Global Governance Futures

Thomas G Weiss, Rorden Wilkinson, Thomas G Weiss, Rorden Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367689711
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440621
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Global Governance Futures addresses the crucial importance of thinking through the future of global governance arrangements. It considers the prospects for the governance of world order approaching the middle of the twenty-first century by exploring today's most pressing and enduring health, social, ecological, economic, and political challenges. Each of the expert contributors considers the drivers of continuity and change within systems of governance and how actors, agents, mechanisms, and resources are and could be mobilized.

The aim is not merely to understand state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors. It is also to draw attention to those underappreciated aspects of global governance that push understanding beyond strictures of traditional conceptualizations and offer better insights into the future of world order.

The book's three parts enable readers to appreciate better the sum of forces likely to shape world order in the near and not-so-near future:

• "Planetary" encompasses changes wrought by continuing human domination of the earth; war; current and future geopolitical, civilizational, and regional contestations; and life in and between urban and non-urban environments.
• "Divides" includes threats to human rights gains; the plight of migrants; those who have and those who do not; persistent racial, gender, religious, and sexualorientation-based discrimination; and those who govern and those who are governed.
• "Challenges" involves food and health insecurities; ongoing environmental degradation and species loss; the current and future politics of international assistance and data; and the wrong turns taken in the control of illicit drugs and crime.

Designed to engage advanced undergraduate and graduate students in international relations, organization, law, and political economy as well as a general audience, this book invites readers to adopt both a backward- and forward-looking view of global governance. It will spark discussion and debate as to how dystopic futures might be avoided and change agents mobilized.

CHAPTER 1Making sense of global governance futures

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139836-1

Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson

CONTENTS

Global governance futures: A framework for thinking

Global governance through time

Global governance across space

Global governance, up and down

The task at hand

The year 2020 began gloomily, though there was little to suggest that it would stand out from the long-run ebb and flow of world politics. Decades-old growth in trade was being eroded by tensions between the leading commercial powers, particularly the United States and China. The United Kingdom’s divorce from the EU had yet to be finalized. Washington, Beijing, and others were at loggerheads over the use of Huawei products in national infrastructure projects as well as over pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Long-standing tensions between the United States and Iran were exacerbated by the drone-strike killing of Qasem Soleimani – the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds force. Australia was suffering from some of the worst bush fires in recent history. And long-standing corruption investigations in South Africa had culminated in an arrest warrant being issued for former president Jacob Zuma while he was in Cuba for medical treatment.

While these events and many others were cause for concern, they did not suggest that 2020 would be exceptional. Yet, in the space of a few weeks, the complexion of world politics and everyday life changed. On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the spread of a novel coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China – what became known as “COVID-19” – was a public health emergency of international concern. This was upgraded on 11 March 2020 to a pandemic – by definition a global crisis. By the end of 2020, some 75 million cases had occurred with more than 1.75 million deaths.¹ The Americas were by far the hardest hit continents, with the United States and Brazil recording the highest number of infections and rates of mortality. Significant outbreaks had also affected Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. In less than a year, COVID-19 had gone from an also-ran influenza to a global catalyst for change, with the months that followed reaping further and increasing misery.

The pandemic not only threatened lives and killed weak and vulnerable people worldwide, but its myriad consequences and the fledgling responses to mitigate its spread exerted significant governance effects on all aspects of life on the planet. The initial reaction from most countries was to close borders and restrict domestic travel. In highly affected areas, severe lockdowns restricted movement outside of personal homes to essential matters. The dramatic reduction in social interactions and the introduction of physical distancing and additional hygiene measures had a significant positive effect on the virus’ spread in those countries where effective processes were put in place. In others, where the response was equivocal – including Brazil, the United States, India, and the United Kingdom – the virus ran amuck. The announcement of an effective vaccine in the waning days of 2020 provided a moment of rare respite and optimism.

Irrespective of the national measures, globally the aggregate consequences of COVID-19 were severe. In the first months of the pandemic, xenophobia increased markedly, particularly toward people of East Asian origin. The global airline and hospitality industries all but collapsed, along with national and international tourism. The supply of goods, including essential foodstuffs and medicines, was disrupted globally and nationally. Panic purchasing ensued. Industries collapsed as workers stayed home. The fall in demand for goods and services generated pressure on employers to lay off staff. Those governments that could underwrote the temporary furloughing of employees to cushion some of the damage wrought by falling demand. For others, the lack of capacity or political will for public intervention generated additional pressure on already vulnerable populations. Globally, housing markets initially teetered on the edge of collapse, and the number of people deferring or defaulting on mortgage payments and rents increased. The price of oil temporarily plummeted to below $0. Universities faced substantial financial challenges in the face of disruption to national and international student recruitment and returns. The shift to remote working created significant demand for technological goods and services. Video conferencing and algorithms shaped not only the delivery and consumption of education but also the nature of work, social interactions, the flow of information, and understandings of domestic and international politics.

These were not the only consequences of the virus’s first blush. Stock market values fell sharply across the globe before the move to remote working and the search for effective vaccines drove the price of technology and pharmaceutical shares skyward. Those that were able bought heavily in these markets and took advantage of otherwise depressed stock prices to expand their portfolios. Property markets, too, though suffering significant initial contractions, boomed in suburban and rural areas, fueled by stamp duty holidays, favorable prices, lower population densities, and the longer-run prospects of remote working and learning. The inevitable consequence of these and other financial movements was an increase in the wealth of the already rich and a very different experience for those in the middle or already living at the margins. Similar patterns played out in access to health care, essential foodstuffs, and even leisure, as they did once effective vaccines became available. In sum, the responses to the virus generated by governments and market movements combined to exert some of the biggest and most dramatic governance effects in centuries. COVID-19 had become – for a discernible time, at least – global governance and generated many of its discontents.

