Hybrid international actors and legitimacy in global governance : the strategies of retrospective self-legitimation of Maurice Strong
A Working Paper by Sabine Selchow |2026
My paper introduces the concept of the ‘hybrid international actor’ to analyse individuals whose international agency and claims to authority rest on the continued combination of positions, relationships and resources acquired across institutionally distinct fields. Such hybridity can provide exceptional capacities for action while creating distinctive problems of legitimacy: cross-sectoral experience may raise questions about conflicting interests, elite networks about privilege and accountability, and institutional mobility about loyalties and independence. My paper sets out to understand how such actors seek to legitimate their authority. I do this through a case study of Maurice Strong (1929–2015), whose career connected business, government, the United Nations, environmental politics, philanthropy and transnational networks. I analyses Strong’s 2001 book Where on Earth Are We Going? as a retrospective form of self-presentation and identify three interrelated dimensions of self-legitimation. Epistemic legitimation constructs Strong’s heterogeneous experience and embodied knowledge as a basis for distinctive judgement. Purposive legitimation presents his movement between influential positions as the expression of a moral calling and commitment to wider purposes. Positional legitimation combines institutional access with claimed independence from institutional conventions and interests. Together, these strategies reinterpret potential liabilities of hybridity as grounds of legitimate international authority: business experience turns into practical and environmental knowledge, economic resources turn into independence, elite networks become access and effectiveness, and institutional mobility turns into a capacity to act across boundaries. The Strong case shows how hybrid international actors construct coherence and legitimacy from the heterogeneous foundations of their contested international authority.
Selchow, Sabine Ulrike, Hybrid international actors and legitimacy in global governance: the strategies of retrospective self-legitimation of Maurice Strong, EUI, HEC, Working Paper, 2026/11, ECOINT - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/96479
