LESSON 4: CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Thakur & Weiss notice that although there is no government for the world, yet:

…on any given day, mail is delivered across borders; people travel from one country to another via a
variety of transport modes; goods and services are freighted across land, air, sea, and cyberspace; and a
whole range of other cross-border activities take place in reasonable expectation of safety and security
for the people, groups, firms, and governments involved. Disruptions and threats are rare...This
immediately raises a puzzle: How is the world governed even in the absence of a world government in
order to produce norms, codes of conduct, and regulatory, surveillance, and compliance instruments?
How are values allocated quasi-authoritatively for the world, and as accepted as such, without a
government to rule the world? (2015)

The answer is said to lie in global governance, which we will discuss in this lesson.

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: A DEFINITION

The Commission on Global Governance (1995) defines governance as "the sum of many ways individuals
and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through
which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action taken. It includes
formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements
that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest" ("Global
Governance," n.d.).

Global governance is understood as the way in which global affairs are managed today. Thakur & Weiss
define global governance as "the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute,
and mediate relations between citizens, societies, markets, and states in the international system-the
wielders and objects of the exercise of international public power" (2015). Ideally, global governance
will assist in helping to solve challenges within the international system.

Also called world governance, this global governance normally involves a variety of actors including
states and regional and international organizations. Nonetheless, one organization may technically be
given the central role on an issue, for instance the World Trade Organization (WTO) in world trade
affairs. Thus global governance is understood as "an international process of consensus-forming which
generates guidelines and agreements that affect national governments and international corporations.
Examples of such consensus would include WHO policies on health issues" (WHO, 2015). Institutions of
global governance also include the United Nations (UN), International Criminal Court (ICC), International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank..
As a movement, global governance ideally works towards political cooperation among transnational
actors, intended for negotiating responses to complications that affect more than one region or state.
Today, global governance exists in the context of globalization and globalizing regimes of power:
politically, economically and culturally. In view of the speeding up of global interdependence, both
among societies and between humankind and the biosphere, the concept "global governance" may refer
to the process of designating laws, rules, or regulations meant for a worldwide scale.

CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

When traditionally interpreted as "governing" (as associated with political authority, institutions, and
control), the term governance stands for formal political institutions that coordinate and control
interdependent social relations and also impose decisions. In the contemporary world nonetheless,
governance has been used to mean the regulation of interdependent relations in the absence of all-
embracing political authority, such as in the international system.

Forms of contemporary global governance may be "visible but quite informal (e.g., practices or
guidelines) or temporary units (e.g., coalitions). But they may also be far more formal, taking the shape
of rules (laws, norms, codes of behavior) as well as constituted institutions and practices (formal and
informal) to manage collective affairs by a variety of actors (state authorities, intergovernmental
organizations, civil society organizations, and private sector entities)" ("Global Governance and the UN,"
n.d.). Through these measures and tools, collective interests are voiced, rights and obligations are
defined, and differences are arbitrated.

Contemporary global governance can thus be depicted as the summation of laws, policies, regulations,
norms, and institutions that define, establish, and mediate transborder relations among states, cultures,
citizens, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the market. It holds the "totality of
institutions, policies; rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their
citizens (indeed, humanity as a whole) try to bring more predictability, stability, and order to their
responses to transnational challenges-such as climate change and environmental degradation, nuclear
proliferation, and terrorism-which go beyond the capacity of a single state to solve" ("Global
Governance and the UN," n.d.).

The development of contemporary global governance also stems from the increase in numbers and
importance of nonstate entities and their new roles. Today, civil society actors take part as activists,
advocates, and even as policymakers in several cases. That is, they perform progressively active roles in
forming laws, norms, and policies at various levels of governance. Their criticisms and recommendations
have perceptible effects in the governmental and intergovernmental allocation of resources and even in
the exercise of economic, political, and military power.

The contemporary global governance has the following features (Biermann and Pattberg, 2008):

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.

The contemporary structure of global governance is shaped by a multitude of actors. Such actors as
states, civil society groups, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
multinational corporations, networks, partnerships, scientific experts, private military and security
companies, as well as transnational criminal and drug-trafficking networks offer global politics with multi
actor outlooks and participate in directing the local and global political system.

