Global Governance

Global governance (or world governance) refers to institutions that coordinate the behavior of transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, resolve disputes, and alleviate collective action problems. Global governance broadly entails making, monitoring, and enforcing rules. Within global governance, a variety of types of actors – not just states – exercise power.

In contrast to the traditional meaning of governance, the term ''global governance'' is used to denote the regulation of interdependent relations in the absence of an overarching political authority. The best example of this is the international system or relationships between independent states.

The concept of global governance began in the mid-19th century. It became particularly prominent in the aftermath of World War I, and more so after the end of World War II. Since World War II, the number of international organizations has increased substantially. The number of actors (whether they be states, non-governmental organizations, firms, and epistemic communities) who are involved in governance relationships has also increased substantially.

Various terms have been used for the dynamics of global governance, such as complex interdependence, international regimes, multilevel governance, global constitutionalism, and ordered anarchy.

Stronger international cooperation is needed to tackle the interconnected global governance challenges such as health, trade, and the environment. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Definition

The term ''global governance'' is broadly used to designate all regulations intended for organization and centralization of human societies on a global scale. ''Global governance'' has also been defined as "the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated, rights and obligations are established, and differences are mediated".

Traditionally, ''government'' has been associated with ''governing'', or with political authority, institutions, and, ultimately, control. ''Governance'' denotes a process through which institutions coordinate and control independent social relations, and that have the ability to enforce their decisions. However, ''governance'' is also used to denote the regulation of interdependent relations in the absence of an overarching political authority, such as in the international system. Some now speak of the development of ''global public policy''.

The definition is flexible in scope, applying to general subjects such as global security or to specific documents and agreements such as the World Health Organization's Code on the Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes. The definition applies whether the participation is bilateral (e.g. an agreement to regulate usage of a river flowing in two countries), function-specific (e.g. a commodity agreement), regional (e.g. the Treaty of Tlatelolco), or global (e.g. the Non-Proliferation Treaty).

In the light of the unclear meaning of the term ''global governance'' as a concept in international politics, some authors have proposed defining it not in substantive, but in disciplinary and methodological terms. For these authors, ''global governance'' is better understood as an analytical concept or optic that provides a specific perspective on world politics different from that of conventional international relations theory. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson have even argued that global governance has the capacity to overcome some of the fragmentation of international relations as a discipline particularly when understood as a set of questions about the governance of world orders.

Other authors conceptualized global governance as a field of practice in which diverse stakeholders, such as public, private, and supra-governmental actors can compete for influence about issues that are not bound to national boundaries. This conceptualization allows to better understand the principles of exclusions of specific stakeholders from the negotiation field as some actors lack the economic, social, cultural and symbolic resources required to gain enough influence.

History

The League of Nations (founded in 1920), the predecessor of the United Nations, was one of the first organizations to promote global governance.

While attempts of intergovernmental coordination of policy-making can be traced back to ancient times, comprehensive search for effective formats of international coordination and cooperation truly began after the end of the WWI. It was during that post-war period that some of the still existing international institutions (or their immediate predecessors) were founded. Among thinkers who made major contributions to the period discussions on the goals and forms of international governance and policy coordination were J.M. Keynes with his " The Economic Consequences of the Peace" and G. Cassel with his works on the post-war development of the global monetary system.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of a long period of international history based on a policy of balance of powers. Since this historic event, the planet has entered a phase of geostrategic breakdown. The national-security model, for example, while still in place for most governments, is gradually giving way to an emerging collective conscience that extends beyond the restricted framework it represents.

In its initial phase, world governance was able to draw on themes inherited from geopolitics and the theory of international relations, such as peace, defense, geostrategy, diplomatic relations, and trade relations. But as globalization progresses and the number of interdependencies increases, the global level is also highly relevant to a far wider range of subjects, such as climate change, environmental protection and sustainability in general.

In the 20th century, the risks associated with nuclear fission raised global awareness of environmental threats. The 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibiting atmospheric nuclear testing marked the beginning of the globalization of environmental issues. Environmental law began to be modernized and coordinated with the Stockholm Conference (1972), backed up in 1980 by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was signed and ratified in 1985. In 1987, 24 countries signed the Montreal Protocol which imposed the gradual withdrawal of CFCs.

Methods

The "cooperative problem-solving arrangements" of global governance may be formal. In that case they take the shape of laws or formally constituted institutions for a variety of actors (such as state authorities, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector entities, civil society

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