global governance essay

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Global governance.

• Roberto Domínguez Roberto Domínguez Department of Government, Suffolk University
•  and  Rafael Velázquez Flores Rafael Velázquez Flores Faculty of Economics and International Relations (FEyRI), University of Baja California
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.508
• Published online: 30 July 2018

The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the literature on global governance, key elements for understanding its conceptualization, and a gateway to capture its multidimensionality. From this perspective, global governance is conceived as a framework of analysis or intellectual device to study the complexity of global processes involving multiple actors that interact at different levels of interest aggregation. The article is divided into four parts. The first section describes the origins, definitions, and characteristics of global governance. The second categorizes global governance based on different thematic areas where there is a confluence of governance practices, on the one hand, and the inclusion of a global level of interaction, on the other. The third discusses the different conceptual inquiries and innovations that have been developed around the term. Finally, the last part maps the different academic institutions that have focused their research on global governance and offer programs on this subject.

• global governance
• globalization
• international system
• institutions
• global actors
• global civil society
• international organizations
• global security
• global economic governance
• global environment

This article aims at explaining the development of the literature on global governance by providing a guide to understanding the evolution of its definitions, thematic applications, conceptual debates, and institutional developments. As the primary audience is scholars wishing to familiarize themselves with debates surrounding the topic, the article offers a gateway to capturing the multidimensionality of global governance. From this perspective and following its discussions, global governance is conceived as a framework of analysis or intellectual device for studying the complexity of global processes involving multiple actors that interact at different levels of interest aggregation.

The primary challenge of this article is to review a term that is amorphous (Zurn, 2012 ) and ubiquitous (Bevir, 2011 ). Global governance emerged as a practice and disciplinary field of inquiry as a product of the end of the Cold War, even though some early debates can be traced back to the late 1970s. The subsequent literature review is organized under the rationale that global governance is an analytical hub helping researchers and policymakers to explain and suggest new avenues of action in an increasingly interconnected world. A defining characteristic is that such interconnection blurs the distinction between public authority and private initiative, and steadily transforms the role of state and nonstate actors operating at different levels of analysis. Understanding global governance as an analytical hub allows grouping its extensive literature and interpreting the various adjectives that have been added to global governance over the years to adapt it to specific areas of human activity at the global level.

The unstructured and pervasive nature of global governance provides the potential for adopting a variety of forms to study it. This article begins with the identification of the main definitions and characteristics of global governance. The second section categorizes global governance based on different thematic areas where there is a confluence of governance practices, on the one hand, and the inclusion of a global level of interaction, on the other. The thematic criteria permit including an interdisciplinary perspective that enriches international relations in light of the evidence that governance practices at the global level operate in a wide range of areas. Later, the paper follows with the identification of some of the conceptual debates and innovations around global governance. The final section presents a survey of the institutions promoting the study of global governance.

Definitions and Characteristics: A New Framework For a Complex World

Globalization, technological change, and transformations in the international order have produced a puzzle that policymakers and scholars have been trying to disentangle since the end of the Cold War. While change is an inherent characteristic of the global system, each historical period experiences a particular articulation of dominant actors and prevailing environment. The arrival of global governance to the debates in international relations is not an exception. While global governance is associated with the transformations of the international system at the end of the 20th century , its roots are traced back to the gradual transformation that has taken place since the early 1970s, which includes the development of the consciousness about global environment, the increasing number of nonstate actors, and the enhancement of the UN system.

Some of the earliest scholarly references to global governance appeared in the mid-1970s. The journal Social Sciences Quarterly included several articles related to the scarcity of global resources and the creation of mechanisms to manage them in 1976 . Nelson and Honnold ( 1976 ) studied the possibility of severe global resource scarcity. They argued that the aggregate individual sacrifice, long-term planning, and global governance are commonly the social responses, but they also require the systematic application of social sanctions to make them consistent with organizational regularities and reinforcement principles (Nelson & Honnold, 1976 ). By the end of the 1970s, Onuf ( 1979 ) made some references to the concept of global governance in his discussion of the absence of an international legal regime, noting the state of global anarchy while emphasizing the lack of scholarly explanation. In a semantic reflection on the nature of authority and order, and how it relates to sovereignty, Onuf asserted that such a dichotomy does not preclude the existence of some order in the global arena (Onuf, 1979 ).

During the 1980s and early 1990s, global governance was increasingly used to relate to a more complex international system, but it was not the central concept of analysis. Dator ( 1981 , 2009 ) developed forecasting methods about alternative futures, archetypes, or images (continued growth, transformation, collapse, conserver/disciplined society) to help scholars and policymakers to explore the drivers, identify the emerging issues, and deconstruct/reconstruct models of development and power in global governance. Branscomb ( 1983 ) focused his research on the growing unregulated flow of data across borders and framed global governance as a mechanism which would contribute to regulating these data flows. After explaining the role of data in liberal societies, he provided some ideas about the role of global governance to develop regulatory data bodies. Senghaas ( 1993 ) also contributed to the analysis of global governance by exploring globalized problems such as climate conventions, responses to epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, and development regimes; his research lead him to explore the concept of a “world domestic policy” capable of addressing the global issues that the “sum of uncoordinated national policies” was no longer adequate to manage and ameliorate.

Incentivized by the uncertainties derived from the end of the Cold War, the theoretical mainstream in international relations gradually shifted away from the study of intergovernmental organizations, law, and world studies, which was seen as top-down and static, toward global governance (Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014 ). Alerted by the mismatch between new international challenges and lack of consistent responses from state and state oriented actors, James Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel sparked the debate on global governance after the publication of their theoretical collection of essays Governance without Government in 1992 (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992 ). Global governance debates and studies experienced significant progress in 1995 . The policy-oriented Commission on Global Governance, co-chaired by Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and former Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, published the report Our Global Neighborhood (Commission on Global Governance, 1995 ). Later, in the winter 1995–1996 , the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACNUS) and the United Nations University sponsored the launch of the journal Global Governance , which has pursued nonpartisan, intellectually challenging, and academically sound debates about global governance (Coate & Murphy, 1995 ).

The transformations of the international context sparked a vivid and active scholarly conversation about the definitions and characteristics of global governance. Like other complex phenomena, global governance has been defined in a variety of ways. Two of the definitions related in this article observe the role of international institutions. Thakur and Van Langenhove ( 2006 ) defined global governance as “The complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens, and organizations—both intergovernmental and nongovernmental—through which collective interests are articulated, rights and obligations are established, and differences are mediated” ( 2006 , p. 233). Rittberger ( 2002 ) presents a shorter definition stating that global governance “is the output of a nonhierarchical network of international and transnational institutions: not only IGOs and international regimes but also transnational regimes are regulating actors’ behavior” ( 2002 , p. 2).

Definitions of global governance have also emphasized the role of collective goods. Risse defines governance as “the various institutionalized modes of social coordination to produce and implement collectively binding rules, or to provide collective goods” (Risse, 2012 , p. 700), arguing that while the debate about global governance is focusing on governance without government and the rise of private authority in world politics, it is also based on the assumption that functioning states are capable of implementing and enforcing global norms and rules (Risse, 2011 ). Building on this, Zurn ( 2012 ) incorporates the element of regulations for transnational common goods. He states: “Global governance refers to the entirety of regulations [substantial norms, rules, and programs, the process by which they are adapted, monitored, and enforced, as well as the structures/institutions that house them] put forward with reference to solving specific denationalized and deregionalized problems or providing transnational common goods” (Zurn, 2012 , p. 731).

Other definitions interoperate global governance as a mechanism for addressing and managing conflicts. Miller ( 2007 ) perceives global governance as “the resolution of conflicts over divergent interpretations of evidence constraining the exercise of power and authority” ( 2007 , p. 327), while Castells ( 2005 ) briefly defines it as “the ability to manage the problems and issues of a world in turmoil” ( 2005 , p. 12). From a different angle, Ikenberry’s definition considers the general orientation of global governance as a process: “It is the collective effort of people to facilitate the upside of openness and exchange in the global system, while working together to manage the downside. Thus global governance is, in effect, the management of liberal internationalism” (Ikenberry, 2014 , p.18).

The previous definitions contribute to understanding the plasticity of the complex phenomenon that is global governance. Turning attention towards the characteristics, expressions, and elements of global governance provides a different perspective of analysis, which unpacks the essence of definitions. For the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, the institutions of global governance are the “mechanisms for steering” states and societies toward the goals of global public policy, as expressed in the UN Charter and other key documents for global governance. These mechanisms of global governance encompass international, national, subnational and local actors, existing to provide public goods, which one can neither diminish availability to others through use, nor be excluded from using (Albright & Gambari, 2015 ).

Rittberger makes an important distinction between international and global governance. In his view, international governance is “the output of a non-hierarchical network of interlocking international (predominantly, but not exclusively, governmental) institutions which regulate the behavior of states and other international actors in different issue areas of world politics” (Rittberger, 2002 , p. 2). In contrast to international governance, global governance is characterized by the decreased salience of states as well as the increased involvement of nonstate actors in the processes of establishing norms and rules, including compliance, monitoring, and contributing at multiple levels of policymaking (Rittberger, 2002 ). Weiss and Wilkinson ( 2014 ) have also identified some significant elements that describe global governance:

It refers to collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that transcend the capacities of individual states.

It reflects the capacity of the international system at any moment in time to provide government-like services in the absence of world government.

It encompasses a wide variety of cooperative problem-solving arrangements that are visible but informal (practices or guidelines) or were temporary formations (coalitions of the willing).

It also entails more formalized problem-solving arrangements and mechanisms, such as hard rules (laws and treaties) or institutions with administrative structures and established practices to manage collective affairs by a variety of actors—including state authorities, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, private sector entities, and other civil society actors (Weiss & Wilkinson, 2014 ).

Krahmann ( 2005 ) has expanded the explanations about the characteristics of global governance. She indicates that the shift from “government” to “governance” denotes the increasing fragmentation and reintegration of political authority among state and nonstate actors across levels of analysis along seven dimensions: geographical scope, functional scope, the distribution of resources, interests, norms, decision-making, and policy implementation (Krahmann, 2003 ). Particularly interesting is the reorientation characterized geographical fragmentation and integration away from the state as the central unit, which takes three forms: “downward” to local bodies, “upward” to international organizations, and “sideways” to private and voluntary actors.

As Krahmann ( 2005 ) indicates, one of the main characteristics of global governance is that it operates at different levels of political activity. Zurn ( 2012 ) specifically advances the understanding of global governance as a form of multilevel governance. Gary Marks initially characterized Multilevel Governance as the result of a “centrifugal process in which decision-making is spun away from member states in two directions,” namely, subnational and supranational (Marks, 1993 , pp. 401–402). Reflecting on these different contexts within which the multilevel governance concept is discussed, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks ( 2010 ) have proposed distinguishing different “types” of multilevel governance. The first type of governance conceives the dispersion of authority to jurisdictions at a limited number of levels (international, national, regional, meso, local). A second vision of governance is task-specific jurisdictions, intersecting memberships, and no limit to a number of jurisdictional levels (Hooghe & Marks, 2010 ).

Another perspective from which to observe different forms of global governance is based on a combination of unidirectional and multidirectional flows of authority, in conjunction with formal, informal, and mixed structures, as Kacowicz ( 2012 ) suggests. The combination of both axes produces six types of governance. Under the axis of unidirectional flows of authority, Kacowicz ( 2012 ) suggests top-down or hierarchical, in which institutions contract and outsource activities; bottom-up governance, where civil society and networks of advocacy develop positive incentives and bargaining; and market-type governance, which is a public-private network/partnership. Under the axis of multidirectional flow of governance, the other three types of governance are the following: network governance, which is hierarchical with governments/nation states at the top and NGOs and businesses at the bottom; side-by-side governance, with all levels working in tandem together; and finally web-network governance, which is a public-private network/partnership that is nonhierarchical and combines efforts from all parts of society, including the people (Kacowicz, 2012 ).

The variety of definitions provided above conveys some of the dimensions of global governance. To enrich its understanding, Weiss and Wilkinson ( 2014 ) have framed three different angles of the challenging nature of global governance by arguing that it (a) is ubiquitous and omnipresent; (b) is used and abused by academics and policymakers (3.1 million hits in a Google search at the end of 2012 ); and (c) remains notoriously slippery. While the broadness of global governance may produce a lack of conceptual rigor, it also offers a wide avenue to bring a diversity of disciplines interested in improving the current transformations of the global system through more pluralist and comprehensive approaches.