Biermann and Pattberg also noticed that global governance actors today widen the range of activities in
which they are involved and they also transform the patterns of interaction and cooperation in
confronting present-day issues on a worldwide 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" (2008).

THE ROLES AND FUNCTIONS OF THE UNITED NATIONS

The United Nations (UN) is an international organization founded on October 24, 1945. It is the second
multipurpose international organization instituted in the 20th century that was global in membership
and scope. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, was established in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles
but disbanded in 1946. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish are UN's official languages.
Headquartered in New York City, the United Nations also has regional offices in Vienna, Geneva, and
Nairobi.

THE UN'S FUNCTIONS

The functions of the United Nations are parallel to its objectives. Based on its Charter, the UN aims: "to
save succeeding generations from the scourge of war....to reaffirm faith in fundamental human
rights...to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties
and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better
standards of life in larger freedom" ("United Nations," 2018).

In other words, some remarkable functions of the UN include the following:

1. maintaining peace and security (especially in the international level);

2. developing friendly relations among nations anchord on respect for the principles of equal rights and
self-determination of peoples;

3. achieving global cooperation to resolve international economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian
problems:

4. respecting and promoting human rights; and,

5. serving as a center where nations can coordinate their actions and activities toward these mentioned
ends.

Since the start of the 21" century, the United Nations and its affiliated agencies have endeavored to
address civil wars and humanitarian crises, unparalleled refugee flows, the damage caused by the
spread of AIDS, worldwide financial disruptions, global terrorism, and the inequalities in wealth between
the world's richest and poorest peoples.

THE UN'S ROLE IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

As regards global governance, none less than the website UNHistory.org states that the United Nations
plays four vital roles as an intellectual actor. These are (1) managing knowledge, (2) developing norms,
(3) promulgating recommendations, and (4) institutionalizing ideas ("The UN's Role in Global
Governance." 2009):

1. Managing knowledge. Although basic research is done in universities, yet the United Nations is a
knowledge-based and knowledge-management international organization. The prototypical UN tasks
include flagging concerns and keeping them in front of undecided sates. Idea-mongering happens
through expert groups, organizing prominent individuals into panels and study groups, and especially
through the worldwide ad hoc conferences.
The United Nations has remarkable convening power and mobilizing capacity to help bring in knowledge
from outside and to make sure its discussion and propagation among states. The UN-sponsored global
conferences, summits of heads of government, and blue-ribbon commissions and panels have been
utilized for "framing issues, outlining choices, making decisions; for setting, even anticipating, the
agenda; for framing the rules, including for dispute settlement; for pledging and mobilizing resources;
for implementing collective decisions; and for monitoring progress and recommending mid-term
corrections and adjustments" ("The UN's Role in Global Governance," 2009).

2. Developing norms. New norms have to be pronounced, circulated, and established once information
has been gathered and knowledge acquired that a problem is severe enough to warrant attention by the
worldwide policy community. The First UN is an indispensable way to allow the expression and
subsequent jelling of official views from around the globe on international norms despite the
understandable problems of accommodating the standpoints of 192 nations. Likewise, in spite of the
apparent problems of running a secretariat with a variety of nationalities, cultures, languages, and
administrative norms, the Second UN is also an continuing bureaucratic experiment in opening up the
array of inputs to include a broad range of outlooks.

3. Promulgating recommendations. Once the norms start to change and become prevalent, a succeeding
step is to frame a range of possibilities about how states and their citizens and IGOS can change
conduct. When an emergent norm comes close to becoming a global one, addressing particular
approaches to problem-solving, to fill the policy gap, becomes compulsory. The policy stage pertains to
the articulation of ideologies and actions that an institution is to employ in the event of specific
eventualities.

The United Nation's capacity to consult far and wide plays a huge part in its capability to frame
operational ideas. "This is a function that is quintessentially in the job descriptions not only of member
states but also of the Second UN, the staff of international secretariats, who are often complemented by
trusted consultants, NGOs, and expert groups from the Third UN. Policy ideas are often discussed,
disseminated, and agreed upon in public forums and global conferences" ("The UN's Role in Global
Governance,"

4. Institutionalizing ideas. When knowledge has been acquired, norms articulated, and policies
formulated, an institution can administer their implementation and monitoring. However, if they are
adequately distinct from other problems, cohesive in their own cluster of qualities, and of satisfactory
scale and gravity, then the global community of governments might well consider forming a new IGO (or
focusing a part of an existing one) committed to addressing this concern area.

