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As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is instructive to re-examine the territory sketched out by James Rosenau in his seminal article (reprinted in this volume as Chapter 1). At the time of its first publication in 1995, few would have contested that the myriad dynamics that made possible the benefits of globalization were also sources of disorder and boundary-traversing dynamics that offered profound challenges to world order as much as to international relations. But was nascent global politics also producing or facilitating commensurate forms of global governance? The uncertainties, paradoxes and ambiguities highlighted as inescapable features of intellectual engagement with global governance are with us still, but so too are Rosenau’s insights into the actors and dynamics that continue to shape world order and to inform investigations into global governance in all its forms. These include the relocation of authority not only ‘outward’ from states toward forms of transnational control mechanisms, including state/non-state configurations, but also ‘downward’ to sub-national groupings and even to individuals1 (sometimes in forms that are not necessarily either inclusive or beneficent). The actors and issues quickly change, but the themes persist, not least because globalization has quickened, spread and intensified. For this reason, the very considerable global governance literature that has now been produced in the years since ‘Governance in the Twenty-first Century’ has not diminished the degree to which trying to discern, create, adjust or sustain global governance is an intellectual adventure.

The US Congressman Thomas (‘Tip’) O’Neil once asserted that ‘all politics is local’.1 There is a degree of provocative simplification in this, but also some seasoned political shrewdness. Political engagement or ascent is driven less by any objective measure of the scale or seriousness of an issue than by how much it matters to individuals. This is often felt in terms of immediate, practical concerns such as job security, disposable income and perceptions of hazard. But there is a good deal more than highly localised and self-interested impulses behind the capacity of individuals to accept or assert the need for making any issue a political one requiring a concerted response. Compassion, a sense of justice and concern for the quality of life of future generations also manifest themselves quite routinely in everything from the politics of foreign aid2 to the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign.3 Politicians are not always able to detect, inspire, lead or channel the felt concerns of their constituents, but they know it is essential to success — and all the more over issues that initially meet with indifference or hostility.

Even on the largest scale, life appears to present us with problems for which there are solutions: wars can be fought to a decisive conclusion; epidemic outbreaks can be halted; and global financial crises can be stabilised. Yet describing any dedicated human endeavour as a ‘solution’ is at the same time a way of characterising the matter to be addressed as limited — that is, as a special set of circumstances, clearly discrete in space and/or time, rather than as a particular manifestation of a more persistent condition. So it is that World War II can be sited with precision, geographically and temporally, but its many legacies persist1 (as does the propensity for politically-directed violence); we were successful in preventing SARS from becoming a pandemic, but a disease-free human future is not more likely as a result;2 and the regularity of global financial crises cannot be put down to what the insurance industry terms, ‘acts of god’.3 We must address disasters and grave threats — and we do, often with considerable effectiveness. But human history has a thematic consistency because the fundamentals of the human condition are consistent; and human life is less a matter of problem-solving than of navigating a course through changing circumstances. For example, the goal of maintaining human health, which includes efforts to prevent and cure diseases, presently entails such varied initiatives as health education and safe sex programmes; a call to reduce the indiscriminate use of antimicrobials in order to slow the adaptive processes of pathogens such as the TB bacillus; and monitoring the migratory patterns of birds in the hope of preventing an outbreak of avian flu.

What is global about the human condition cannot wholly be contained or directed from within the international system, despite the fact that many of the empowering aspects of globalisation have been set in place by states themselves. This is partly a matter of the complex interaction of human and natural systems, which generally need to assume crisis proportions in order to achieve political visibility. But the limits of states and the international system to exercise a fully comprehensive global governance (whatever that might comprise) also arise because states are enmeshed in nets of relations which not only impact on them in functional ways, but which also constitute the larger order in which states themselves operate. An acknowledgement of this does not entail an evasion of the long-standing structure/agency debate in International Relations theorising, which as one author contends, can help us to confront notions of globalisation as akin to a force of nature: [I]t is important that we acknowledge the strategic use made of the rhetoric of globalisation. For, as a process without a subject, seeming to operate above the heads of elected officials it provides, or is capable of providing, a most convenient scapegoat for the imposition of unpopular and unpalatable measures. By restoring active and strategic subjects to the process of globalisation we can not only contribute to the demystification of this process without a subject, we can also contribute to the repoliticisation of political and economic debate.1

Disputes about the concept of global governance generally take place around a shared understanding that there are two distinct but not entirely free-standing uses of the term. The first, referred to throughout this book as ‘summative’ global governance, depicts the overall order of the world, many important elements of which are not accounted for by the structures and dynamics of states and the international system. The second, characterised in previous chapters as ‘sector specific’, is not necessarily unitary or in possession of commanding political authority, but refers to order-creating and sustaining action in defined arenas of human endeavour (global finance) or consequence (health; environment). So what has come to be known as global governance can be exercised directly, or created and sustained through a combination of state/non-state and formal/informal mechanisms. Neither seems adequate on its own, either in descriptive or normative terms;1 and a substantial portion of contestation over global governance consists of investigating highly complex and dynamic questions of political authority, practical capacity, accountability, agency and legitimacy2 in a world in which states and the international system are necessary but not sufficient for the kinds of global order we can observe and, under the pressure of events, those we must shore up, extend or create.

