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This article focuses on the vast number of people who make global governance happen. It probes the role of the unknown people in the "middle" who are largely absent from scholarly gaze: professionals, service teams, and others who act behind the scenes. They are not at the top of public and private organizations ("global governors" in the literature), but they keep the lights on. They accomplish the policy, operational, and support work to move the needle of global governance institutions of all varieties from the local to global. These largely invisible and unheard populations—at least in the scholarly and policy literatures—make global governance work. The "missing middle" is not confined to the everyday contributions of professionals in intergovernmental secretariats because contemporary global governance is not synonymous with international organization, but concerns networked forms of public authority that may or may not include secretariats or states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explore what a programme of 'reglobalization' could look like for the governance of global trade. Our focus is on the centrepiece of the current commercial order, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our aim is to illustrate the potential value of a reformulated WTO not just for commercial relations globally but also for other areas of social concern. We seek to be both practical and challenging. We seek to be practical by establishing what a programme of WTO reform might look like in the near-to-medium term, including changes to the negotiating process and opening up the WTO to non-state actors. We seek to be challenging by setting the transformation of global trade governance within the context of a thorough process of reglobalization wherein the primary public mechanisms of global governance are reoriented towards the delivery of progressive social and environmental outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to establish the value of looking at global governance from the point of view of those who are governed, thereby making them more visible in a field in which they have often had too little profile. This is a necessary addition to an evolving global governance scholarship that seeks to highlight greater sensitivity to issues of complexity, time, space, continuity, and change. We explore recent advances in the literature emphasizing that, although much has been done to enhance global governance as an analytical endeavor, far more intensive efforts are required to reflect the everyday experiences of the globally governed. Three examples of everyday global governance are provided to illustrate how more meaningful research could be accomplished and the potential payoffs that could result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper peers backwards into the history of the multilateral trading system and its development over the past half century as a means of considering what may lie beyond the horizon for the future of global trade governance. Its purpose is to underscore the necessity and urgency for root-and-branch reform of the multilateral trading system. It achieves this by comparing and contrasting the global trading system of 50 years ago with its modern-day equivalent and its likely future counterpart half-a-century hence. In so doing, the paper throws into sharp relief not only the inadequacies of global trade governance today but also the damaging consequences of not fundamentally reforming the system in the near future, with a particular emphasis on the past, present and future development of the world’s poorest and most marginalised countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses topics within the issue including global governance and power politics, solutions for preventing degradation of global environment, and the Chinese development financing.

This review offers a critical reading of the November 2014 India–U.S. trade deal that unblocked an impasse in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round and considers what it means for the way we govern global trade. It argues that the agreement, rather than being a ‘victory’ for the developing world or a cause for celebration, may simply reinforce an unfair and problematic system of distributing trade opportunities among WTO members. It may also obscure further the need for a fundamental overhaul of the way global trade is governed. In so doing, the review speaks to broader debates about what happens when ‘rising’ powers replace established states in global institutions in the absence of wider processes of reform; and it adds to growing concerns about the increasing precariousness of least developed countries (LDCs) in international economic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global governance remains notoriously slippery. While the term arose to describe change in the late twentieth century, its association with that specific moment has frozen it in time and deprived it of analytical utility. It has become an alternative moniker for international organizations, a descriptor for an increasingly crowded world stage, a call to arms, an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of globalization, and a synonym for world government. This article aims not to advance a theory of global governance but to highlight where core questions encourage us to go. A more rigorous conception should help us understand the nature of the contemporary phenomenon as well as look 'backwards' and 'forwards.' Such an investigation should provide historical insights as well as prescriptive elements to understand the kind of world order that we ought to be seeking and encourage us to investigate how that global governance could be realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations teeters on the edge of an abyss of irrelevance. As an academic pursuit, it has become disparate and fragmented. Those of us in the discipline have ceased to pursue greater clarity in the way that we understand the world around us. Moreover, we have failed as agents of change; that is, as purveyors of opinion and proposals about a better and fairer world order. As such, we no longer serve our students and those practitioners who seek our advice, or, for those of us who take on policy jobs, to push out the envelope of what is considered acceptable. Global governance offers one potentially compelling way of "saving international relations" though it is not without its problems. This article outlines how and why. The argument unfolds in three parts. The first outlines why and how IR teeters on the edge of an abyss. The second offers a proposal for moving beyond the fragmentation and atomization that afflicts international relations. We suggest that one way of encouraging reengagement is to return to debating grand questions that used to be the sustenance of IR. The third part argues that global governance--appropriately and specifically framed to make it fit for purpose--offers an opportunity to return to these questions and, in so doing, reinvigorate our fragmented and atomized field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]