Institutional lawmaking: the emergence of a global normative web

While over the past years lawmaking by international organizations has received abundant attention, institutional lawmaking has moved beyond the traditional methods and actors and is increasingly studied in a broader sense, including new actors and new regulatory activities. This chapter approaches institutional lawmaking with these developments in mind. It assesses the lawmaking functions of traditional international organizations and will also further clarify the notion of institutional lawmaking itself. It focuses on possible lawmaking functions of other international bodies and in doing so will point to the wide variety of bodies and networks active in lawmaking processes. The main argument is that different international norms originating in distinct formal and informal bodies and networks are interconnected and together form a global normative web. Implicitly, this calls for a broader understanding of institutional lawmaking to allow us to take full account of a rich institutional normative output but also of a complex relation between different norms.