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The broad and continuing applicability of Geoffrey Vickers’ work owes much to his concern with the human condition in changed and changing circumstances. An important instance of this problem is the relationship between the potential of scientific advances which can greatly enhance human well-being but also find application in new or enhanced weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, preventing such weapons from becoming a normal part of conflict during a period of rapid scientific and technological change in the sciences will require an integrated system of laws and regulations implementing the international agreements. Yet it will also require that the scientific community, through their daily practice and norms of professional conduct, support the efforts to maintain and further develop relevant international treaties that seek to limit the spread of and outlaw such weapons. The purpose of this paper therefore is to examine the utility of Vickers’ concept of an Appreciative System for developing a systematic theoretical framework for understanding what change mechanism is efficacious in the education of scientists regarding the extent to which new ideas about ethics and professional responsibility can be grasped, acknowledged and applied.

Donor country initiatives for the prevention and mitigation of HIV/AIDS are not a matter of simple burden sharing. Instead, they have brought in their wake many of the complexities and unforeseen effects that have long been associated with more general overseas development assistance. In the case of funding directed toward HIV/AIDS, these effects are by no means either secondary or easily calculable. It is widely acknowledged that there is no consensus framework on how these impacts may be defined, no framework/toolkit for the evaluation of impacts and no longitudinally significant data that could provide the substance for those evaluations. The subject of this study focuses not on the health outcomes of funding but on how donor-recipient relations could be better deliberated, negotiated and coordinated. We argue that effective leadership and governance of developing country health systems for HIV/AIDS work requires a reconfiguration of how donor-recipient relations are conceived and contracted, and for this purpose, we propose an adaptation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Paris Declaration principles of aid effectiveness.

The prospect for the MDGs cannot be reduced to the sum of the eight goals, divorced from international dynamics, the hard interests of states and the global dynamics that impact on both, or from the complexities and intractability of widespread poverty and its consequences. The legacies and controversies of previous international development initiatives also beset perceptions of, and support for, the MDGs. However, the wholly inclusive nature of the goals give them a unique normative standing and momentum; and the quantitative measures of progress ensure that there is more to the goals than lofty ideals. In addition, the thematic linkages between each of the goals is mutually reinforcing. While not discounting either structural difficulties or the lack of adequate progress in some specifics, it is important not to overlook the political consensus, abundant goodwill and normative momentum that have already been generated in the ten years to date. The answer to the question, `How promising is the p...

Five years from the end of the 15-year span of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) it is already plain that progress has been patchy and that the larger goals will not be met. The scale and profile of the MDGs will make them subject to eventual success or failure judgments and ‘lessons learned’ analyses, but the evidence of the past decade and current trajectories are sufficient to reveal our conceptual and operational shortcomings and the kinds of reorientation needed to ensure that the last five years of the MDGs will exhibit positive momentum rather than winding-down inertia. Such reorientations would include prioritising actors over systems; disaggregated targets over global benchmarks; qualitative aspects of complex forms of human relatedness over technical ‘solutions’; and the painstaking work of developing country enablement over quick outcome indicators, not least for the purpose of sustainability. Thinking and planning beyond 2015 must be made integral to the last five years of the M...

This paper addresses the capacity of our deliberative systems to comprehend and judge the practical implications of technological systems convergence (CT) against criteria ranging from ethics to the timely framing of prohibitive and/or regulatory mechanisms. Our established regulatory systems (which themselves require deliberation as part of their routine functioning) have become stressed in the face of technological advances – a notable example of which is the backlog of patent applications generated by new developments in bioinformatics. A much wider range of legal, ethical, environmental and relational concerns are likely to be similarly stressed by the sheer speed of CT scientific advances, their practical developments and social adaptations. The problems are likely to be much more fundamental than can be addressed by institutional streamlining, since there are limits to the rate at which any society can adapt to change on a coherent basis. The ‘transformative’ potential of CT needs to be understood f...

Despite the promises made for nanotechology, its direction and momentum as it has developed to date already pose very considerable problems of regulation and control in quite fundamental ways. This article will review these difficulties under four themes. First, the principal agents for framing governance agreements (states) are also the principal proponents of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Second, the speed of new advances in nanotechnology and the reach of their implications are already outpacing our means of social deliberation. Third, as the products and processes of nanotechnology become more widespread and more embedded, controlling pernicious applications will be every bit as vexed as the abuse of biological knowledge is currently. Finally, military applications are already underway, so a combination of realist fears and competitive economic drives is likely to disadvantage under-developed countries. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The convergence of several technological systems (especially nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and robotics) has now been adopted as a strategic goal by several countries, most notably the United States and those of the European Union. The anticipated benefits and related fears of competitive disadvantage have brought together a wide range of interested parties, governmental and nongovernmental. In the rush to enter and/or dominate this arena, the benign promise of converging technologies (CT) are highlighted, although a range of risks and less welcome (if difficult to quantify) implications are at best understated. What, then, are the prospects for exercising governance over the technological systems we are busy creating—and the uses to which they might be put? What will it mean to speak of “global governance” in a world in which the technological promise of CT has been fulfilled?