Thematic Areas of Global Governance

The explanation of global governance is a daunting task, because there are multiples structures of interaction among different actors and processes. The word “governance” appears in diverse disciplines, each one acting sometimes within its own rationale and barely connecting with other disciplines. How to make sense to the multiple forms of global governance? Bevir suggests a starting point when he argues that “governance refers to theories and issues of social coordination and the nature of all patterns of rule” (Bevir, 2011 , p. 1). From the perspective of this article, global governance focuses on social coordination at the international level; in other words, global governance is based on different areas of human activity where there is a confluence of governance practices at the global level of interaction. This social coordination at the international level varies across the respective areas of human activity and hence sets different patterns of rule.

When attempting to systematically articulate and evaluate the concept of global governance, the mainstream thematic categorization for studying international relations offers a helpful starting point. Manuals and textbooks on international relations have been organized by either geographical or theoretical categories. The vast literature on international relations has produced several debates utilizing categories such as concepts, images, perspectives, understandings, and paradigms. From the theoretical perspective, images (realism, liberalism, economic structuralism, and English School) and interpretative understandings (constructivism, critical, postmodern, and gender studies) have shaped competing explanations about how the world works. However, the literature on global governance has emerged from several different areas, and hence a strict theoretical IR categorization would leave numerous contributions out of the analysis. From the thematic angle, however, the extensive literature in international relations is disaggregated in various topics such as politics (international law and organizations), security, international political economy, and more recently environment and civil society (Viotti & Kauppi, 2012 ). This approach allows broader inclusion of global governance contributions. Based on IR thematic traditions as well as the current literature on global governance, this section organizes the information in six main areas: politics, security, economic, environmental, civil society/human rights, and other emerging themes. The next section informs and completes the overview with a description of conceptual debates and global governance.

Global Governance and International Organizations

The United Nations has been one of the catalysts of global governance. While it has been subject to numerous criticisms due to the anachronism of the Security Council, the UN system is by far the most comprehensive global organization that has demonstrated the capacity to trigger and underpin mechanisms of cooperation on matters such as health, culture, refugees, and civil society, to name a few, for more than seven decades. Regardless of the positive or negative assessment of the performance of United Nations, the world after 1945 embarked on a journey of no return where global norms, laws, and customs matter more than in any other historical period. The contribution of global governance is indeed one of the multiple causes in the transformations of the behavior of international actors. Pierre ( 2013 ) has correctly argued that institutional changes in domestic governance over the past two decades are overwhelmingly driven by endogenous agents and changes related to international influences tend to be adaptations to globalization rather than globalization in itself.

The UN’s reform and performance have been at the center of the debates of global governance. Weiss and Thakur ( 2010 ) have identified five gaps between the nature of many current global challenges and the available inadequate solutions. The first is the knowledge gap, which contributes to developing a broad consensus on global problems such as climate change; the second is the normative gap, which can be defined as a pattern of behavior in international society; the third is the policy gap, which is the interlinked set of governing principles and goals in addition to the agreed programs of action to implement those principles and achieve those goals; the fourth is the institutional gap, including formal and informal institutions; the fifth and final is the compliance gap, which has three facets: implementation, monitoring, and enforcement. Another important dimension of global governance and international organizations is the regional level. While the global level of political aggregation is partially able to contribute to the amelioration of problems, it also requires the inclusion of regional organizations in order to galvanize the interest of regional actors in cooperating (Weiss & Thakur, 2010 ). All in all, the assumption is that regional organizations are more sensitive to cultural and political regional preferences and hence may contribute to implementing norms of good global governance (Rabe, 2007 ).

Global Security Governance

Explaining the mechanisms of provision of international security has been one of the essential driving forces in the discipline of international relations since the end of World War II and the rise of global governance following the Cold War. Concepts and debates produced within the umbrella of global security governance offer a variety of analytical schemes while revealing new avenues of research. The development of global security governance has been oriented to a large extent by the contributions, limitations, and performance of international and regional organizations as security providers, in addition to state and substate actors. As the number and scope of regional organizations have expanded since the end of the Cold War, the way regional organizations conceptualize security and practice their collective duties has become a focus of attention of scholars. The prolific literature on global governance and regional organizations has shed some light on the institutional mechanisms and autonomy (Acharya & Johnston, 2007 ; Tavares, 2010 ), the variety of security governance policies (Kirchner & Sperling, 2010 ; Kirchner & Dominguez, 2011 ), the conditions of becoming a significant actor in regional and global governance, and the capacity of member states to enable regional organizations to produce collective security goods, particularly in the cases of NATO and the EU.

While the research agenda of global security governance and regional organizations has produced significant contributions, some scholars, such as Christou and Croft ( 2011 ), rightly argue that it is still necessary to advance systematic comparisons and to strengthen the methodological foundations of security research in the analysis of security governance. Ceccorulli and Lucarelli ( 2014 ) have also argued that in order to make the concept of security governance more useful for assessing current security dynamics, four main challenges must be addressed. First, there is a need to expand the research agenda with regard to how security is understood and perceived by the actors involved in the governance system. Second, as the literature is divided into two main branches (one looking at governmental organizations and one dealing with nonstate actors), attempts should be made to impart a sense of coordination concerning efforts among different actors and layers of governance, even when focusing predominantly on one type of actor (e.g., regional state powers). Third, the literature (with notable exceptions) has predominantly focused on Europe and the transatlantic area, which is particularly limited in light of the emergence of new actors. Fourth, the literature on security governance has been too often detached from reflections on regionalism, limiting the understanding of the different dynamics and security arrangements around the world (Ceccorulli & Lucarelli, 2014 ).

Another dimension of global security governance is the case of nuclear security and US hegemony. Chung argues that given the increased threat of nuclear terrorism by nonstate actors, the current global mechanisms addressing nuclear security have revealed serious limitations, prompting a demand for developing new arrangements of global nuclear security governance (Chung, 2012 ). With regard to global security governance and US hegemony, Krahmann ( 2005 ) argues that the emergence of security governance appears to explain the changing strategies of America’s allies. Her argument suggests that major powers, including the United States, are increasingly collaborating through flexible coalitions of the willing. Crucially, these flexible coalitions do not constitute a new form of balance of power; they respond to differences in interests and capabilities within overlapping structures of regional and global security governance. The concept of security governance thus highlights and informs the complexities in the policies of the United States and these other states. It points to evidence showing that US imperialist strategy relies to a considerable degree on the cooperation of both state and nonstate actors and that its interests and reach may be more specific than frequently suggested in the current debate (Krahmann, 2005 ).

Due to the diversity of dimensions involving the area of security, the concept of global security governance has been used to understand more specific aspects of human activity capable of producing regional or global situations of instability such as food security and climate change. Following the 2007–2008 global food crisis, Margulis examined the Government of Canada’s efforts of promoting global food security governance behavior at meetings of the G-8 and the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS). While the global influence of Canada is to some extent marginal, Margulis underscored that the CFS has emerged as a key institution for agenda-setting, norm-building, and rule-making in global food security governance (Margulis, 2015 ). In the area of climate change, Floyd has advanced the argument that while institutional fragmentation of global climate security governance is not automatically problematic, the phenomenon of ideational fragmentation that often goes with it is highly disadvantageous to achieving climate security for people, particularly in light of the diverse and competing preferences and agendas of states and international organizations (Floyd, 2015 ).

Global Economic Governance

Global economic governance has been defined as “governing, without sovereign authority, economic relationships that transcend national borders” (Madhur, 2012 , p. 18). While this definition encapsulates a large range of elements comprehended within economic relations, more challenging has been the implementation of global economic policy coordination. After the economic turmoil of the 1929 crisis and the interwar period, the Bretton Woods system was put in place, but it insufficiently addressed the financial instability of the 1970s. The disillusion with the neoliberal order continued to grow through the 1990s, paving the way for experimenting with alternative economic practices, particularly in Latin America. In addition, the 2008 financial crisis and the emergence of economic powerhouses such as India and China have also contributed to shaping the debates around global economic governance, which aims to “set formal and informal rules that regulate the global economy and the collection of authority relationships that promulgate, coordinate, monitor, or enforce said rules” (Drezner, 2014 , p. 124).

While the demands for producing global collective forms of action are increasing, the capacity of global economic arrangements to respond to secular stagnation, recession, or inequality has proven to be decidedly lacking. Nonetheless, the progress made in the construction of global economic governance should not be underestimated. Drezner argues that despite the failure of institutions of global governance to avert the 2008 crisis, international institutions and governance frameworks performed contrary to expectations, and on the whole “the system worked and the open global economy survived” (Drezner, 2014 , p. 124, 2012 ). This line of argument is predicated on the reforms in the US financial system, the coordination of the G-20, and the slow transformations of the triad of economic institutions. From a more skeptical position, Quinlan ( 2011 ) contends that globalization is in retreat after 2008 and the only solution is to find commonalities while subsuming national interest for the global good by expanding global governance, which will depend on how well the so-called G-2 (United States and China) gets along in conjunction with to what degree developing nations feel they are actual stakeholders in the global economy, among other factors.

The debate on global governance calls for revisiting the architecture of global economic institutions, with particular focus on the changes wrought in three major international institutions: the transformation of the IMF, the marginalization of the World Bank, and the creation of the Financial Stability Board. Woods ( 2014 ) identifies six core principles to be strengthened for producing good economic global governance: legitimacy, representation, responsiveness, flexibility, transparency and accountability, and effectiveness. The reform of the global economic architecture has also been studied from the angle of soft law, particularly through the study of the G-20, which strives to build a new economic and financial regime better suited to the global economy. The use of soft law is based on legal instruments such as G-20 communiqués and declarations (Filipovic & Buncic, 2015 ). The broader inclusiveness of emerging economies in shaping the global architecture has been largely advocated for as a way to strengthen global governance (Martin, 2007 ). From a more comprehensive perspective, Madhur ( 2012 ) advocates the concept of hybrid architecture, in which the rise of multilateralism in the past 20 years has produced a hybrid system with two interrelated yet distinct layers: a set of formal institutions (WTO, IMF, WB, and FSB) forming its four pillars, and the G-20 as an informal, yet prominently presiding, multilateral forum setting the overall agenda and guiding the formal institutions.

Global Environmental Governance

Environment is an area inherently conducive to global governance, because it involves numerous individuals and institutions operating at different levels of spatial activity. As there is no global government and environmental degradation is not confined to borders, the concept of global environmental governance has been helpful to explain this phenomenon that typically involves a broad range of actors, including states as well as regional and international organizations. John Vogler has defined global environmental governance as follows: “At a formal level it is virtually a synonym for international environmental cooperation; for the network of international environmental organizations and conventions and the spaces between them” (Vogler, 2005 , p. 835). While studies of global environmental regimes have allowed a better understanding of who, why, and how our ecosystems are affected, a more daunting analytical area is whether political actors are willing to adapt to sustainable practices. Nongovernmental actors, in concert with corporations, governments, and international organizations, have established new standard-setting bodies to guide and regulate behavior. Scholars have begun to document the rise of these new forms of private governance and hybridized public–private governance as a means of promoting environmental protection (OHCHR et al., 2013 ).

Another area that demands inclusive policies at different levels of government is sustainable development. Jeffrey Sachs ( 2012 ) has argued that the most effective way to reach the global goals of strengthening sustainable development is by focusing on three broad categories, economic development, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion, which will depend on a fourth condition: good governance at all levels, local, national, regional, and global. However, implementing the environmental regime is complex, because international agreements must operate at the domestic policy level, where there is often still a gap between broad international goals and local engagement for implementation (Busby, 2010 ).

Global Civil Society and Human Rights

The inclusion of the rights of individuals in international processes has been an inherent part of the genesis of global governance. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1949 as a nonbinding document to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998 , the governance of global human rights has been evolving as normative framework and as common practice. The UN-led proliferation of national human rights institutions, whose purported aims are to implement international norms domestically, has expanded considerably since the early 1990s; such institutions have quadrupled in number and exist in almost 100 countries (Cardenas, 2003 ). However, despite overall advancements in advancing rights, applying them consistently remains an outstanding governance issue (Thompson, 2010 ). These mechanisms are far from consistent. Generally, when they are effective, they change a state’s conduct by publicizing abuses rather than by providing technical advice or applying punitive measures (Kaye, 2011 ). The protection of human rights in the global agenda has also advanced the debate for more proactive mechanisms to enhance the rights of people (Ruggie, 2014 ). However, challenges to implement full-fledged human rights protections worldwide still surpass the capacity of global governance actors to provide them.

