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Change and Continuity in Global Governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Thomas G. Weiss  and
Rorden Wilkinson
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Extract

Why, despite well-established and well-publicized intergovernmental processes that date back to the early 1970s, have we been unable to put in place effective mechanisms to combat climate change? Why, despite the existence of extensive global human rights machinery, do we live in a world where mass kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder continue to blight the lives of so many? Why, despite a great deal of effort on the part of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nonstate actors, have we been unable to make much of a difference to the lives of the ultra-poor and attenuate the very worst aspects of growing global inequalities? Most fundamentally, why have the current international system and the outcomes that it has produced remained so inadequate in the postwar period?

Type
Roundtable: Change and Continuity in Global Governance
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Winter 2015 , pp. 397 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Good recent examples are Pegram, Tom and Acuto, Michele, eds., “Forum: Global Governance in the Interregnum,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 2 (2015), pp. 584–705 Google Scholar; Jamie Gaskarth, ed., Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2015); Weiss, Thomas G. and Wilkinson, Rorden, “Rethinking Global Governance? Complexity, Authority, Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014), pp. 207–15Google Scholar; Weiss, Thomas G. and Wilkinson, Rorden, “Global Governance to the Rescue: Saving International Relations?” Global Governance 20, no. 1 (2014), pp. 19–36 Google Scholar; Elias, Juanita, “Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism,” International Political Sociology 7, no. 2 (2013), pp. 152–69Google Scholar; Scholte, Jan Aart, “Poor People in Rich Countries: The Roles of Global Governance,” Global Social Policy 12, no. 1 (2012), p. 3–23 Google Scholar; and Dauvergne, Peter and Lister, Jane, “The Power of Big Box Retail in Global Environmental Governance: Bringing Commodity Chains Back into IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 1 (2010), pp. 145–60Google Scholar.

2 Finkelstein, Lawrence S., “What is Global Governance?” Global Governance 1, no. 3 (1995), pp. 367–72Google Scholar; and Robert Latham, “Politics in a Floating World: Toward a Critique of Global Governance,” in Martin Hewson and Timothy J. Sinclair, eds., Approaches to Global Governance Theory (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 23–54. For commentaries, see Hofferberth, Matthias, “Mapping the Meanings of Global Governance: A Conceptual Reconstruction of a Floating Signifier,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 2 (2015), pp. 598–617 Google Scholar; and Dingwerth, Klaus and Pattberg, Philipp, “Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politics,” Global Governance 12, no. 2 (2006), pp. 185–203 Google Scholar.

3 See, for instance, Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Krasner, Stephen D., “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies 21, no. 1 (1988), pp. 66–94 Google Scholar; and Hopf, Ted, “The Logic of Habit in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 4 (2010), pp. 539–61Google Scholar.

4 Brian Frederking and Paul F. Diehl, eds., The Politics of Global Governance: International Organizations in an Interdependent World, 5th edition (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2015); and Margaret P. Karns and Karen A. Mingst, International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance, 2nd edition (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2010).

5 For an overview, see Alice D. Ba and Matthew J. Hoffmann, eds., Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence, Contestation and World Order (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2005).

6 Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Ploughshares, 3rd edition (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 4.

7 For accounts of key actors, issues, and perspectives in global governance, see fifty essays in Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, eds., International Organization and Global Governance (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2014).

8 Weiss and Wilkinson, “Rethinking Global Governance?”

9 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (London: Pelican, 1961), p. 62.

10 Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Random House, 2009).

11 Exceptions include Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George, “The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of Modern International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2013), pp. 620–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and earlier Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

12 Andrew J. Williams, Amelia Hadfield, and J. Simon Rofe, International History and International Relations (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2012).

13 Andrew Hurrell, “Foreword to the Third Edition,” in Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. xiii.

14 Biermann, Frank et al. , “Nagivating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance,” Science 335, issue 6074 (2012), pp. 1306–307CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

15 Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World after 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

16 Weiss and Wilkinson, “Global Governance to the Rescue.”

17 Murphy, Craig N., “The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance,” Global Governance 21, no. 2 (2015): 189Google Scholar.

18 Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Ruggie, John Gerard, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution,” International Organization 46, no. 3 (1992), pp. 561–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, “History's Revenge and Future Shock,” in Hewson and Sinclair, eds., Approaches to Global Governance Theory, p. 213.

20 James N. Rosenau, “Governance in the Twenty-First Century,” in Rorden Wilkinson, ed., The Global Governance Reader (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2005), p. 45.

21 On the nebulous aspects of global governance, see Robert W. Cox with Timothy Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 301.

22 Mayer, Maximilian and Acuto, Michele, “The Global Governance of Large Technical Systems,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 2 (2015), pp. 660–83Google Scholar; Boli, John and Thomas, George M., “World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 2 (1997), pp. 171–210 Google Scholar; and A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, eds., Private Authority in International Affairs (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999).