The dichotomy between prohibitive law and moral responsibility is at the centre of debates about the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. However, political interests remain an important factor not only in determining and tempering the humanitarian impulses of states, but also for gauging their more general adherence to the rule of law. The humanitarian intervention debate only has meaning in a context in which there is general, routine adherence to the non-interventionist norm of the international system, codified as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The ‘Bush Doctrine’ of pre-emptive self-defence alters the political and politico-legal context that has until now given the humanitarian intervention debate its meaning and importance. Given this, together with a more general loosening of the strictures prohibiting or limiting the use of force, there is good cause for concern about the foundations of the post-1945 international order. The debate about humanitarian intervention can no longer abstract the tension between law and morality from a political arena that is facing such profound challenges.

Disseminative systems are identified as central to the organization and dynamism of humanity's globalized condition. Three types of disseminative systems are defined and their characteristics are delineated in terms of the considerable challenges they pose to comprehensive and effective global governance. The pervasiveness and configuration of disseminative systems presents a further range of conceptual, political, and social difficulties that frustrate a "problem solving" approach, both to the control of disseminative systems themselves and to wider global governance. Without discounting either the potential or the difficulties of conceiving and exercising governance over disseminative systems, the speed and extent of their proliferation and adaptability suggests a fundamental consideration for the development of global governance theorizing: whether its possibilities fall short of the world we have already created. Keywords: disseminative systems, global governance, complexity, connectivity, comprehension. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon initiated the Nth Country Project, a small initiative to determine whether two amateurs (individuals with doctorates in physics but with no nuclear expertise and no access to classified information) could design a nuclear weapon. As one of the participants recalls, "[after thirty months] we produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved. The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."1 Thirty-five years later, in 1999, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency commissioned Project Bacchus. With little more than a budget and commercial catalogs for laboratory equipment, a team was given the task of assembling a small but functional germ factory. It took them just over a year to produce two

Many of the trends identified by Geoffrey Vickers are now clearly visible in the intensification of globalizing dynamics, yet the implications of these developments for human security and sustainability have still not been grasped adequately. The most pertinent and extensive literature in the social sciences concerning political and organizational arrangements at the highest levels of human organization is the study of global governance. However, the many themes and perspectives that comprise this literature tend toward sectoral speciality, or intra-community theoretical debates. If we are to engage Geoffrey Vickers' insightful and now pressing range of questions, global governance theorists might do best to ask, ‘What would an adequate global governance be the governance of?’ Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Much of the global governance literature is devoted to the processes and outcomes of globalizing forces for the accrual of power by non-authoritative actors. The emphasis on process at the expense of detailed considerations of agency leaves open considerable questions about democratic accountability for the extension and consolidation of a summative global governance. It is not clear that the kinds of negotiated re-configurations of state and non-state actors and their roles that are possible within states can be `scaled up' to produce a global governance in which public policy and the larger determinants of political and economic life will be open to wide scrutiny or competing claims. The darker possibilities open to a new array of non-authoritative but effective actors are examined, together with a consideration of the prospects for the delivery of global public goods under global governance so constituted. `Unaccountable' is also frequently self-serving, which can only diminish our ability to organize concerted, coherent initiatives needed to deal with the global issues that now beset humanity.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000, taken together with the Data Protection Act 1998, has created new challenges for those engaged in handling and providing access to records in public authorities.1 Freedom of Information has significant implications for working practices within archive and records management in these authorities and will necessitate far-reaching changes. Other recent changes in legislation and certain policy initiatives will add further impetus to this process. Foremost of these are the modernising agenda associated with the Local Government Act 2000, recent legislation concerning the interception of communications on public networks, and central government’s e-government initiative.2 In addition, there is the incorporation of European law on human rights into English legislation in the form of the Human Rights Act 1998.3 This establishes standards for all thinking on policy and legislative issues affecting human welfare. The essence of Freedom of Information is to facilitate general access to information held by public authorities. The essence of Data Protection is to protect the rights of privacy of the individual. Although the legislation has been drafted to accommodate these two sets of needs, and although they should complement each other, there is a potential tension for public authorities. This stems primarily from areas of ambiguity created by the practicalities of their implementation, between granting access to information while ensuring that privacy is maintained. Much will become clearer with practical experience of the legislation. With these thoughts in mind, the Balancing Information Access and Privacy (BIAP) project was conceived. It aimed to survey the early response in local authorities to these core legislative changes within their wider context, to assess what preparations were under way, and to gauge reactions to the need to balance providing access with protecting privacy. The project focused upon responses from English shire and metropolitan local authorities and their associated record offices outside of Greater London.

(2000). The Kosovo Refugee Crisis: NATO's humanitarianism versus human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 4, The Kosovo Tragedy The Human Rights Dimensions, pp. 164-183.

Clash and harmony in promoting peace - overview, Leon Gordenker peacekeeping and refugee relief, Kathleen Newland, Deborah Waller Meyers the World Health Organization and peacekeeping, Yves Beigbeder civilian-military interactions and ongoing UN reforms - DHA's past and OCHA's remaining challenges, Thomas G. Weiss complex emergencies, peackeeping and the world food programme, Raymond F. Hopkins the United Nations Development programme - the development of peace? Dennis Dijkzeul the UN specialized agencies, peacekeeping and the enactment of values, Jim Whitman.

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.