The development of networks has been an important element in incentivizing the creation of global civil societies protecting human rights. The roots of global civil society have been the subject of debate. Two approaches have been adopted. The first suggests that global civil society has been developing rationally over a long period of time, continuous and parallel with the development of domestic civil society in democracies. The second postulates global civil society to be a relatively new phenomenon, one that has emerged in response to unprecedented challenges to democracy as a result of globalization (Coleman & Wayland, 2005 ).

National civil societies embark on developing links with peers around the world in multiple ways, producing a myriad of forms of interaction. Following Mor’s analysis ( 2013 ) and based on the approaches to exerting leverage on global society, four clusters of GSC are emblematic of the complexity of the phenomena of this emerging global society from below. The first is the GCS that aims to some extent to replace statist features of the international system; several networks have been developed along these lines, from global student protests to social groups working against globalization. The second frames GCS as being in opposition to the state system; social movements in Latin America and Eastern Europe working to promote an active citizenship outside and beyond the national borders are emblematic of this group. Nongovernmental organization (NGO) activism concerning the arms trade is emblematic of the significant and emancipatory role attributed to civil society in post–Cold War international politics. A distinctively liberal understanding of civil society as an increasingly global sphere marks discussions of NGOs’ efforts separately from the state and market, promoting progressive and nonviolent social relations. The final strand of GCS is mostly focused on advancing the rights of religions and ethnic movements, which in recent years have encouraged a new agenda to develop the fourth world, which includes indigenous peoples, refugees, and migrants, mainly.

The third GCS has been studied as a subsidiary organ to international society, in which, under a neoliberal perspective, civil society organizations become institutionalized and professionalized so that they can fit into the global political framework as partners rather than as opponents. First, liberal accounts underplay the mutual interdependence between the state, the market, and civil society. NGO agency is constrained as well as enabled by its historical structural grounding. Second, a more ambivalent understanding of NGOs’ progressive political value is needed. While some NGOs may play a role in counter-hegemonic struggles, overall they are more likely to contribute to hegemonic social formations. Third, liberal accounts of a global civil society inadequately capture the reproduction of hierarchies in international relations, downplaying ongoing, systemic patterns of North-South asymmetry. Fourth, the emphasis on the nonviolent nature of global civil society sidelines the violence of capitalism and the state system while serving as a means of disciplining dissent and activism (Stavrianakis, 2012 ).

Other Emerging Areas of Global Governance

As global governance studies have reached a prominent role in the agenda of IR research, numerous intersections have been developed between global governance and other policy domains. These intersections are the results of specific areas of policy action that have elevated their sphere of action to the global level and experienced the phenomenon of being affected by multiple actors and various levels of analysis. These are the cases of global governance in labor, migration, health, sustainable development, and water.

Global governance has been used as a frame for studying labor relations. Based on the analysis of International Labor Organization (ILO) standards and the setup of the UN Global Compact, Hassel ( 2008 ) argues that there is a plethora of voluntarist initiatives that converge over time toward a shared understanding of labor standards, which is part of the transformation of global labor governance institutions. Nonetheless, there are several problems for a full-fledged convergence of global norms on labor standards, such as the lack of governmental commitment in implementing labor standards in some countries in addition to the lack of coordination and the existence of collective action problems pertaining to various decentralized activities. In this regard, the strongest incentives for monitoring compliance, mostly advocated by the victims of noncompliance, as well as the development of a cognitive frame of unacceptable corporate behavior are essentials steps toward actualizing a “harder” institutional setting (Hassel, 2008 ).

Barnett ( 2002 ) has linked global governance with migration and refugees. She argues that the recent influx of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) has caused the UNHCR to rethink its governance model even further, as it does not accommodate the needs of all displaced people, especially IDPs, who are not strictly defined by borders. The UNHCR has been pushed to adapt their current state-centered global governance model toward a democratic governance model whereby a possible solution would be for the UN General Assembly to expand UNHCR’s mandate to include IDPs. However, the UNHCR remains unresponsive to this proposal (Barnett, 2002 ).

In the case of global health governance, Lee ( 2010 ) argues that the bulk of scholarship on international organization and health continues to be produced from outside the formal disciplinary boundaries of international relations. This literature, primarily from the perspective of public health, is concerned with improving the contemporary institutional mechanisms for addressing collective health problems. From such analyses, the broader question of what international organizations and health tell us about emerging forms of global governance can be raised. For example, what do innovations in international health cooperation tell us about the shifting boundaries between the state, the market, and civil society? What is the quality of global governance as provided by these diverse institutional actors? While a recent shift in the literature explores how international organizations matter in addition to the role of delegation and agency, more analysis is required beyond the study of the World Health Organization (Lee, 2010 ).

Particularly as a result of the post- 2015 development framework, global sustainable development governance provides an opportunity to address these global economic, social, and environmental issues in a coordinated, coherent, and collaborative manner. In this context, the global partnership can promote a more effective, coherent, representative, and accountable global governance regime, which should ultimately translate into better national and regional governance, the realization of human rights, and sustainable development (Madhur, 2012 ). Within the umbrella of environment and development, global water governance remains in its initial stages in spite of increasing awareness of the scarcity of this vital resource. Pahl-Wostl, Gupta, and Petry ( 2008 ) have argued that although a global discourse about water issues has evolved over the last five decades, unlike governance of many other environmental and resource issues, a clear global governance framework has still not emerged. They have advanced their studies on global water governance by compiling 86 international river basin organizations and advocating the discussion of the vital importance of water as it relates to global governance.

Conceptual Debates on Global Governance

Thematic categorizations provide an overview of the main areas where the literature on global governance has proliferated. However, scholars have also embarked on conceptual, rather than thematic, debates or have derived interesting conceptual discussions from their thematic research. Social scientists have studied global governance from a variety of angles, producing numerous analytical innovations which improve its comprehension. While debates on global governance are perpetually evolving and the related conceptual list is extensive, this section incorporates some emblematic concepts that have paved the way for debates enriching the understanding of global governance. These include common goods, good governance, power, legitimacy, authority, global governors, governmentality, governance in areas of limited statehood, and policy-centric systems of governance. These concepts have triggered the need of adopting global governance as a framework for analysis.

The perception of sharing a common milieu has been crucial for understanding the interconnections that global governance aims to study and explain. One of the main concepts that explicitly and implicitly remain in the debates on global governance is related to the preservation and enhancement of global common goods and, more importantly, the need to develop mechanisms for collective actions. Keohane ( 2010 ) has explained the complexity of dealing with common-pool resources and collective action in the context that they are subject to the challenge of underprovision or overuse because no individual actor has an interest in unilaterally preserving them. The link between common-pool resources and collective action varies from sector to sector of political action, and hence the concept of global commons has advanced at different paces in distinct areas of international activity. While the rationale of international security is still rooted in various levels of security dilemmas, the perception of a global commons has found better conditions to flourish in areas such as global environmental policy, because the stewardship of the global commons cannot be executed without global governance. This is the case of those parts of the planet that fall outside national jurisdictions and to which all nations have access (the high seas, the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space), and these resource domains are guided by the principle of the common heritage of mankind (OHCHR et al., 2013 ).

The concern about the depletion of common goods leads to the conception of global governance not only as a heuristic device to understand multiple and complex relations but also as a mechanism to suggest policy prescriptions to manage and ameliorate global problems. Central to this assumption is the concept of good governance. While postmodern critical theories and Gramscian cultural hegemony scholars contest the intentions of global good governance as conventional mechanism of domination, a substantial share of scholars working with the concept of global governance to some degree acknowledge the need for global good governance. Weiss’ definition of good governance entails the following elements: participation and empowerment with respect to public policies, choices, and offices; rule of law secured by an independent judiciary to which the executive and legislative branches of government are subject, along with citizens as well as other actors and entities; and standards of probity and incorruptibility, transparency, accountability, and responsibility (Weiss, 2013 ).

The fact that good global governance advocates a more comprehensive and inclusive agenda is not dissociated from the debates surrounding power and international relations. Barnett and Duvall ( 2005 ) argue that scholarly literature surrounding global governance largely dismisses the role of power. As power remains one of the most significant concepts in most international relations theories, from its relevance in realism to its relative contestation in social constructivism, two different lines of reasoning provide some elements acknowledging the pertinence of linking global governance and power.

The first is the understanding that power has been disaggregated in the past few decades. Based on IR debates on hard (military and economic) and soft (cultural) power and from the perspective of global governance, power has been embedded in two types of global governance, hard and soft. The former refers to formal rules, norms, and institutions that have been established to regulate the behavior of states and other actors in the international system. In this context, international law, treaties, conventions, and other juridical tools are capable of providing governance. But it also means that legitimate power can be used to produce world order in the absence of a global government. In this line of thought, the balance of power plays a significant role in reducing global anarchy. Soft governance includes informal rules, norms, and institutions that can also provide governance. In this perspective, persuasion and influence are key elements in the search for world stability (Kröger, 2008 ). From a different angle, Weiss ( 2013 ) rightly contends that it is often forgotten that power is not confined to states and that nonstate actors play an increasingly significant role in international relations. Along the same lines, while the increasing role of civil societies and political parties have underpinned the process of democratization around the world, some other subversive and opportunistic forces, such as criminal organizations, have taken control of areas where the state is fragile or absent, resulting in the weakening of the rule of law and the negative fragmentation of state power (Naím, 2013 ).

The second dimension of power that affects the architecture of global governance is its polarization. From the bipolar order that prevailed in the Cold War to the current multipolar system, global collective action assumes different forms. While hegemonic transition theories have been largely studied in international relations, some scholars have linked the US decline and global governance. Chase-Dunn, Kwon, Lawrence, and Inoue ( 2011 ) have argued that while the rise of another hegemon that could replace the United States is unlikely, there are clearly challenges to be addressed. Newly emergent national economies such as India and China need to be fitted into the global structure of power, while the unilateral use of military force by the declining hegemon (the United States) has further delegitimized the institutions of global governance and has provoked resistance and challenges (Chase-Dunn et al., 2011 ).

Barnett and Duval broaden the definition of power from the perspective of global governance, stating that power is “the production, in and through social relations, of effects on actors that shape their capacity to control their fate” (Barnett & Duvall, 2005 , p. 45). In other words, power is a means to govern people’s lives, or even international orders. The authors develop a taxonomy of power based on two analytical dimensions: the kinds of social relations through which power is exerted, and the specificity of social relations through which effects on actors’ capacities are produced. These two dimensions generate a fourfold taxonomy of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. But when it comes to the international system, it is structural power that specifically and directly affects global governance and its varying capacities. However, it is productive power, defined as the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification, which will combat the negative view of power and will contribute to effectively analyzing global governance (Barnett & Duvall, 2005 ).

Associated with power, the concept of legitimacy has also been included in the debates on global governance. The main challenge, as Castells ( 2005 ) indicates, is that there is a credibility crisis as a result of the nation-state’s inability to adequately represent its citizens in the global governance era, where local and national governance has caved in and given way to global issues resolution, serving as a platform for the emergence of a global civil society. Another dimension of legitimacy in global governance is the case of compliance with international norms. The internationalization of norms leads to legitimized forms of behavior in which there is less need of coercion and calculation of interests. In other words, as Weiss has pointed out, “legitimacy is driven by the logic of appropriateness, whereby compliance can result from self-imposed obligation to do what is perceived as right” (Weiss, 2013 , p. 38). Despite the silver lining logic of appropriateness, three major global governance gaps still undermine legitimacy. The first is the jurisdictional gap, in which public policymaking is by nature predominantly national in both focus as well as scope. The second is the operational gap, wherein public institutions lack the policy-relevant information and policy instruments necessary to respond to the daunting complexity of global policy issues. The third is the incentive gap, in which the compliance problem makes it difficult for international governance systems to contribute effectively to the attainment of governance goals, since that remains contingent on the willingness of individual states to implement international regulations (Brüh & Rittberger, 2003 ).