How comprehensively and thoroughly must something be governed in order for the governance in question to be fully meaningful? The governance of any large human system can comprise a staggering number of component sub-systems and variables, many of which can have negative, though not usually systemically threatening consequences. States, for example, can experience a variety of economic, social and political crises which might unseat a government but leave the general integrity of the state unscathed. Even the routine business of hard budgetary choices can affect the quality of some aspects of state governance as much as instances of managerial incompetence or the impact of unanticipated events. And although weak, failed and ‘quasi states’ are a source of practical concern and of scholarly interest,1 the terms themselves are not free of ambiguity; and a determination of these conditions is a matter of judgement, not precise measurement against agreed criteria. Yet when a state is unable or unwilling to halt widespread violence, human rights abuses, or other sources of large-scale human suffering within its sovereign bounds, definitional precision is moot. Indeed, the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty argued that sovereign immunity from humanitarian intervention should be regarded as conditional on a state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens from catastrophe, not a legal absolute.2

The concept of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theorising is not disputed: in those contexts, the term means that states exist in a world in which there is no overarching authority, no global government. Realist emphasis on this point gives anarchy the quality of an arena in which states contend with each other quite sharply and directly, because in the absence of any supranational authority, war and violent conflict are inevitable; and states are thrown back onto self-help, with the prospects for trust and cooperation limited and generally shortlived. But is the absence of any authority that can exercise power over states so determining? It is perhaps more helpful — and more ‘realistic’ — to consider anarchy not as an arena but as one of many conditions informing state interaction. This is easier to grasp if we ‘scale down’ to sub-state levels. In law-abiding societies, most people do not eschew acts of law-breaking because they fear arrest, but because they see it as in their interests. After a period of civil unrest, violent conflict or other form of social dissolution, one is likely to hear calls for the establishment or re-establishment of ‘law and order’ — a phrase that can convey an understanding that law imposes and maintains social order. But it is more often the case that law arises from order, which is why the imposition of martial law is an emergency measure, not a viable and sustainable form of governance.

Is it truly the case, as we are sometimes told, that ‘global issues require global solutions’?1 What would acting in this way entail, and do we currently have the means to do so? What would be required of the familiar structures, actors and processes of politics? Are these fixtures either necessary or sufficient? Would something new need to be created, or could we engineer ‘global solutions’ by making running adjustments to our already existing organisations of political community? Are global issues now properly the work of international organisations, or should we think instead of supranational ones, or possibly configurations of state and non-state actors? How would the agents of ‘global solutions’ secure and maintain all of the important mainstays of democratic politics: legitimacy, authority, accountability, inclusiveness, and representation? On what basis would ‘solutions’ be enacted — and if necessary, enforced?

Introduction: Global Governance or Global Governances? J.N.Rosenau Governance in the Twenty-First Century J.N.Rosenau Actors, Arenas, and Issues in Global Governance K.Dingwerth& P.Pattberg Global Governance as International Organization T.G.Weiss& A.Z.Kamran Global Governance as Configurations of State/Non-State Activity T.Porter Global Governance as Liberal Hegemony J.Friedrichs Global Governance as Public Policy Networks and Partnerships J.Steets Global Governance as Sector-Specific Management J.Whitman Global Governance as a Summative Phenomenon W.A.Knight Conclusion: The Global Governance Prospect J.Whitman

The use of the term ‘governance’ is not confined to activities taken to regulate matters at the highest levels or in the most inclusive arenas of human activity — global governance. ‘Governance’ has long been in use to describe the ways in which non-governmental actors, activities and relations combine with the machinery of government to produce social order. Effective government is necessary for the orderly functioning of large and complex societies throughout the developed world, but state and society are not co-extensive; and it would be difficult to imagine a state lacking an extensive civil society that was not also a tyranny of frightening proportions. So there are many forms of order and association which are outside of the remit of government, or outside of its purview; and the lines between public and private are routinely contested. At the same time, when international organisations and donors subject weak states to ‘good governance’ criteria, they do so on an understanding that an imbalance between forms of order that are regulated/unregulated, public/private, accountable/unaccountable can be pernicious, as in aptly-named ‘kleptocracies’.1 However benign and inclusive the form of governance in particular states or sub-state polities, we can say that governance ‘[comprises] patterns that emerge from governing activities of social, political and administrative actors…[Thus], modes of social-political governance are always an outcome of public and private deliberation.’2

