Global governance is increasingly accompanied by processes of legalization. Yet, although scholars of international relations and international law have started to explore these phenomena, there is only little consensus on what legalization actually means. Drawing on insights of international relations and international legal scholarship, this contribution wants to take a closer look on the concept of legalization and suggests conceptualizing legalization as a discursive process of normative thickening within which social norms finally condense into a formal legal norm. My contribution shall focus on three aspects: First, I want to briefly sketch out and merge the ongoing debates on legalization within the disciplines of International Relations and International Law. Against this background, I want to develop my own concept of legalization that divides the process of legalization into three phases (agenda-setting, negotiation and implementation) within which the level of legalization can be analyzed on three dimensions: (1) the content of the norm, (2) the norm-setting procedure and (3) the mechanisms of the judicial review. I argue that an increasing precision of the norm’s content, the formalization of the norm-setting procedure and the institutionalization of its review process indicates an increasing level of legalization. In a final step, I would like to illustrate the application of my concept in the context of global development governance. My contribution exemplarily analyzes the level of legalization of aid delivery by focusing on the emergence of the Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness in 2005.
