CIAO DATE: 03/2012
February 2012
We frequently treat the changing constellation that has come to be referred to as global governance as a lackluster fait accompli. Nobody has masterminded it. Nobody is really in charge. Almost everybody has reasons to be unhappy about what they view as its current suboptimal state. As such, global governance is not an easy phenomenon to assess or audit. The benchmarks and scales to be used are not obvious. Yet an audit attempt is nevertheless necessary, if for no other reason than to start to form a deliberated assessment, to develop some benchmarks, and to refine our questions for the future. With this goal in mind, I, along with David Held of the London School of Economics, Miguel Maduro of European University Institute, Eva-Maria Nag of the Global Policy journal, and Kalypso Nicolaidis of Oxford, set out to organize such an audit and formulated three questions designed to assess the achievements of, impediments to, and imminent challenges for global governance. Throughout 2011, these questions were channeled to students and the younger generation of academics at universities and think tanks around the world. Many of the submissions we received were by single authors. Australian National University (ANU), Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, Global Relations Forum in Istanbul, Hong Kong University, New Economic School (NES) in Moscow, Sabanci University in Istanbul, and Yale University ran workshops and submitted reports on their discussions and conclusions. Accepted submissions are available at the Global Policy website, and a subset is included in this working paper. Several points emerge from both the content and the geographical origin of the responses to our audit. For starters, interest in global governance is not uniform across the world. Europeans seem most comfortable with, and fluent in, the global governance debates, which is not surprising. Europe, with the European Union (EU), has been functioning with pooled competencies and sovereignties for decades and is used to thinking about solutions to global problems and changing power architectures through the prism of international law and organizations. Zang reports a rapidly growing interest and debate concerning global governance in China. For much of the rest of the world, issues of global governance seem alien and have high entry barriers. Many in the South have been excluded for too long from the real deliberations. Both interest and familiarity seem to have suffered as a result.
Resource link: Global Governance Audit [PDF] - 4.3M