The discussion on power and legitimacy in global governance has also provided the background for the discussion on global authority. Finnemore ( 2014 ) has underscored the challenges that global governance is facing with regard to global authority because while power can be an attribute of an actor in isolation, “authority is always conferred by others in some form, however distant. . . this conferral is central to the legitimation of many aspects of global governance” (Finnemore, 2014 , p. 221). For example, while the UN is authorized to exert power through established institutional procedures, its authority can increase or decrease based on performance and the response by others to UN actions. Based on this premise on global authority, Finnemore ( 2014 ) has pointed out the benefits of shifting the focus of global governance from actors to the relationships among actors involved in the making of global processes. From that perspective, Finnemore ( 2014 ) argues that it is hard to think of a policy area where a single “global governor” is acting alone and suggests that the nature of relationships among these potential governors can vary greatly, which in turn has diverse effects on policies and outcomes: “Global governors compete, conflict, cooperate, delegate, and divide labor in a host of ways we have not always examined systematically, but should” (Finnemore, 2014 , p. 223). Her emphasis on relationships rather than on single actors contributes to the understanding that the interactions among global governors vary enormously, shaping dynamics and outcomes of global governance (Finnemore, 2014 ).

Alexandria Jayne Innes and Brent Steele have developed the analysis of global governance through the lens of governmentality. They argue that practices and tactics of actors (such as states, individuals, NGOs, and for-profit agencies) produce a field of power where influences strategically oppose/coincide with one another to produce governmentality. In essence, their view is that governance is too narrow and, more specifically, “governmentality. . . offers insight into a concept of global governance that does not prioritize the state. Rather, it situates the state within a network of governance, representing an actor that governs itself and others” (Jayne Innes & Steele, 2012 , p. 717). Moreover, governmentality serves broadly as a regulatory factor/mechanism that promotes self-governance. In this case, sovereignty and governmentality coexist, with the latter allowing states to have sovereignty and control over disciplinary power over their people as well as the capacity to act as a “unitary cohesive agent in the global system” (Jayne Innes & Steele, 2012 , p. 724). Overall, the authors proclaim that global actors will be compelled to act a certain way because the chaos can be avoided in a nonhierarchical world where each state/actor works together under the wide-spread efforts of global governance and tactics of governmentality (Jayne Innes & Steele, 2012 ).

One of the conceptual innovations that has put in perspective the Western roots of global governance and the implementation limits of good governance is the debate around governance in areas of limited statehood (Risse, 2011 ). Risse argues that the governance discourse remains centered on an ideal type of modern statehood, with full internal and external sovereignty, a legitimate monopoly on the use of force, and checks and balances that constrain political rule and authority. This approach is very state-centric and mainly western-driven and is utilized in state building and development strategies. However, from the global as well as historical perspective, “the modern nation-state is the exception rather than the rule. . . areas of limited statehood lack the capacity to implement and enforce central decisions and the monopoly on the use of force” (Risse, 2011 , p. 2). In other words, in areas of limited statehood, from developing and transitioning countries to failing states, international sovereignty remains intact, while domestic sovereignty is lacking. Risse argues that governance in areas of limited statehood rests on the systematic involvement of nonstate actors and on nonhierarchical modes of political steering, yet these “modes of governance do not complement hierarchical steering by a well-functioning state but have to provide functional equivalents to develop statehood. . . in a multilevel governance which links local, national, regional and global” (Risse, 2011 , p. 3).

Along the same lines of observing the limits of global governance, Ostrom and Janssen analyze the differences between “high modernism” and “polycentric” systems of governance with regard to development and natural resource management. High modernism is characterized by situations where governments attempt to suppress complexity through the design of unitary governments, which rely on experts to dictate or optimize preferred desirable goals. These systems tend to fail due to their separation from local accountability. Polycentric systems, on the other hand, are those where many actors are capable of making mutual adjustments for ordering their relationships with one another within a general system of rules where each element acts with independence of other elements (Ostrom & Janssen, 2002 ).

Mapping Institutional Sources

Institutions play a significant role in supporting, deepening, and widening research on global governance. For decades, education and policymaking institutions prioritized IR studies focused on Cold War tensions and Soviet studies; later, in the 1990s, globalization became not only a buzzword of politicians to justify decisions, but also a priority in the research agenda of IR departments. By the early 2000s, governance and global governance were incorporated into the IR intellectual debate and institutions started supporting its study. The relationship and correlations between transformations in the international system and how IR departments, universities, and think tanks allocate resources to study the leading topics of a generation is quite straightforward. This section identifies the leading institutional sources for studying global governance, particularly from regional and national perspectives. While a detailed survey of institutions surpasses the limits of this article, this section examines two types of institutions that have led the debate and intellectual production regarding global governance: centers or programs focusing on conducting studies on global governance, and education programs at the graduate level where global governance plays a central role.

Centers For the Study of Global Governance

The United States and Europe remain the predominant places where the debates and allocation of resources for the study of international relations are taking place. The creation of centers for the study of global governance does not deviate from this general trend. In New York, Columbia University opened the Global Governance Center at the Columbia Law School in 2003 . The center addresses globalization’s legal dimensions through diverse interdisciplinary research and scholarship in addition to supporting public policy-oriented projects with other Columbia University centers and programs, including the Earth Institute, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, and the Institute for Human Rights, as well as maintaining joint programs with international organizations such as the United Nations (Columbia University, 2015 ).

Also in New York, the Lublin School of Business at Pace University sponsors the Center for Global Governance, Reporting, and Regulation (Pace University, 2015 ). In New Jersey, the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (CGG) at Princeton University started operations in 2004 . As part of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Niehaus Center is one of the few centers that combines globalization and governance under its research program (Princeton University, 2015 ). In North Carolina, the Global Value Chains Center at Duke University is built around the use of global value chains methodology to study the effects of globalization worldwide (Duke University, 2015 ).

In Europe, centers for studying global governance have also been created since the early 2000s, particularly in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Belgium. The Hertie School of Governance together with the Freie Universität Berlin and the Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB) established the Berlin School of Transnational Studies in 2008 , which includes a cluster on European Global Governance in its PhD program. This research cluster focuses on the analysis of the postnational constellation in its multiple dimensions and studies the implications of the increasingly blurred boundaries of the political space for communities and forms of belonging as it relates to the rise of global civil society, and especially for the structures of governance beyond the state (Hertie School of Governance, 2015 ).

In the United Kingdom, the London School of Economics (LSE) opened the Global Governance program in 2003 with a grant from the Ford Foundation. The program aimed to establish a rigorous conception and typology of global governance as well as construct an account of emergent international and transnational authority structures. While the LSE Global Governance closed as a formal research center in July 2011 as a result of a shift in research priorities, global governance has remained in the agenda of its scholars in other parts of LSE (London School of Economics, 2011 ). Also in London, the Global Governance Institute at University College of London undertakes cross-disciplinary study of crucial governance “deficits” in order to explore the nature of the problem and the processes, structures, and institutions involved, as well as identifying and postulating potential solutions. The Institute’s research activities coalesce around the following five thematic tracks: global governance, global security, global environmental sustainability, global justice and equity, and global economy (University College of London, 2015 ).

In Italy, the European University Institute in Florence launched the Global Governance Program (GGP) in 2010 , which is one of the flagship programs of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. It aims to build a community of outstanding professors and scholars, produce high-quality research, engage with the world of practice through policy dialogue, and contribute to the fostering of present and future generations of policy- and decision-makers through its executive training. With its three dimensions (Research, Policy, and Training), the GGP aims to serve as a bridge between research and policymaking (European University Institute, 2015 ). In Belgium, the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies was set up in 2007 , linking governance processes and multilateralism with a particular focus on the European Union’s role in global governance. With more than 60 senior and junior members, the Centre hosts a seven-year research program ( 2010–2017 ) on Global Governance and Democratic Government (Leuven University, 2015 ).

Global governance centers worldwide have followed the American and European trends, with the added value of focusing on their own specific regional agenda priorities. In East Asia, Waseda University Organization for Japan-US Studies (WOJUSS) was established in Japan in 2007 as a new type of research institution providing a platform for collaborative, interdisciplinary research on Japan-US relations. Later, in 2012 , WOJUSS renewed research programs and teams to further promote policy-oriented research on the current state of global governance studies (Waseda University, 2015 ). In Korea, the Hills Governance Center at Yonsei University in Seoul became the second Hills Governance Center worldwide when it opened in 2003 . The Center focuses on analysis, research, and dissemination of findings on governance-related issues and pursues specific projects such as regionally relevant case studies, the development of methodologies to measure the cost of poor governance, and identifying the best practices of successful firms in the country. Also in Korea, the Asian Institute for Policy Studies hosts the Center for Global Governance in order to offer policy recommendations which improve international relations and politics by making them more effective. With an office in Washington, DC, the center itself tries to bring forth traditional ways of thinking that focus on state actors and national security as well as recommending policies that account for nontraditional security factors such as human security (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2015 ).

In South Asia, Jindal University created the Centre for Global Governance and Policy (CGGP) in the late 2000s in Delhi, India. The distinctive feature of the CGGP is that it emphasizes a Global South perspective and probes the possibility for more a balanced and even-handed structure for global governance. It also focuses on an agenda that goes beyond India’s regional priorities (Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc.) or relations with Europe and the United States, incorporating multidisciplinary and non-state-driven debates taking place in Latin America, Africa, and the rest of Asia. Emblematic of this approach is the CGGP report entitled Rethinking International Institutions: A Global South Agenda released in 2011 (Jindal University, 2015 ). In Africa, the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) is the first research institution in Africa dedicated entirely to governance innovation. With a strong orientation on African topics in the context of global governance, GovInn prioritizes producing cutting-edge research capable of generating new thinking about governance and development as well as attracting innovators from all over the world. GovInn focuses on new economic governance, governance of the commons, transboundary governance, and security governance (University of Pretoria, 2015 ).

Education Programs on Global Governance

Education programs underpin developing a better understanding of global governance. At the doctoral level, three programs on Global Governance are salient. University of Massachusetts in Boston offers a PhD program in Global Governance and Human Security which aims to develop skills in topics such as emerging nonstate actors, norms, conflict resolution, and geopolitical competence (University of Massachusetts Boston, 2015 ). In Canada, a PhD in Global Governance, offered jointly by Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo, examines power and authority in the global arena and aims to examine and re-evaluate concepts, tools, and assumptions that have served scholars in the past and assesses new approaches for addressing contemporary and future challenges in six areas: global political economy, global environment, conflict and security, global justice and human rights, multilateral institutions and diplomacy, and global social governance (Balsillie School of International Studies, 2015 ). In Germany, the University of Bremen and Jacobs University Bremen founded the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), which offers a PhD program focused on three thematic fields, one of which is Global Governance and Regional Integration (Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, 2015 ).

More focused on training and specialization than on research, a variety of Masters programs are offered in several parts of the world. Florida International University offers an MA program in Global Governance featuring two tracks: globalization and security, and corporate citizenship (Florida International University, 2015 ). In Canada, the University of Waterloo opened an MA in Global Governance that goes beyond the rigidities and formalities of established academic boundaries by drawing on a variety of disciplines (Balsillie School of International Studies, 2015 ). In Europe, among other institutions, Sussex University offers an MA in Global Governance and the University of Kent offers an MA in European and Global Governance in the United Kingdom. In Italy, the University of Siena opened an MA in Global Governance Studies and Cultural Diplomacy. One example in South Asia is Jindal University, which has offered an MA in Global Governance since 2012 , in which students are encouraged to raise awareness and analytical depth in India about academically neglected regions such as Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (Jindal University, 2015 ).

Future Directions of Global Governance

This article has provided an extensive review of the literature on global governance. However, the significant scholarly development of the concept in the last decades still demands further analytical tools to explain the permanent transformations of international relations and the problems derived from the lack of global governance. In this regard, the current literature on global governance offers a platform where theories and concepts are adaptable and versatile, providing the research agenda of global governance with conditions conducive to expand its explanation about an increasingly more complex reality.

