxy

Despite the officious title, this is a really important issue.  Here is one of the major challenges we face to get anything done that requires international agreement and/or participation.

There are no sovereignty rights for any international organizations.  So unless every single country agrees, the agreement stalls.  There are some organizations that can pass policies with less than 100% of the vote, but the countries that vote no can just opt-out.  That is what the US does with many of the UN initiatives they don't agree with.

The problem is that when you have 150+ countries involved in the negotiation, there will never be an agreement.  There are too many divergent issues and priorities.  But if you exclude anyone, you lose the value of unanimous consensus, the validity of the agreement, and in practice the compliance of countries that don't agree.

So my thought is to leverage the brilliance of our Founding Fathers and use a federalist representative model.  Here is what I am thinking:

1.  Each country votes in a secret ballot open ended format for who they want to represent them in the negotiations.  They are free to vote for themselves.

2.  The top five vote-getters form the negotiating committee.  So the risk of voting for yourself is that unless other countries respect your position, your vote is "wasted."  In general, larger and more influential countries will get selected.  This is what we want if we hope to get consensus and compliance at the end of the process. 

3.  There is another worldwide vote for weighting. Every country votes for one of the five committee member countries.  The committee negotiates equally, but then when any official votes are taken they are weighted according to this score.  It can be some hybrid of GDP, population, or whatever summed for all of the countries that voted for them.  For example, if many countries respect Brazil's position on environmental policy, then Brazil will receive many votes (in both rounds) and have a large influence in the final international agreement of the environmental committee.  But these same countries can vote for a different country when setting up the international trade committee, the human trafficking committee, or whatever.  Moderate and reasonable positions are likely to get on the committee.  Extremists won't, but will feel included because they got to vote both for committee membership and for committee weighting.

4.   These five countries then negotiate a policy.  I used five just because it is enough to represent a variety of positions but not unwieldy. If four or six is better, then so be it.

5.  The final negotiated policy becomes the international treaty on the environment or on trade or on whatever.  Everyone has previously committed to abide by the result and has participated in the process, so there should be a decent amount of buy-in.  Admittedly, North Korea and some other real outliers may never agree, but I don't think any system could handle them.

Because every country gives their proxy to one of the final committee members in the second round, their vote is counted in the final treaty vote.  Just not separately.

And because a new committee is formed for each domain (environment, trade . . . ), the major positions will always be represented, extreme positions will be muted, and countries will have a strong incentive to build an international reputation for developing smart positions because this was they get to form the final policy language in domains they care about.