Institutions represent ideas but can also "provide a platform from which to challenge existing norms and
received wisdom about the best approaches to problem solving. For instance, the generalized system of
preferences for less industrialized countries-which was hardly an item on the conventional free trade
agenda-grew from both the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and GATT" ("The UN's
Role in Global Governance," 2009).

THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The world has changed immensely since the formation of the United Nations. In the 21 century, there
have been four times as many state actors, a compatibly greater amount and proportion of nonstate
actors, and a remarkable diversity in the kinds of state and nonstate actors as compared to 1945. And
there has been a corresponding spread in the quantity, nature, and brands of threats to national
security and global peace alike. Accordingly, the increasing amount and kinds of actors in global affairs
have to grapple with a swelling number, array, and complexity of concerns in a progressively networked,
profoundly intertwined, but also more fragmented globe.

In the face of new and multifarious contemporary concerns, the irresistible challenge is to reconfigure
the institutions of global governance such as to make them more vigorous so that they can weather
both endogenous and exogenous blows; tough so that they can recover when they do buckle in the face
of some jolts; and bendable and flexible - so that they can cope with the quickly changing nature and
cause of threats.

Today, states in the world are interdependent in areas as varied as climate change. infectious diseases,
terrorism, nuclear peace and safety, financial markets, product safety, food supply and water tables, fish
stocks, and ecosystem resources. Not only do they have potential to incite interstate military clashes,
they are all drivers of human insecurity as they pose threats to individual lives and wellbeing.

Ramesh Thakur, former Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University in charge of its Peace and
Governance Programme, explains that the challenge of global governance-governance for the world to
yield order, solidity, and predictability even in the lack of a world government-is sixfold:

1. The evolution of international organizations to facilitate robust global responses lags behind the
emergence of collective action problems;

2. The most pressing problems - nuclear weapons, terrorism, pandemics, food, water and fuel scarcity,
climate change, agricultural trade - are global in scope and require global solutions: problems without
passports in search of solutions without passports. But the policy authority and legal capacity for
coercive obilization of the required resources for tackling them remain vested in states;"

3. There is a disconnect between the distribution of decision-making authority in international

5. There is a mutually undermining gap between legitimacy and efficiency. Precisely what made the G8
summits unique and valuable-informal meetings between a small number of the world's most powerful
government leaders behind closed doors on a first name basis, without intermediaries and with no
notes being taken- is what provoked charges of hegemonism, secrecy. opaqueness, and lack of
representation and legitimacy. The very feature that gives the United Nations its unique legitimacy,
universal membership, makes it an inefficient body for making, implementing and enforcing collective
decisions;'

6. During the Cold War, the main axis around which world affairs rotated was East-West. Today this has
morphed into a North-South axis. The Copenhagen Conference on climate change was suboptimal in
outcome in part because of the colliding worldviews of the global North and South. (Thakur, n.d.)

Thus, the essential challenge for the global community is how to reorganize and reform the United
Nations in order to transpose it at the center of communal efforts to address present-day and projected
worldwide problems over the next quarter and half century. The exemplary institutions of global
governance have been the G8 and the United Nations. But the G6/7/8, set up in 1975, has been always a
thin club of a selection of nations, and, as such, never possessed either representative or electoral
legitimacy. Equally, despite its many real accomplishments, the United Nations has been struggling to be
effective and significant.

Nontheless, the advent of the G20 spoke strongly to the need for an alternate worldwide directing
group to pull in all the world's potent actors as accountable managers of the world order as
stakeholders, and not simply as rule-takers. The G20 is an international forum for the governments and
central bank governors from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France,
Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey,
the United Kingdom, and the United States of America

In theory, the G20 provided the best crossover point among legitimacy, efficiency, and effectiveness. It
should strive to direct policy consensus and coordination, and to activate the indispensable political will
to drive change and address worldwide challenges while piloting the shifting international currents of
power, influence, and wealth. To be legitimate however, it still should operate with and not
independently of or against the United Nations.