Some future areas of research around the global governance agenda include the exploration of areas conducive to reducing anarchy in the international system through several policy instruments. Cooperation and multilateral approaches are pillars for the creation of more effective global public policies considering the limited capacity of states to resolve simultaneously every local or international problem. As a consequence of globalization, the nature of problems is increasingly defined by multiple domestic and international factors. Therefore, governments have to resort to creating schemes of coordination with other actors to confront contemporary challenges, and more research is required to decipher and better understand how to create and protect collective global goods. International organizations, private actors, civil society, and even individuals are necessary to promoting global governance. Since there is not a central global government to cope with international conflicts and problems, norms and institutions are needed to provide legitimacy for—and protect the stability of—the international system.

Global governance is also an important framework of analysis that incentivizes ontological and epistemological approaches to study how the international system works. Not only governmental officials but also scholars and nonstate actors are deeply concerned with understanding the mechanisms to promote global governance, which include legitimate authority to solve international conflict and enhance mutual cooperation. The recent emergence of academic institutions and programs to address such topics is integral to this process. It is probable that in the near future more think tanks and universities will facilitate further research on global governance.

A current and future challenge pending in the global governance agenda is to develop further interconnections between different areas of human activity which also percolate at the global level. Economic interactions need a framework of rules, norms, and institutions to avoid financial crisis, facilitate cooperation, and promote global development. Global economic disparities will not be reduced if states, transnational companies, international organizations, and civil society do not establish cooperative schemes. For a more secure world, the international community must seek the creation of instruments to promote global security governance. These kinds of institutions will be necessary to diminish international terrorism, wars, organized crime, and other global threats. Global governance is also a key element for reducing ecological degradation, climate change, and other environmental challenges the world is facing today. States and international organization are not able to solve those problems without the participation of civil society and individuals. For the conservation of natural resources and the creation of new energy sources, global public policy will be required as well. Health and food issues are also a primary concern of global governance studies. As this article has illustrated, the future of international relations will benefit from developing the concept of global governance, debating better practices, and implementing effective global policies.

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• Published: 19 January 2016

Global governance: present and future

• Jinseop Jang 1 ,
• Jason McSparren 1 &
• Yuliya Rashchupkina 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  2 , Article number:  15045 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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• Politics and international relations

Globalization, the end of the Cold War and increased involvement of non-state actors in global affairs represent fundamentally shifting relations of power, speeding up national economies’ integration and contributing to the convergence of policies in different issue domains. This review considers the state of global governance by presenting a variety of global governance arrangements, key challenges facing governance in an increasingly globalized context and possibilities for the future governance. Current global governance arrangements favour flexibility over rigidity, prefer voluntary measures to binding rules and privilege partnerships over individual actions. This synopsis of the state of global governance examines the evolving role that sovereignty and the enduring human struggles for power and equity are playing in shaping international relations and governance. This contribution argues that individual empowerment, increasing awareness of human security, institutional complexity, international power shifts and the liberal world political paradigm will define the future of global governance. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to global governance.

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Introduction.

Global governance is a product of neo-liberal paradigm shifts in international political and economic relations. The privileging of capital and market mechanisms over state authority created governance gaps that have encouraged actors from private and civil society sectors to assume authoritative roles previously considered the purview of the State. This reinforces the divergence of views about how to define the concept of global governance, issues that are of the utmost importance and priority. Some scholars argue that global governance as it is practiced is not working ( Coen and Pegram, 2015 : 417), while others believe that global governance is constantly adapting by readjusting strategies and approaches to solutions and developing new tools and measures to deal with issues that impact communities throughout the world ( Held and Hale, 2011 ). Rather than judging current global governance, this contribution seeks to provide an overview of the current state of global governance by discussing its present state vis à vis the challenges that it faces and its future.

The perspective employed here presents global governance as a tool to identify solutions to problems created by neo-liberal globalization ( Biermann and Pattberg, 2008 : 279). As such, the concept of global governance relates to the interaction of myriad collective or individual entities emanating from various societal and professional orientations, which form networks that engage to address issues that threaten local and global communities. Global governance is concerned with issues that have become too complex for a single state to address alone. Humanitarian crises, military conflicts between and within states, climate change and economic volatility pose serious threats to human security in all societies; therefore, a variety of actors and expertise is necessary to properly frame threats, devise pertinent policy, implement effectively and evaluate results accurately to alleviate such threats.

Structure and actors: stakeholders of global governance

The proliferation of networked global markets, revolution in global communications technologies, the end of the Cold War and increased involvement of non-state actors in global affairs all contribute to “globalization”. Increased interconnection among nations has advanced the exchange of knowledge by bringing peoples, cultures, communities and states closer in an era in which issues call for increased international collaboration ( Bhagwati, 2004 ; McGrew, 2008 ). The scope of modern issues has become “global”, beyond the capacity for state governments alone to address such issues. The former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Kofi Annan acknowledged that “no State, however powerful, can protect itself on its own” ( Annan, 2005 : 7) and that “the threats we face are interconnected” ( Annan, 2005 : 25). As a result, we witness broad strands of cooperative and competitive interdependency among sovereign nations, transnational corporations (TNCs), networks of experts and civil societies.

The current phenomenon of global governance is well captured by Biermann and Pattberg in their overview of global environmental governance for the Annual Review of Environmental Resources of 2008. They describe contemporary governance through the following features: (1) the emergence of new types of agency and of actors in addition to national governments; (2) the emergence of new mechanisms and institutions of global governance that go beyond traditional forms of state-led, treaty-based regimes; and (3) increasing segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional spheres ( Biermann and Pattberg, 2008 : 280).

A multitude of actors define and shape the current structure of global governance. States, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations, scientific experts, civil society groups, networks, partnerships, private military and security companies, as well as transnational criminal and drug-trafficking networks provide world politics with multi-actor perspectives and take part in steering the political system ( Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2006 ; Biermann and Pattberg, 2012 ; Karns and Mingst, 2015 ). Global governance actors broaden the scope of activities in which they are involved and they also change the patterns of interaction and cooperation in tackling current issues on a global level. Current global governance arrangements favour flexibility over rigidity, prefer voluntary measures to binding rules, choose partnerships over individual actions, and give rise to new initiatives and ideas.

While the modes of global governance vary widely, four general structures can be identified: International Governmental Organizations (IGOs), Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs), Private governance and tripartite governance mechanisms. IGOs such as the World Trade Organization and the UN system are examples of existing state-centered governance mechanisms. IGOs, however, utilize partnerships with non-state actors that have expertise and resources concentrated in service sectors and environments that IGOs may lack. Such arrangements maximize efficiency. Abbott and Snidal (2010) use the term “Transnational New Governance” to recognize the way IGOs expand capacity and access to resources by including private and non-governmental actors and institutions. This formulates global collaborative networks in which IGOs shape and support the operations of NGOs and certain private enterprises. Such governance structures are considered to be PPPs. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) utilize the PPP strategy across all aspects of implementation of the SDGs.

The UN Global Compact is another example of an international PPP. The UN Global Compact is a forum that encourages TNCs to share case studies that illustrate the ways a firm is implementing the SDGs in host communities where they operate. The objective is to formulate a digital record of best practices in Corporate Social Responsibility for public, private and civil society stakeholders located at all levels of governance—the local, state and transnational—to engage in discourse and form collaborative efforts for the purpose of accomplishing what the SDGs identify as expected outcomes. In addition, an increasing trend of private governance exists that sets sector-specific standards; and, there are alternative forms of governance that are considered as tripartite arrangements among state, private and civil society actors. Tripartite arrangements among state, private and civil society actors exemplify alternative, public–private or private governance arrangements. Tripartite governance such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Publish What You Pay and the African Peer Review Mechanism, while categorized as PPPs, “are located in the policy space between states and markets” ( Carbonnier et al., 2011 : 250). PPP-type arrangements empower civil society actors to not only coordinate with state and corporate entities, but also to monitor state–corporate activities. Often such mechanisms are “voluntary, horizontal, multi-actor and participatory, and address global issues” (Ibid.).

In some areas of business, private governance has supplanted state authority to regulate industry, showcasing the work of private governance. Examples of private governance include international accounting standards; the private bond-rating agencies (for example, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard and Poor’s Rating Groups); International Chamber of Commerce rules and actions; private industry governance such as the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Manufacturing Principles and the Forest Stewardship Council ( Karns and Mingst, 2015 : 34); Equator Principles ( Wright and Rwabizambuga, 2006 ). Global corporations also actively develop, promote and implement their own codes of conduct that concern issues of labour, environment and health. Those voluntary codes are usually adopted as a response to NGO campaigns, and primarily target developed country consumers, rather than tackle the problems faced by a diverse set of vulnerable worker groups. However, the processes through which codes have been developed enables better representation of hitherto excluded groups of workers (women export workers, homeworkers, casual workers) in social policy and labour regulation debates ( Pearson and Seyfang, 2001 ).

Multi-actor configurations in global governance broaden the scope of policy solutions that, combined with current capacities for information sharing and learning, advance policy changes. Yet this also increases fragmentation and segmentation of different layers and clusters of rule-making and rule-implementing ( Biermann and Pattberg, 2008 : 289). The result is increased competition over resources that may lead to paralysis in cooperative efforts. On the other hand, this competition may produce innovative solutions. In the subsequent sections, we offer an overview of the current challenges to global governance concluding with a discussion on the role that it may play in the future.

Present challenges of global governance

A growing number of emerging global governance actors aim to contribute to the solution of interdependent issues supplementing, and sometimes clashing, with already established regimes designed to address certain international problems separately from other issues. Hale et al. (2013) define the situation when current international institutions fail to provide a coordinated response to current agendas challenges as “gridlock”. Through the examples of sovereignty, and by discussing the questions of power and equality we will show how new developments in international relations affect and reshape collaborative responses to the most pressing issues.

Various global governance actors coalesce around the ideas and norms of human rights and human security; however, the principle of sovereignty continues to challenge the practical application of those ideas internationally. Huge and severe violations of peoples’ rights and freedoms during inter- or intra-state wars or conflicts continue to erode human security in different parts of the world. However, governance actors working for the maintenance of peace, security, justice and the protection of human rights have limited capacity to improve situations because of complicated approval procedures of humanitarian intervention or authorization of peacekeeping operations. For example, political divisions and partisan interests within the Security Council (particularly the use of veto power by some of its permanent members) blocked any international response to the mass atrocities committed in Syria, thus strengthening impunity and encouraging the expansion of war crimes and crimes against humanity ( Adams, 2015 ). A rise of nationalist sentiments and movements in Russia and some European countries also continues to erode international cooperation in response to challenges such as the huge influx of refugees, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. All of these threaten the international security, and order in general, that was created during the post-Cold War period. Yet, even as the principle of the responsibility to protect has gained political support and international legitimacy since it was introduced about a decade ago, its contribution to preventing mass atrocities and protection population remains low. As Luck (2015) points out, policy practitioners and scholars need to think in a more nuanced way about sovereignty. Both decision-making sovereignty, when governments choose to independently determine whether a particular course of action for the cause of human rights protection is in their national interest and erosion of sovereignty open the door to more atrocities within and across states’ boundaries. This scholar, for instance, argues that the ineffective exercise of sovereignty by a number of states over their own territory becomes a significant barrier to exercising protection responsibilities in other places ( Luck, 2015 : 504).

Power in the current system of global governance has become more diffused. The power shift accompanying the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, China (the BRICs) and other so-called “rising powers” pose questions about the possible reordering or shifts in the current state of global governance. While advocating for better representation in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the UN Security Council, the governments of China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies have started to develop and maintain alternative institutions for economic and political collaboration. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank are products of these efforts. While rising powers’ behaviours are shaped by the structural features of global capitalism, “the differing contours of BRICs’ state-society relations provide the foundations for conflicts with Western powers over the most liberal aspects of global governance” ( Stephen, 2014 ). The Western ideas of privatization, autonomous markets and open capital accounts are challenged by state-controlled approaches to development in the countries of so-called Global South. The proliferation of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), and national development banks in BRICs challenge an autonomous status of private capital in current global economic affairs. Those developments have led to the conclusion, by some scholars, that the most liberal features of global governance order are being contested by rising powers ( Stephen, 2014 ). In addition, a small group of big and influential countries such as India and China gain more negotiating power ( Barkin, 2013 ), as their non-participation in international treaties and policies (for example, climate change) might substantially diminish the effects of other countries’ efforts to solve these global issues. The shifting global power configuration challenges each type of multilateral setting whether it concerns international institutions that have a selective Western-based membership (for example, OECD, NATO, G7/G8); international institutions that shape the state of international policies but do not provide rising powers with equal membership and power in their governing bodies (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UN Security Council); or multilateral settings in which rising and established powers interact more or less on an equal footing (the World Trade Organization, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) ( Lesage and Van De Graaf, 2015 ).