For the largest part of human history the environmental and material circumstances of human groups everywhere were subject only to incremental change, much of it generated and mediated locally.1 ‘[I]t took 99.4 per cent of economic history to reach the wealth levels of [the hunter-gatherer], 0.59 per cent to double that level by 1750 and then just 0.01 per cent for global wealth to leap to the levels of the modern world…[in other words], over 97 per cent of humanity’s wealth was created in the last 0.01 per cent of our history.’2 With that wealth has come the dislocations, uncertainties, impacted problems and the governance challenges of our globalised world. Certainly in a world less comprehensively globalised, less populous and less industrially advanced, global governance would not be necessary. In fact, it would scarcely be possible.

No part of the world remains unaffected by human activity: we have created or conditioned the fundamentals of human circumstances around the globe. For both good and ill, the world as it is — ‘everything that is the case’ — is an outcome of our values and the aspirations they inspire. Acknowledging this does not nullify plurality as a fact or as an ideal, nor does it lessen the importance of contention and resistance to dominant forms of social, political and economic organisation1 — in fact, quite the opposite. As discussed in Chapter 1, our globalised condition has left few aspirations innocent — that is, without far-reaching and sometimes undesirable consequences; and at least in the developed world we have become acutely conscious that aspirations in organised, social forms entail costs and outcomes that not even the most scrupulous democratic procedures can obviate. The extent of globalisation means that ‘we the people’ is no longer merely an expression of inclusion within a bounded culture or polity, but is now also the expression of a common human fate. So for example, there is a good deal about large-scale carbon emitting behaviours such as power generation, mass transportation and international tourism and their impact on distant peoples and environments that we could reasonably characterise as ‘collateral damage’.

As globalization has developed from being an emergent phenomenon to a pervasive condition, the global qualities of human relatedness have become inescapable and of routine importance. Increasingly, in matters as varied as human health, environmental quality and economic stability, national and even local concerns must take into active consideration world-encircling lines of causation. So when we attach the qualifier ‘global’ to an issue such as human health, it is on an understanding that global health is not merely a statistical abstraction, but a specific form of complex interrelatedness with a range of serious implications, not least in the form of epidemics and pandemics. To the extent that various actors — public and private, national and international, alone and in combination — seek to monitor and improve human health and to cure or prevent diseases worldwide, we can say that their combined activities amount to the global governance of health1 (sometimes expressed as global health governance). This and related forms of global governance dedicated to specific arenas of activity or relations can best be termed sectoral. The other principal use of the term ‘global governance’ is summative — that is, global governance regarded as the totality of all governances, including but not limited to states and the international system.

All technologies entail risks of varying kinds and degrees; and all systems created or adapted for the regulation of technology are minimally concerned with reducing risk to what is deemed an acceptable maximum, even if that is essentially a calculated balance against real or expected benefits.1 There is nothing new in this: many basic considerations (most notably public safety) that attended once-novel technologies are as pertinent for nuclear power stations as they were for steam trains. Similarly, large-scale social disruptions arising from or amplified by technological advances are hardly a late arrival, even in respect of globalisation.2

However broad their scope, theories of world politics are abstractions from the richness and complexity of life. Of course, theorizing necessitates boundaries which define and limit what is deemed pertinent and within which coherent understanding and explanatory power can be developed and defended. This generally holds, however difficult it might sometimes be to clearly distinguish the border between, say, international relations and international political economy; or between economics and economic sociology.1

Let us assume that the principal fixtures and dynamics of the UN and its member states, and the main currents of international relations, remain essentially unchanged but that unprecedented levels of cooperation and coordination for the provision of humanitarian assistance combine in a widening virtuous circle. How much could we then accomplish through the betterment of our operational capabilities? After improvements to the timeliness, efficiency and possibly even the scope of our activities, what would still remain on any humanitarian agenda? We know that the most appalling humanitarian disasters can engender a combination of hard-headed practicality and heart-felt goodwill capable of cutting through entrenched interests, institutional inertia and all manner of otherwise insurmountable obstacles, but has a recurrence of these catastrophes been rendered any less likely as a result?

During the United Nations’ first 45 years, the assumption that the permanent members of the Security Council would work together in peace as they had in war proved to be erroneous. The disintegration of the bipolar world order in 1989, reinforced by the successful expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait by a UN-sanctioned coalition in 1991, raised expectations that, in the words of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘an opportunity has been regained to achieve the great objectives of the Charter — a United Nations capable of maintaining international peace and security…’.1