Global Governance

Global governance is a new and much contested area of scholarly enquiry. Situated principally in the discipline of international relations, global governance is broadly understood to be a term of reference for the various and collected ways in which life on this planet is managed. The absence of a world state (or other overarching political body) ensures that global governance is currently concerned with a host of actors—states, international and regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations, and financial markets, to name the most obvious—and the impact of their actions on the global environment, world economy, the international political system, and the social and cultural orders therein. The study of global governance also has a distinctly normative quality—that is, it is concerned with how the globe is governed and how it might be governed.

Interest in global governance emerged out of a dissatisfaction with existing ways of understanding world politics in the face of a series of changes that occurred in the closing years of the twentieth century. This interest was prompted by a need to better understand the changing role of the state, the growing significance of regional and international organizations, increasing global interdependence, the problems and possibilities presented by developments in information and communication technologies, and the increasing significance of nonstate actors—not just NGOs, but also private military companies, multinational corporations, business and legal associations, and credit rating agencies, among others—and their overall contribution to world politics in the post–Cold War era. Scholars explored changes in global governance in relation to developments such as growing global inequalities, accelerating environmental degradation, an upsurge in civil and regional conflicts, and increasing anxiety about the activities of some global “actors” (especially international organizations such as the World Trade Organization [WTO]). Similarly, scholars discussed changes in global governance in relation to concerns about a decline in global democracy (especially its accountability and transparency) and concerns about the inadequacy of existing intergovernmental machineries for dealing with crises such as mass human rights violations, global warming, and infectious disease.

Despite a widespread recognition of the events that sparked an interest in how global affairs are managed, scholarly attempts to wrestle with such a vast field of study have yet to produce a common definition. Moreover, little progress has been made on clearly delimiting the terrain of study. For instance, scholars have been unable to agree on whether global governance refers simply to the way in which interstate interaction is managed or whether it should be expanded to include the actions and activities of a host of nonstate actors. It is unsurprising to find, then, that global governance has been used as a term of reference for the study of, and everything associated with, international organizations; it has been used as shorthand for the growing array of nonstate actors and their increasing influence on the world stage; it has become a leitmotif for the need to find global solutions to problems of planetary significance (particularly those of an environmental nature); and it has come to be synonymous with the governance of globalization and neoliberalism.

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