In other words, the real challenge is how to preserve the helpful attributes of the existing knots of global
governance while peeling their pathologies. This could be done by configuring and operating either the
G20 or the United Nations as the core of networked global governance. The United Nations must
continue to lead efforts for the establishment and upkeep of a rules-based order that defines both the
appropriate conduct to be followed by all state and nonstate international actors and mechanism and
procedures for settling differences among them. The United Nations must remain in its chief role in the
development of global governance through "filling five gaps in all issue-areas: knowledge (empirical and
theoretical), normative, policy, institutional, and compliance (monitoring and enforcement) (Thakur,
n.d.). (For Thakur's suggestions on how to reconstruct the UN, you may read the Appendix E: "UN's
Structural and Procedural Reforms" of this book).

THE RELEVANCE OF THE STATE AMID GLOBALIZATION

Simply defined, a state is a community formed by people and exercising permanent power within a
definite territory.

Characteristics of the Territorial State

According to international law, a state is characteristically defined as being based on the 1933
Montevideo Convention. Based on Article 1 of the Convention, the state as a person of international law
should possess these qualifications:

1. Permanent population

2. Defined territory

3. Government

4. Capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

A more politically-oriented definition of state is that it is "a compulsory political organization with a
centralized government that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain
geographical territory" ("State," n.d.).

For millennia, numerous human societies have been governed by states. The first states are said to arise
about 5,500 years ago alongside swift growth of cities and invention of writing. For long, the modern
nation-state has been the leading form of state to which people are subject.

Although many states are sovereign, some are "subject to external sovereignty or hegemony where
ultimate sovereignty lies in another state. The term state is also applied to federated states that are
members of a federal union, which is the sovereign state...Speakers of American English often use the
terms state and government as synonyms, with both words referring to an organized political group that
exercises authority over a particular territory" ("State," n.d.).

Social historian Eric Hobsbawm, Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the
New School for Social Research in New York enumerates some specific characteristics of the territorial
state:

1. In the first place, it consists of a (preferably continuous and unbroken) territory, separated from other
states by clearly defined lines (frontiers or borders) demarcating the area under the power of one state
government from that under the power of another...

2. Second, this territory is sovereign, which is to say that within it no authority other than that of the
local state is recognized, except by the unforced agreement of that state (by a negotiated treaty, for
example)... The imposition of a superior authority against the will of the local state- such as a military
conquest - is an act of force which brings sovereignty to an end, at least temporarily...

3. Third, within its territory the state has the monopoly both of law and of the powers of coercion,
except insofar as these have been willingly renounced, as by the member-states of the European Union
which accept for certain purposes the precedence of European law over national law. The state's
authority extends to all who are present on its territory; and while on that territory, again with minor
exceptions such as diplomatic immunity, all persons are, to varying extents, subject to that state's power
and to no other....

4. Fourth, the national state rules its citizens or subjects directly and not through intermediate
authorities, subaltern but to some extent autonomous, as was the case in feudal societies or certain
kinds of traditional empires...

5. Fifth, direct government and administration of the inhabitants by the central authorities of a nation-
state implies a certain degree of standardization or even homogenization in the treatment of the
inhabitants. If, say, monogamy is established by state law, then polygamy cannot be legally practised in
the state (as the Mormons in Utah discovered when joining the United States)...

Finally, while a nation-state composed of people without political rights or positive participation in its
affairs is possible, the heritage of the Age of Revolution has been to turn most states into citizen states,
at least in theory. In such cases the state is considered to represent 'the people', and 'the people' to be
the source of sovereignty. or at least to give the state legitimacy, most commonly by some form of
election or plebiscite, or some other form of public ritual symbolizing the unity of people and state
...(Hobsbawm, 1999)
THE WEAKENING OF THE STATE IN GLOBALIZATION

Hobsbawn however admits that the sovereign nation-state is today entering a new phase, an era of
uncertainty, and perhaps of retreat. In today's globalized world, the removal of trade barriers,
liberalization of world capital markets, and rapid technological advancement, particularly in the fields of
transportation, telecommunications, and information technology, have enormously improved and
hastened the movement of products, people, information, and capital. These developments have also
enlarged the variety of issues which spill over the borders of nation-states necessitating transnational
regulation and norm setting and, thus talks and formal negotiations on a regional or global scale.
Significantly due to globalization, several problems troubling the world today, such as economic crises,
poverty, environmental pollution, organized crime, and have become transnational in nature, and thus
cannot be managed only at the national level, nor by state to state dialogues.

