About

Charles F. Sabel is the Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a professor of social science. He holds an A.B. in social studies and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. His earlier work focused on the crisis of mass production and its implications for market regulation and macroeconomics. His recent work develops pragmatist ideas into a general conception of democratic experimentalism, with particular attention to regulation, complex social service provision, and contracting under uncertainty. Sabel's current projects include elaborating experimentalist solutions to global problems such as trade and climate change, investigating the transformation of U.S. administrative law in the face of uncertainty, and exploring new models of economic development in the context of globalization.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Law and economics
• Business
• Economics
• International economics
• Epistemology
• Political economy
• Public administration
• Environmental science
• International trade

Selected publications

• Global Democracy?

  2026-01-06

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Transforming the Welfare State, One Case at a Time: How Utrecht Makes Customized Social Care Work

  Politics & Society · 2023-01-17 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Advanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht's success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules.

  PublisherDOI

• Polycentrism

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 34 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract How does governing work today? How does society (mis)handle pressing challenges such as armed violence, cultural difference, ecological degradation, economic restructuring, geopolitical shifts, global pandemics, migration flows, and technological change in ways that are democratic, effective, fair, peaceful, and sustainable? This book addresses this key question around the theme of ‘polycentrism’: i.e. the idea that contemporary governing is dispersed, fluctuating, messy, elusive, and headless. Chapters develop this notion of polycentrism from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines and theoretical approaches. Readers thereby obtain a full coverage of exciting new thinking about how today’s world is (mis)ruled. The book distinguishes four paradigms of knowledge about polycentric governing—organizational, legal, relational, structural—and pursues conversations across the divides that normally keep these approaches in separate research communities. These exceptional inter-paradigm exchanges focus especially on issues of techniques (how governing is done), power (what forces drive governing), and legitimacy (whether governing is rightful). Comparisons between the multiple perspectives on polycentric governing highlight, and help to clarify, the distinctive emphases, potentials, and limitations of each approach. In addition, combinations across the diverse theories generate promising novel avenues of thought about polycentrism. Through their engagement with the book, readers can develop their own understandings of governing today and thereby become more empowered political subjects.

  DOI

• Fixing the Climate

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-08-02 · 9 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fixing the Climate

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022 · 30 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Environmental science
  PublisherDOI

• The Uncertain Future of Administrative Law

  Daedalus · 2021 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract A volatile series of presidential transitions has only intensified the century-long conflict between progressive defenders and conservative critics of the administrative state. Yet neither side has adequately confronted the fact that the growth of uncertainty and the corresponding spread of guidance–a kind of provisional “rule” that invites its own revision–mark a break in the development of the administrative state as significant as the rise of notice-and-comment rulemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas rulemaking corrected social shortsightedness by enlisting science in the service of lawful administration, guidance acknowledges that both science and law are in need of continual correction. Administrative law has the resources to ensure that the provisionality of guidance does not lead to the abuses that conservatives fear. But to deploy those resources–and to carry through the reforms of administrative organization that are their natural complement–progressives must rethink their commitments to judicial deference to administrative authority and administrative deference to presidential authority, commitments on which the progressive defense of the administrative state currently depends.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Uncertain Future of Administrative Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Law and economics
  PublisherDOI

• Plurilateral Cooperation as an Alternative to Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain at a Time

  Global Policy · 2021 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • International trade

  Abstract At the end of 2017 different groups of WTO members decided to launch talks on four subjects, setting aside the WTO consensus working practice. This paper argues that these ‘joint statement initiatives’ (JSIs) should seek to establish open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) even in instances where the outcome can be incorporated into existing schedules of commitments of participating WTO members. Designing agreements as OPAs provides an institutional framework for collaboration among the responsible national authorities, transparency, mutual review and learning, as well as alternatives to default WTO dispute settlement procedures which may not be appropriate for supporting cooperation on the matters addressed by the JSIs. In parallel, WTO members should establish enforceable multilateral principles to ensure OPAs are compatible with an open global trade regime.

  PublisherDOI

• Domain-specific Plurilateral Cooperation as an Alternative to Trade Agreements

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Plurilateral Cooperation as an Alternative to Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain at a Time

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  At the end of 2017 different groups of WTO members decided to launch talks on four subjects, setting aside the WTO consensus working practice. This paper argues that these ‘joint statement initiatives’ (JSIs) should seek to establish open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) even in instances where the outcome can be incorporated into existing schedules of commitments of participating WTO members. Designing agreements as OPAs provides an institutional framework for collaboration among the responsible national authorities, transparency, mutual review and learning, as well as alternatives to default WTO dispute settlement procedures which may not be appropriate for supporting cooperation on the matters addressed by the JSIs. In parallel, WTO members should establish enforceable multilateral principles to ensure OPAs are compatible with an open global trade regime.

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Gráinne de Búrca

  European University Institute

  32 shared

• Robert O. Keohane

  University of Oxford

  31 shared

• Jonathan Zeitlin

  Scuola Normale Superiore

  20 shared

• William H. Simon

  Stanford University

  18 shared

• Dani Rodrik

  18 shared

• Ricardo Hausmann

  Santa Fe Institute

  18 shared

• Anne Morriss

  New York University Press

  16 shared

• Andrés Throughout

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  16 shared

Education

• B.A., Social Studies

  Harvard University

• M.A., Government

  Harvard University