Economic and political inequality have long-lasting implications for governance both within and between states. Inequality in either form contributes to a rise in extremism and social unrest, and it also raises the questions of what responsibility the international community should bear for human development beyond just satisfying basic needs, that is, security, food and shelter. While the SDGs agenda of 2015 prioritizes the goal to “(e)nd poverty in all its forms everywhere” (United Nations, 2015), questions still remain about exactly who will fund this eradication of poverty and which actions are best suited to this fight. Global governance actors, for example, focus more on intervention measures in poor countries, as they are primarily guided by a “narrow” understanding of security rather than thinking of more long-term development issues, or the “everyday” insecurities experienced by individuals in different parts of the world. A huge diversification of financial sources of development aid complicates the task of applying a common framework, based on individuals’ needs and development interests approach. In addition, the supply of development resources including official development assistance is also moving away from the old North towards the BRICs and other new official donors such as South Korea and Turkey, plus private foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, faith-based organizations, remittances from diasporas, heterogeneous SWFs and a plethora of Exchange-Traded Funds as well as novel sources of finance such as taxes on carbon, emissions, financial transactions and so forth ( Shaw, 2015 ).

Thus, the observed changes in socio-economic and political aspects of the current world pose new questions and create new challenges for previously active participants of global policy processes, as well as for new actors of global governance. Global governance actors will need to critically reflect on the relevance of earlier policy tools to rapidly changing conditions in the current world.

The future of global governance

Global governance is arguably inevitable for the survival of the human race in present and future generations. Although global governance sometimes appears fragile and ineffective in response to current challenges, the trend of globalization and the demand for global governance approaches have already passed the point of no return. The future of global governance will be mainly shaped by the following five factors: individual empowerment, increasing awareness of human security, institutional complexity, international power shift and liberal world political paradigm. We draw this conclusion by applying the findings and observations from different field of studies including security studies, international political economy, global governance field and communications studies.

First, because of information technology and mass/social media, individual citizens—especially in developed countries—have acquired much more information power than a half century ago. Individuals can attain higher awareness of situations related to national and international affairs. Compared with humans in the twentieth century, a majority of those in the twenty-first century can more easily access international security information, thanks to the Internet and media exposure. Therefore, individual citizens of the world are more likely to understand the importance and the impact of international security on their personal lives. Digital media played a major role in the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt and Tunisia: social networks allowed communities to unite around shared grievances and nurture transportable strategies for mobilizing against dictators ( Howard and Hussain, 2011 ). Globalization of the new media illustrates how communities throughout the world can be mobilized for collaborative response as well signals a new trend in the intersection of new media and conventional media such as television, radio and mobile phone ( Khondker, 2011 ). The US National Intelligence Council also identified individual issues and the decreasing influence of the state as one of the main global trends for the twenty-first century, arguing that the potential political power of individuals has significantly increased since the end of the Cold War because of the proliferation of information and transportation technologies ( National Intelligence Council, 2012 ). This trend will strengthen the convergence between domestic and international politics, constraining state behavior ( Putnam, 1988 ) and continue to produce many transnational actors. Considering the dramatic increase of individuals’ capabilities in information gathering, analysis and political projection, the trend of individual empowerment is logically supposed to pave a wider road towards cooperative global governance, because peace is generally preferred over war by individual humans.

Second, as the trend towards “individual empowerment” continues, global society through global governance architecture will need to pay high attention to human security, which protects individual humans from fatal threats to physical safety, and human dignity, whether human-made or of natural origin. Human security is an innovative concept for security in response to horizontal (such as military, economic and political) and vertical (such as individual, state and global) threats, which traditional security concepts cannot effectively control ( Grayson, 2008 ). The focal point of state security is too narrow to encompass the myriad threats that challenge societies today. The threat of sovereign states engaging in large-scale war is less probable today than at any time in modern history. War has not been eliminated, rather its form has shifted from sovereign versus sovereign to substate wars between differing identity groups or insurgencies against the state. Beyond war, the concept of human security is concerned with varieties of security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security ( UNDP 1994 ). Human security provides an excellent compatible conceptual paradigm to global governance regimes in the future, which must respond to transnational, multi-dimensional threats that a single country cannot manage. For example, a number of national security analysts have already begun to recognize environmental degradation and natural disasters such as epidemics, floods, earthquakes, poverty and droughts as national security threats similar to military disasters ( King and Murray, 2001–2002 ).

Third, we must additionally consider “institutional complexity” ( Held and Hale, 2011 ) as another direction for future global governance development. As the trend of individual empowerment gains more momentum, the influence of civil society is expected to grow in terms of authority and resources. Various non-state actors will not only affect their national governments’ behavior more significantly, but will also engage in networks of transnational relations more actively. International institutions in global governance will likely keep expanding to “regime complex”, a concept defined as “an array of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions governing a particular issue area” ( Raustiala and Victor, 2004 ).

Fourth, global governance in the future will be also be shaped by power shifts in international relations. Almost all the traditional institutions of global governance were initiated by Western countries, and their pluralistic political culture and influential civil societies have shaped the political context of global governance. States of the Global South, especially China, have improved their relative power in relation to the Global North. As a result, the voice of actors originating from the Global South is expected to become more prominent in global governance regimes and institutions traditionally dominated by a small number of the Global North states. Therefore, an increase in multilateralism will further complicate the face of global governance.

Fifth, the future of global governance is also rooted in liberal paradigms of world politics. States and non-state or transnational actors tend to be more cooperative with global governance when a liberal world order is maintained. Global governance regimes to date have evolved with liberal paradigms such as democracy, bottom-up orientations and human rights promotion. While the advancement of democratic practices in the states without strong traditions of following liberal values remain a challenge, democracy has near-universal appeal among people of every ethnic group, every religion, and every region of the world and democracy is embraced as an international norm by more states, transnational organizations and international networks ( McFaul, 2004 ). Liberal approaches challenge the traditional concept of the state as a unified unitary actor that lacks adverse interpretation of national interest. Accordingly, even in traditional security areas, there are more spaces for international cooperation. Global security governance through intergovernmental institutions such as the UN, International Atomic Energy Agency and International Criminal Court has made considerable progresses and gained more influence. If the realist paradigm dominates national security, however, the world would have to overcome deep uncertainty and doubt about the effectiveness of global governance. As a result, global governance today and in the future will be in the face of such serious threats as US–China hegemony rivalry, US–Russia military confrontation and Middle East conflicts. Nevertheless, as long as global society retains liberal paradigms powerful enough to offset the negative effects of mutually suspicious realist paradigms, global governance will continue to generate into effective hybrid regimes that hold the potential of creating a future world that is more cooperative, sustainable and secure.

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Global Governance for the 21st Century

Subscribe to global connection, colin i. bradford colin i. bradford nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development.

October 24, 2005

Summit reform, expanding the G-8 to a larger grouping of countries, is a sin qua non for creating more representativeness and performance legitimacy, filling the void at the apex of the international system and addressing the mismatch between 21st century global challenges and the current international institutional framework. Process, aspirational and political legitimacy based on the role of nation states in forging the Millennium Agenda buttress an expanded summit mechanism. Practical issues of safeguards for current and potential new members of the summit group, rotational membership and provision for revisiting the membership issue in the future provide enhanced prospects for moving forward on summit reform. Global governance based on national leaders is critical to addressing the interlinkages among major issues on the global agenda and shaping the new inter-institutional relationships necessary to deal with them.

Global Economy and Development

Tedros Adhanom-Ghebreyesus

May 9, 2024

Robin Brooks

Emily Gustafsson-Wright, Elyse Painter

May 8, 2024

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Why do we need global governance?

Global governance is necessary because humanity increasingly faces both problems and opportunities that are global in scale. Today, transnational problems such as violence and pandemics routinely reach across borders, affecting us all. At the same time, the increasingly integrated global system has also laid the necessary foundations for peace and spectacular prosperity. Effective global governance will allow us to end armed conflict, deal with new and emerging problems such as technological risks and automation, and to achieve levels of prosperity and progress never before seen. 1

The most important challenge for humanity to overcome is that of existential risks. One way to look at the danger of an existential risk is to quantify the level of global coordination needed to deal with it . While best-shot risks, at one end of the spectrum only require that a single nation, organization or even individual (i.e., superhero) has the means and the will to save everyone, weakest-link risks, at the other end of the spectrum, are dangers that might require literally every country to take appropriate action to prevent catastrophe, with no room for failure. 2 3

We’ve always been at risk of natural disaster , but with advances in our level of technology the risk we pose to ourselves as a species becomes ever greater. Nuclear weapons are a well-known risk that we still live with to this day. The progress of technological research exposes us to new dangers such as bioengineered superbugs, nanotechnological menaces, and the risk of an out-of-control artificial intelligence with ill-intent. Increased levels of global coordination are needed to combat many of these risks, as described in our article on the cooperation possibilities frontier.

There are other problems that don’t necessarily threaten the species or even civilization as we know it, but which are holding back the development of prosperity and progress. Armed conflict, around since the dawn of history, still haunts us today. Even though wars between great powers appear to be a thing of the past, regional conflicts still account for tremendous human suffering and loss of life in parts of the world without stable governance. 4

Other problems have emerged precisely because of our successes in the past. The unprecedented advancement of human wellbeing and prosperity over the past century has been based in large part on the use of fossil fuels, thus exposing us to climate change. Widespread automation, already a stressor on society, will put increased pressure on the social and economic fabric of our societies over the next few decades. Global governance can help alleviate these issues in various ways – we refer the interested reader to the very detailed work in Ruling Ourselves .

Finally, global governance will increasingly be judged not only by the extent to which it prevents harm, but also by its demonstrated ability to improve human wellbeing. 5 Progress has let us set our sights higher as a species, both for what we consider to be the right trajectory for humanity and for our own conduct. 6 Major advances in human wellbeing can be accomplished with existing technology and modest improvements in global coordination.

Effective global governance is global governance that tackles these issues better than the regional governments of the world can independently. Global governance is key to solving global problems. Without it, we may not be able to avoid weakest-link existential risks or regulate new and dangerous technologies. With it, we may be able to prosper as we never have before. The next step is to determine how effective global governance can be achieved.

• For a good primer on the subject of Global Governance, we suggest Hale, T., Held, D. and Young, K., 2013. Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing when we need it most . Hale et. all frame global governance as the solution to the issue of major world power’s inability to coordinate [ ↩ ]
• Hirshleifer, J., 1983. From Weakest-Link to Best-Shot: The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods. Public choice , 41[3], pp.371-386. [ ↩ ]
• Barrett, S., 2005. The Problem of Averting Global Catastrophe. Chi. J. Int’l L. , 6 , p.527. [ ↩ ]
• Pinker, S., 2012. The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined . Penguin Books. [ ↩ ]
• Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling Ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance . Available online: http://rulingourselves.com   [ ↩ ]
• United Nations, 2000. Millennium development goals. Available online: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals [accessed on 21 July 2017]. [ ↩ ]

Related posts for further reading:

• The cooperation possibility frontier
• What is global governance?
• A Very Long Peace: Potential solutions to armed conflict found in global governance?
• Humanity must flourish to survive
• How much do humans need to cooperate in order to survive?

2 thoughts to “Why do we need global governance?”

In case that you haven’t noticed, globalization is already lifting the standard of living for millions of people. There has been a dramatic improvement in people’s lives world wide. Well, world wide other than the developed nations who are loosing their middle class, as the middle classes sink into a level of low income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg

Very true; thanks for the comment!

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Essay: Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

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Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

International agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way that they should..

Global governance, never really settled, has recently been having an especially hard time. Everyone believes in a rules-based system, but everyone wants to make the rules and dislikes it when the rules work against them, saying that they infringe on their sovereignty and their freedom. There are deep asymmetries, with the powerful countries not only making the rules but also breaking them almost at will, which raises the question: Do we even have a rules-based system, or is it just a facade? Of course, in such circumstances, those who break the rules say they only do so because others are, too.

