Abstract: The legitimacy dilemma of global financial governance was fully revealed and drew widespread attention in the global financial crisis. Global financial governance has three defining features, i.e., being crisis-driven, inherently imbalanced, and informal. Closely related to these three features, the legitimacy dilemma of global financial governance unfolds as the “democracy deficit” problem, due process problem, and the validity problem. In the post-crisis era, dominated and urged by the Group of Twenty, the international society and the relevant bodies tried to break the dilemma by improving the representation of the bodies, strengthening the normalization of the procedures, and enhancing the authority of the rules. Those efforts, albeit fruitful, did not solve all the problems. Recently, the growing tendency towards hegemonism, unilateralism and anti-globalization on the part of the United States has posed new challenges to global financial governance. In the future, the international community should firmly stick to the principle of multilateralism, reform the existing multilateral financial governance system, establish and improve such governance bodies and mechanisms as dominated by the emerging countries, enhance the agenda-setting ability of the emerging great powers, and balance the legitimacy and effectiveness of global financial governance on the basis of rethinking the “softness” and “hardness” of the international rules.

Keywords: global financial governance, Group of Twenty, soft law, global financial law, multilateralism

The author of this article is the deputy director of the CASS Bureau of International Cooperation and a research fellow at CASS Institute of International Law. This article is published in Chinese Journal of Law (5) 2020.