Global Administrative Law is an evolving academic approach that starts with the recognition that the enormous diversity of human activity that is subject to some form of global regulation - from forest preservation, control of fishing and refugee protection to coffee and cocoa standards, labour standards and antitrust regulation - involves a myriad number, scope and variety of regulatory regimes. Many of these regulatory regimes are built around international organisations that have evolved to operate as far more than the instruments of the governments of their Member States.

In this multifaceted regulatory world, GAL suggests that a ‘traditional' understanding of international law as being founded on State consent expressed through treaties and/or customary international law is no longer sufficient to account for all global activities. Instead, GAL suggests that a new regulatory space is emerging, which is distinct from that of inter-State relations, and which transcends the purview of both international law and domestic administrative law: this new regulatory space can be defined as ‘global administrative space'.

Within this global administrative space, GAL seeks to examine the structures, procedures and normative standards that apply to regulatory decision-making carried out via formal intergovernmental regulatory bodies; informal intergovernmental regulatory networks; regulatory decisions of national governments where these are part of or constrained by an international intergovernmental regime; and hybrid public-private or private transnational bodies. In examining these matters, GAL focuses on the actual or potential application of principles, procedural rules and reviewing and other mechanisms that relate to accountability, transparency, participation, and the rule of law in global governance over and above a focus on the particular content of substantive rules generated by global regulatory institutions.