The current moment is a good illustration. It is the product of longstanding beliefs and power relations. Under this system, industrial subsidies were a no-no, forbidden (so it was thought) not just by World Trade Organization rules, but also by the dictates of what was considered sound economics. “Sound economics” was that set of doctrines known as neoliberal economics, which promised growth and prosperity through, mostly, supposedly freeing the economy by allowing so-called free enterprise to flourish. The “liberal” in neoliberalism stood for freedom and “neo” for new, suggesting that it was a different and updated version of 19 th -century liberalism.

This essay is adapted from the book T he Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton, 384 pp., $29.99, April 2024

In fact, it was neither really new nor really liberating. True, it gave firms more rights to pollute, but in doing so, it took away the freedom to breathe clean air—or in the case of those with asthma, sometimes even the most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom to live.

“Freedom” meant freedom for the monopolists to exploit consumers, for the monopsonists (the large number of firms that have market power over labor) to exploit workers, and freedom for the banks to exploit all of us—engineering the most massive financial crisis in history, which required taxpayers to fork out trillions of dollars in bailouts, often hidden, to ensure that the so-called free enterprise system could survive.

The promise that this liberalization would lead to faster growth from which all would benefit never materialized. Under these doctrines that have prevailed for more than four decades, growth has actually slowed in most advanced countries. For instance, real growth in GDP per capita (average percent increase per annum) according to data compiled by the St. Louis Fed, was 2.5% from 1960 to 1990, but slowed to 1.5% from 1990 to 2018. Instead of trickle-down economics, where everyone would benefit, we had trickle-up economics, where the top 1 percent and especially the top 0.1 percent, got a larger and larger slice of the pie.

These are illustrations of British political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s dictum that “total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs”; or, as I have sometimes put it less gracefully, freedom for some has meant the unfreedom of others—their loss of freedom.

Just as individuals rightly cherish their freedom, countries do, too, often under the name “sovereignty.” But while these words are easily uttered, there is too little thought about their deeper meanings. Economics has weighed into the debate about what freedom and sovereignty mean, with John Stuart Mill’s contribution in the 19th century ( On Liberty ), and Milton Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s works in the mid-20th ( Capitalism and Freedom and The Road to Serfdom ).

But contrary to what Hayek and Friedman asserted, free and unfettered markets do not lead to efficiency and the well-being of society; that should be obvious to anyone looking around. Just think of the inequality crisis, the climate crisis, the opioid crisis, the childhood diabetes crisis, or the 2008 financial crisis.  These are crises created by the market, exacerbated by the market, and/or crises which the market hasn’t been able to deal with adequately.

Economic theorists (including me) have shown that whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect markets (that is to say, always), there is a presumption that markets are not efficient. Even a very little bit of imperfection can have big effects.

The problem is that much of the global economic architecture designed over recent decades has been based on neoliberalism—the kinds of ideas that Hayek and Friedman put forward. The system of rules that evolved from there must be fundamentally rethought.

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 8, 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

From an economist’s perspective, freedom is the “freedom to do,” meaning the size of the opportunity set of what a person can do, or the range of the choices that are available.

Someone on the verge of starvation has no real freedom—she does what she must to survive. A rich person obviously has more freedom to choose. “Freedom to do” is also constrained when an individual is harmed. Obviously, if an individual is killed by a gunman or a virus, or even hospitalized by COVID-19, he has lost freedom in a meaningful sense, and we then have a dramatic illustration of Berlin’s dictum: Freedom for some—the freedom to carry guns, or to not be masked, or to be unvaccinated—may entail a large loss of freedom for others.

The same principle applies to the international arena. The rules-based trade system consists of a set of rules intended to expand the freedoms of all in a meaningful way by imposing constraints. The idea that constraints can be freeing, while seemingly self-contradictory, is obvious: Stoplights force us to take turns going through intersections, but without this seeming constraint, there would be gridlock and no one would be able to move.

All contracts are agreements about constraints—with one party agreeing to do or not do something in return for another person making other promises—with the belief that in doing so, all parties will be better off. Of course, if one party cheats and doesn’t deliver on its promise, then that party gains at the expense of others. And there is always the temptation to do so, which is why we require governments to enforce contracts, so that promises mean something. No government could enforce all contracts, and the so-called free market would crash if all participants were grifters.

But while there are similarities between discussions of freedom at the individual level and the country level, there are also a couple of big differences. Most importantly, there is no global government to ensure that the powerful countries obey an agreement, as we are seeing today in the case of U.S. industrial subsidies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) generally forbids such subsidies and especially disapproves of some of the provisions—such as requiring domestic manufacturing (“Made in America”)—in legislation passed recently by the U.S. Congress, including the CHIPS and Science Act .

Big Tech Is Trying to Prevent Debate About Its Social Harms

The industry’s “digital trade” strategy seeks to preemptively constrain governments.

The Global Credibility Gap

No one power or group can uphold the international order anymore—and that means much more geopolitical uncertainty ahead.

Moreover, within democratic countries, the role of power in the making and enforcement of the rules is often obscure; we know that inequalities in wealth and income get translated into inequalities in political power, which determines who gets to design the rules and how they are enforced. An imbalance of power means that the powerful within a country determine the rules in ways that benefit them, often at the expense of the weak.

Still, the democratic context means that every once in a while, power is checked—as it was when the antitrust laws were passed in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century, or the Wagner Act was passed during the New Deal of the 1930s, giving workers more power.

In an international setting, power is even more concentrated, and democratic forces are even weaker. What has happened in the past few years illustrates this. The United States was at the center in constructing the rules-based system, in both designing the rules and how they were to be enforced, including dispute resolutions through the WTO’s Appellate Body.  But when the rules—such as those concerning industrial subsidies—were inconvenient, it decided to ignore them, knowing that there was little, if anything, that any country could or would do about it. So much for the rules-based system.

And the United States’ confidence that nothing could or would be done was reinforced by the fact that it had effectively defenestrated the Appellate Body, because that Body had made decisions it didn’t like, and the U.S. thought that the Body was guilty of overreaching, going beyond what it was entitled to do. But rather than going back to the WTO and clarifying what the Body’s role should be, the U.S. simply hamstrung any adjudication within the WTO. The situation would be like suspending the U.S. Supreme Court while figuring out how to bring the justices back to a reasonable theory of jurisprudence.

This imbalance of power has played out repeatedly in recent years. When developed countries attempted to implement industrial policies—even mild policies, such as Brazil’s effort to provide capital to aerospace corporation Embraer at reasonable interest rates through that country’s development bank (as opposed to the outlandishly high rates then prevailing in its financial markets)—they were attacked . When Indonesia tried to ensure that more of the added value associated with its rich nickel deposits remained in Indonesia, it was attacked .

People line up to receive the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccination at a local hospital in in Harare, Zimbabwe, on March 29, 2021. Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images

Even worse, when more than 100 countries proposed a waiver of intellectual property related to COVID-19—in the spirit of the compulsory licenses already seemingly part of the WTO framework, but given the urgency of the moment, a less bureaucratic process was of the essence—they were denied. The result: vaccine apartheid , where the advanced countries had all the vaccines they wanted, and the developing countries had almost zero access. This almost surely resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths and tens of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations in the poorer countries.

These are obviously no small matters in the well-being of citizens around the world, especially not for developing countries and emerging markets. Nor are they small matters in geoeconomics and geopolitics. The neoliberal rules forbidding subsidies effectively meant that developing countries couldn’t catch up to the advanced countries; the rules condemned them to being commodity producers, reserving the higher value-added production for the advanced countries.

This tariff structure has been rightly criticized as a crucial tool in the preservation of colonial trade patterns—aided and abetted by other unfair aspects of the trade regime, such as escalating tariffs. As economist Ha-Joon Chang has put it , the advanced countries “kicked away the ladder” from which they themselves had used.

It should be clear, too, that there are geopolitical consequences in refusing to play by the rules. The United States and the advanced countries are losing support for some of the most important issues requiring global cooperation, including climate change , global health, and the support needed to resolve the conflict in Ukraine as well as Washington’s apparent battle for democracy and hegemony with China.

The global south may yet steer the ship of international rules back on course. When the United States was the hegemon, it could do as it wanted, but its influence is now being challenged. China has provided more infrastructure than the United States has; early on in the pandemic, both China and Russia seemed more generous in providing vaccines.

Washington told the developing countries to open their doors to its multinationals, but when those countries asked that the rich corporations pay the taxes they owed, the United States was not supportive—reforms under an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative called BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) generated sparse revenues for the poorer countries, and in return, the developing countries were asked to forego digital taxation. When, accordingly, the African Union asked for a change in venue of the discussions of global tax reform to the United Nations, the United States not only opposed it , but also tried to strong-arm others to do so. Last November, the United States lost the vote overwhelmingly at the U.N.

So whither goes global governance? In the absence of rules, the law of the jungle prevails. While the United States might win that fight, it would simultaneously lose the cooperation it needs so badly in a host of arenas. Overall, it would lose.

It is in the interests of the United States to abandon the corporate-driven rules-based system and work instead to create a set of at least basic rules that would reflect common interests. For instance, instead of the comprehensive so-called free trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership , that were really managed trade agreements (and managed specifically in the interests of Big Pharma and some of the big polluters), the United States should have narrow agreements—say, a green agreement to share knowledge and technology, promote sustainable forests, and work together to save the planet.

We need agreements that do more to constrain the large countries—whose actions can hurt the global economy—and do less to constrain the small, whose actions have little global consequences.

For instance, we need rules that would constrain the European Union and the United States from using monetary policy in ways that benefit their economies at the expense of others, as the United States has repeatedly done. Today, even the United States recognizes that investment agreements (such as NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11 ) that allow corporations to sue states actually exert constraints on sovereignty without commensurate benefits. A key difference between NAFTA and the trade agreement that succeeded it is the effective dropping of Chapter 11. But the United States should go further, strengthening the ability of any government party to an agreement to sue corporations when terms of the agreement have been violated.

To win the hearts and minds in the new cold war brewing between the United States and China, the United States needs to do more. Washington needs to use the money it has to provide assistance to the poor, and the power that it possesses to construct rules that are fair. Nowhere is that more evident than in response to the debt crisis that the United States faces today and the recent pandemic, another of which the world will almost surely face in the future.

An aerial view shows open graves, left, near recent burials at a cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, on May 22, 2021, during a surge of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. Mario Tama/Getty Images

With most sovereign debt contracts written in the United States, Washington has the power to change the legal framework governing these contracts in ways that make the resolution of crises—where countries can’t pay back what they owe—faster and better. This approach would address the “too little, too late” problem by which one crisis is followed by another, which has plagued the world for so long. With more creditors entering the field, debt resolution is becoming ever more difficult. There are important proposals currently before the New York legislature (where most of the money is raised), but support from the Biden administration would be enormously helpful.

The world has just gone through a terrible pandemic, and the recognition that there will be another has spurred work on a proposed pandemic preparedness treaty. Unfortunately, under the influence of Big Pharma, there are no provisions in the treaty for the kind of intellectual property waiver that the world so badly needs, let alone the technology transfer that would allow the production of all the products—protective gear, vaccines, and therapeutics—necessary to fight the next disease that strikes.

The freedom to live is the most important freedom that we have. Our global agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way they should. Better global agreements can benefit all countries, though not necessarily all people within them: Such agreements would constrain the power of the exploiters to exploit the rest of us, thereby making a dent on their bottom line, but they would benefit society more generally.

Striving to create global agreements that are fair and generous to the poor would, I believe, be in the United States’ self-interest—in its “enlightened” self-interest, taking into account the new geoeconomics and geopolitics. It was never in the United States’ self-interest to pursue a corporatist global agenda, even when it was the hegemon. But it is especially not so today.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University. Twitter:  @JosephEStiglitz

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Global Governance: Political and Economic

The system of global and regional institutions and organisations which has developed mostly after World War 2 was a reaction to the disasters of two world wars and prolonged economic stagnation in the 1930s. The aim was to enable states to come together to agree on shared solutions to shared problems.

Theories of Global Governance

Co-operation on a global scale is centred on the United Nations (UN) . Other organisations include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). All these organisations are set up jointly by states to serve a function or to solve a particular problem.

The United Nations UN

The north atlantic treaty organization (nato), the international monetary fund, the world bank, the world trade organization (wto).