The need for better economic and social interdependence affects national decision making as it
demands a transfer of decisions to the international level. Globalization necessitates complex decision-
making procedures that transpire at various levels, Le. sub-national, national, and even global, leading to
an increasing multilayered system of governance that goes beyond the authority of the state.

Hobsbawm enumerates three ways in which the supranational (transnational) forces have weakened
the state:

1. First, the creation of a supranational (or rather transnational) economy, whose transactions are
largely uncontrolled or even uncontrollable by states, restricts the capacity of states to direct national
economies. A major reason for the crisis of the social-democratic and Keynesian policies which
dominated Western capitalism in the third quarter of the century is precisely that the power of states to
set levels of employment, wages and welfare expenditures on their territory has been undermined by
exposure to international competition from economies producing more cheaply or more efficiently. The
fashionable neo-liberal free market policies of the 1980s have made states even more vulnerable.

2. Second, the state has been weakened by the rise of regional or global institutions such as the
European Union and the international banking institutions set up in 1945 to which individual states
defer, either because they are too small to engage in effective international competition except as part
of a larger bloc. or because their economies (or, more precisely, their public finances) are so weak as to
make them dependent on loans given under politically restrictive conditions.

3. Third, territorial borders have been made largely irrelevant by the technological revolution in
transport and communications. A world in which people, with rare exceptions, lived and worked either
in one state or in another, has been replaced by one in which they may live and work simultaneously in,
or commute between, more than one state, as well as being in constant immediate contact with any
part of the globe. It is quite normal today for a person of relatively modest economic situation to be
simultaneously a householder and income earner in two or more states. The sharp distinction between
permanent and seasonal, or temporary, emigration, so typical of the wave of intercontinental migration
before the First World War, no longer applies in the present wave of international migration. This affects
the relations between permanent immigrants and the states in which they have chosen to live, as well
as between immigrants and their countries of origin. It also raises the question of social and political
rights for people domiciled in a state who are not, and may not wish to be, full citizens of that state. A
glance: at current politics in Europe, North America, and the successor states to the USSR shows that
these are explosive issues. (Hobsbawm, 1999)

Because regulation and cooperation are needed on several levels as an upshot of the complexities and
transnational nature of contemporary globas concerns. some scholars thus predict the 'end' of national
state power. Some say that the state may simply adjust to globalization, while some forecast that it will
not have an active role in future forms of globalized world. Worse, some believe that the state will
become obsolete at all.

THE REMAINING FUNCTIONS OF THE STATE

Even amidst globalization, Hobsbawm believes that the state retains its indispensable redistributive
function. Redistribution of income and redistribution of wealth are respectively the allocation or
transfer of income and of wealth (including physical property) from some persons to others through
instituted social devices like taxation, public services, welfare, charity, land reform, monetary policies,
confiscation, divorce, or tort law. The terms characteristically refer to redistribution on an economy
wide nature rather than among chosen persons.

Hobsbawm believes that the state, preferably the huge state or a supranational combination, remains
indispensable in this respect. Even in a globalized society, the need to provide for education, health
care, income maintenance, and the like remains indispensable and so does some form of public
authority for these noble purposes. For the moment, the nation-state remains the most effective
authority for this aim. "It may not be ideal for the purpose in a much more globalized world.
Nevertheless if compared to global institutions which (for the time being) have no power to diminish
international economic inequalities, nation-states (supplemented in Europe by the European Union) are
in a position to diminish regional or group inequalities to some extent" (Hobsbawm, 1999).

True, nation-states may have to be supplemented or in some respects supplanted by units capable of
dealing with the concerns of the global economy, global demographic movements, global environment,
global inequalities and, especially the globalization of communication and
Culture; nonetheless, the territorial state will continue to play a major role in relation to social
development. (For more discussions on the relevance of the state amid globalization, you may read the
Appendix F: "The Functions of States in a Globalized World" in this book).