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The case for global governance of AI: arguments, counter-arguments, and challenges ahead

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It is increasingly recognized that as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful and pervasive in society and creates risks and ethical issues that cross borders, a global approach is needed for the governance of these risks. But why, exactly, do we need this and what does that mean? In this Open Forum paper, author argues for global governance of AI for moral reasons but also outlines the governance challenges that this project raises.

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Recently there have been more calls for a global approach to the governance of AI across international organizations, industry, and academia. The UN’s Secretary-General and his Envoy on Technology, for example, have called for globally coordinated AI governance as ‘the only way to harness AI for humanity while addressing its risks and uncertainties’. Footnote 1 Earlier a Resolution adopted by the UN’s General Assembly called for improving digital cooperation and deliberation using the UN as a platform for stakeholders, Footnote 2 thus preparing work on global governance. In September, the G20 leaders called in New Delhi for global governance for AI to harness AI for ‘Good and for All’. Footnote 3 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for coordinated international regulation of generative AI. Footnote 4 And while still relatively rare, several academics have discussed how to achieve global governance of AI, often calling for new policies and new institutions (Erman and Furendal 2022 ; Dafoe 2018 ) and recognizing existing and emerging initiatives and regimes (Schmitt 2022 ; Butcher and Beridze 2019 ; Veale et al. 2023 ), also from non-governmental and non-profit directions. For example, next to the AI for Good summits Footnote 5 that have discussed how AI can contribute to solving global, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has its Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems Footnote 6 and in May 2021, the International Congress for the Governance of AI (ICGAI) held its first conference in Prague. Footnote 7

But why, exactly, is global governance needed, and what form can and should it take?

The main argument for the global governance of AI, which is also applicable to digital technologies in general, is essentially a moral one: as AI technologies become increasingly powerful and influential, we have the moral responsibility to ensure that it benefits humanity as a whole and that we deal with the global risks and the ethical and societal issues that arise from the technology, including privacy issues, security and military uses, bias and fairness, responsibility attribution, transparency, job displacement, safety, manipulation, and AI’s environmental impact. Since the effects of AI cross borders, so the argument continues, global cooperation and global governance are the only means to fully and effectively exercise that moral responsibility and ensure responsible innovation and use of technology to increase the well-being for all and preserve peace; national regulation is not sufficient.

Some might add that the alternative to global governance is a race to the bottom: a kind of Hobbesian situation in which nations engage in a competitive race without heeding ethical standards, safety, and accountability, resulting in widespread injustice and inequality, displacement, security problems, power concentration, and perhaps even totalitarianism. Just as Hobbes thought that individuals left to themselves and not ruled by a state authority would render the life of individuals nasty, brutish, and short, one could argue that nation states left without global governance would result in a global disastrous situation where only some nations and their citizens benefit from the technology and others suffer. A global authority that reigns in the power of the individual nation states could solve this situation. A similar Hobbesian argument can and has been made regarding the climate crisis and other global challenges (Saetra 2022 ).

The Hobbesian for of the global governance of AI argument is not absolutely necessary, at least not in that form. Without world government, one could argue, the situation might not be as bleak as sketched here. There is already regulation at national and even supranational level. The EU, for example, will implement its AI Act, Biden recently issued an Executive Order to create A.I. safeguards, Footnote 8 and China has published rules for generative AI. Footnote 9 However, while this objection defuses the specific Hobbesian view, it does not undermine the general moral argument for global governance of AI: with national regulation in place in some countries, the world might get less nasty for some (e.g., for EU citizens), but such islands of regulation do not benefit those who do not have the luck to live in these parts of the world. In other words, even without a race to the bottom everywhere and for everyone, the general argument still holds. For sake of justice, equality, and inclusion, we need a global governance framework, regardless of national regulation.

Sometimes the argument is made that AI will accelerate and that we need global governance given the risks of AGI (Artificial General Artificial Intelligence)—intelligence comparable to human intelligence—or superintelligence. It is argued that AGI might be in charge of global governance or may lead to (other) global existential risks. Sam Altman and Geoffrey Hinton, for instance, hold this view. Footnote 10 Mitigating such risks, including risk of extinction from AI, is then a reason for global governance. While neither the acceleration thesis nor this view concerning the existential risks of AGI are shared by everyone in the scientific community, they have received increasing attention and are currently influencing AI policy—not only in the US but also in the EU, for example. I am very concerned about this development, if only since it contributes to increased power of people like Altman: they do not only create the problem but also claim to sell the solution, which gives them a unique undemocratic position of power. However, regardless of one’s view on these matters, it is important to see that the world governance of AI argument does not depend on it. Just as a specific Hobbesian version is not necessary, a specific AGI version of the argument is also not necessary for it to work. Even without the supposed risks that might be created by AGI (if such a thing would ever exist), there are sufficient risks left and there is sufficient moral reason to mitigate them. Not believing in the possibility of AGI or in the acceleration thesis is not an excuse to reject global governance of AI.

A more challenging range of counter-arguments, however, has to do with the precise form global governance of AI can and should take. These counter-arguments point to important challenges for those who support this project and wish to implement it, and deserve careful consideration.

A first objection is that global governance is undemocratic. Here the assumption is that global governance means establishing a world government and that a world government is necessarily undemocratic. But these assumptions do not hold. Global governance can in principle be organized in a (more) democratic way, for instance, more democratic than currently the UN works, and there is no obvious reason why world governance should be organized along the lines of the nation state (or any particular nation state for that matter). If we can find a way to do this differently but still establishing sufficient authority then let us do that. In the history of politics and political theory, it has always been a challenge to combine legitimacy and authority; this is not different in this case. Supporters of global governance of AI, therefore, can (and do) argue that they want a multistakeholder approach and want inclusivity and participation not only in terms of AI ethics but also when it comes to the global governance process. For example, the UN has recently established a multistakeholder advisory body on AI. Footnote 11 While this is arguably not democratic enough since it is composed of a rather selective membership, there is a growing awareness of the need for inclusivity and democratisation. Moreover, global agencies and (other) authorities are just one form global governance can take; there are also councils, international agreements, and other instruments of global governance. That being said, how to organize global governance remains a challenge and requires much more research and innovation efforts. Unfortunately, usually the degree and pace of institutional and political innovation does not match the speed of technological development. This needs to change. Institutions needed to be created that can respond faster to technological developments.

Another objection is that global governance of AI is unrealistic and too idealistic: that nation states are not, and will not be, willing to give up national sovereignty and delegate power to a global governance entity or framework, and that even if they would do so, it would be difficult to enforce anything since they would anyway do what they want. This objection can have two faces: a normative and a descriptive one. If the point is that we should not delegate this to supranational governance then one can reply with the moral imperative that we should do something about the risks and ethical problems; in other words, one can reiterate the main argument. If the point is that, as a matter-of-fact, nations are not and would not be willing to do this; one could point to existing global governance in other technological areas such as aviation and nuclear technology, and point to current and emerging initiatives that get the support of nation states. For example, those who argue for global regulation of AI often refer to the current nuclear governance model. Altman has used the analogy and UN Secretary Antonio Guterres has proposed the establishment of an international AI agency akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Footnote 12 While there are good reasons to be sceptical about the comparison between AI and nuclear weapons (Does AI pose existential risk similar to nuclear weapons, if it poses an existential risk at all? Does this distract us from real and known risks? And are nuclear weapons not easier to control given that they need specific resources? Footnote 13 ), the example shows that it is not only desirable but also possible to reach agreements about global regulation of technology. The UN’s history when it comes to nuclear, aviation, and indeed climate change (Guterres also referred to the IPCC) shows that it is perfectly possible to come to new rules, treaties, and agencies at a global level in response to global threats.

A third potential weakness of the argument concerns, surprisingly perhaps, its moral component. The argument seems to assume that we all agree on AI ethics. But, so this objection goes, apart from nations having different interests (a point that is somewhat covered in the previous paragraph), they might also have different values. Given cultural diversity across the world, so it is argued, it is unlikely that nations might agree on a global governance framework. In response, one may point again to the fact that this has so far not been a barrier for international cooperation and global governance. Consider for instance human rights frameworks and their supranational institutions at UN and EU level, which despite being subject to decades of philosophical criticism that stresses difference and diversity, have been at least partly successful as a form of global governance by focusing on what we have in common as humans. And currently there seems consensus rather than divergence within the AI ethics community. Even if there is valid criticism that points to the danger of neo-colonialism and hegemony, ethical frameworks in this area look surprisingly similar and seem to have found some kind of pool of shared values. Consider for example UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which lists a number of such values. Footnote 14 Moreover, from a philosophical point of view, it can be argued—as is done in the case of human rights for example—that while it is important to respect diversity and difference, humans also share a lot of needs, interests, and values, regardless their differences in terms of citizenship, culture, and identity. In other words, it is both possible and desirable to establish a global ethics, including a global AI ethics. Yet the objection does help to create sensitivity and awareness of the importance of respect for diversity and in this context must be seen as a call for creating global governance of AI in a global-inclusive way—for example, in a way that includes the Global South—and in a way that avoids the instalment of (another?) unjust and hegemonic regime. Global governance of AI can only succeed if it has broad global support across cultures and continents and takes into account all these values and interests.

Finally, there might be the worry that global governance of AI might hinder technological innovation. For example, in the process towards the E.U.’s AI Act, OpenAI and other big tech companies have expressed concerns about this Footnote 15 ; similar concerns exist concerning global governance of AI. But this is a familiar discussion also at the national level, and is not as such a good objection to global governance. What I currently see is that the tech industry itself also calls for regulation of AI, both at national level and at global level. The argument, I guess, is that innovation can only succeed if there is a regulative framework that brings more certainty and stability in this turbulent policy area, and that makes sure that the technology can be used and developed in a safe and ethical way. It is in the long-term interest of innovation and business that there is a robust and integrated global governance framework. The extent and nature of that framework may be under discussion—as it should be—and that discussion may well have to include this concern about protecting innovation, but this can hardly be an argument against a global approach. At most, it signals that there are of course power interests at play here, also at the global level. Big tech companies risk to monopolize both the development and the regulation of AI, at least those AI systems that are currently most successful and pervasive. The global governance of AI project questions this monopoly and rightly asks these companies to share the responsibility for better AI and a better world with global frameworks and global institutions that represent and protect citizens and their communities and cultures. How they can and should do this is a huge challenge, but this problem should not justify halting efforts towards more global governance of AI.

In conclusion, here is a good argument for global governance of AI, based on moral reasons and aimed at avoiding a situation in which only some citizens and countries benefit from AI whereas others have to deal with most of the risks and ethical issues. Objections that the global governance of AI project would necessarily be undemocratic, unrealistic, not respecting diversity, and hindering innovation, can be countered. Nevertheless, these objections point to challenging issues that the UN and other actors in this global policy arena will have to deal with in the coming years when trying to build this global governance framework. More research in this area is urgently required to support these efforts.

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Coeckelbergh, M. The case for global governance of AI: arguments, counter-arguments, and challenges ahead. AI & Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01949-5

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REVIEW article

The linkage between global financial crises, corporate social responsibility and climate change: unearthing research opportunities through bibliometric reviews provisionally accepted.

• 1 Kotebe University of Education, Ethiopia
• 2 University of Johannesburg, South Africa

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Financial matters, corporate social responsibility (CSR), climate change, and other sustainable solutions all work in tandem. In order to provide a thorough understanding of the integration between various components during crises, it is necessary to provide knowledge of the interaction between financial, societal, and environmental aspects. In order to accomplish this, hundreds of papers were examined and presented using bibliometric analysis. The study demonstrated that, when examining financial crises in relation to CSR and climate change, sustainability issues were clearly examined. Sustainability, environmental economics, governance approaches, and sustainable development are some of the main issues in this comprehensive subject. Besides, the emerging topics that need more research include organizational resilience, global financial crises, and sustainable performance, while there are no specific themes developed in the subject matter that integrate financial crises, CSR, and climate change. Thus, future researchers need to provide new insights on the integration of these concepts.

Keywords: Financial crises, CSR, Climate Change, sustainability, scientific mapping, thematic

Received: 19 Feb 2024; Accepted: 08 May 2024.

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* Correspondence: Mx. Abdella K. Chebo, Kotebe University of Education, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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