The onset and immediate aftermath of the pandemic inevitably became the focus of journalistic, scholarly, and policy analyses. Yet, no matter how significant its effects, the global governance of COVID-19 will not constitute the totality of forces shaping world order, now or in the future. Although global crises on the scale – or greater – than COVID-19 cannot be discounted, in the next quarter century we are likely to continue to confront unprecedented economic, political, social, ecological, and health changes – arising from and independent of the pandemic. Our modest effort, and that of the other contributors to this volume, is to offer some of what we consider the most significant emerging and enduring issues that will also shape the world order to come and the forces involved in its governance. As we collectively note, the changes wrought by continuing human domination of the planet; war; current and future geopolitical, civilizational, and regional contestations; life in and between urban and non-urban environments; the enduring divides between those who govern and those who are governed, and those that have and those that do not; persistent racial, gender, religious, and sexual-orientation-based discriminations, among many others; the plight of migrants worldwide and the threats to the human rights gains of the modern era; and the challenges of food and health insecurities, ongoing environmental degradation and species loss, the current and future politics of international assistance, and the wrong turns taken in the control of illicit drugs, among other international regimes, will bring as many challenges as they do opportunities.

Our endeavor is to understand and interrogate the problématique of future global governance in light of recent developments and the themes we detect in those areas that we have chosen to highlight. Our aim is not merely to understand what state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors – the traditional fare of global governance – will do. While state-based responses are clearly important, they are not – and indeed never have been – the whole story, as COVID-19 has illustrated only too well. Our purpose is more broadly conceived: to understand the forces large and small, the systems of governance, the enduring divides, and the primary challenges that will shape life on our planet into the middle of the twenty-first century and beyond. We seek to mobilize our current understanding of contemporary forces to appreciate how the world is likely to be governed and ordered as well as to comprehend how adjustments can be made to improve prospects for the survival and meaningful advancement of humanity and the planet. We do this through the lens of a rearticulated understanding of global governance.

Thus, our objective in this chapter is to provide a framework for making sense of what is to come. We do so by offering an understanding of global governance that wrests it from the strictures of traditional conceptualizations and enables us to appreciate better the sum of forces likely to shape world order in the near and not-so-near future. We achieve this by setting out a series of conceptual markers to help better understand future global governance and the alternative possibilities that may and could be realized. We draw attention to the need to account for the underappreciated temporal and spatial aspects of global governance; we consider the role of a wider variety of actors – including those we call the “missing middle”; and we highlight the impact that global governance has and may have on those whose relationship with its outcomes is most intimate but also often underappreciated.

Global governance futures: A framework for thinking

One way to imagine the global governance of the future is to start with the global governance of today: its constitution, organizational form, and inner logic. Yet, to do so is not without problems. These problems arise because of the lack of both a clear understanding of global governance and a common consensus about what it could and should be. For some, global governance is merely old wine in new bottles – an alternative expression for the actions and activities of international organizations. For others, it is a descriptor for a global stage packed with ever more actors, a call to arms for a better world, and an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of accelerating economic and social change. For others still, it is a synonym for world government, a pejorative term, and a hegemonic plot to advance the interests of a murky global elite.

Our contention is different. We see considerable analytical value in the term. Our assertion, however, is that to be able to think about the global governance of the future, we first have to acknowledge and overcome eight problems that have come to be baked into its current meaning and that restrict its utility to comprehend not only the governance of today but also eras past and future. These problems are:

1. the overly strong association between global governance and the problems and possibilities of international organization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries;
2. the lack of a comprehensive identification and explanation of the structure of global authority that accounts not just for grand patterns of command and control but also how regional, national, and local systems intersect with and push against that structure;
3. an ignorance of myriad ways that power is exercised within such a system, how interests are articulated and pursued, and the kind of ideas and discourses from which power and interests draw substance as well as help establish, maintain, and perpetuate the system;
4. misunderstandings of what propels changes in and transformations of systems of global governance that focus on the causes, consequences, and drivers of continuity and change, not just today but over extended periods in the past and the future;
5. an unwillingness to ask questions about systems and instances of global governance through time to explore the mechanisms, machineries, institutions, rules, norms, ideas, interests, and material capabilities that have governed world orders in times before and after our own;
6. an assumption that the “global” preceding “governance” is necessarily planetary in scale, which risks ignoring the forces involved in the governance – for example, of the Silk Road, ancient empires, and colonial regimes, among many others – and the indelible marks left by those systems on the governance of world order today and tomorrow;
7. too little an appreciation of the output end of the global governance equation – what is produced, the effects that are generated, the impact of systems and expressions of global governance on everyday lives, and the feedback loops that exist between aspects of global governance and those whose lives are affected by it; and
8. a neglect of those directly and indirectly involved in the production of global governance, not just those identified as the “global governors” but also the professionals, service teams, and individuals at work behind the scenes whose combined activities contribute to creating, sustaining, disrupting, and dismantling world orders – what we call the “missing middle.”

To appreciate how these shortcomings came to be part of conventional understandings and how they inhibit our capacity to look forward to global governance of the future, we need to recover the genesis of the term “global governance.” The term “global governance” emerged from academic and policy responses to a series of real-world events in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These responses sought to understand the forces at play on the world stage that had led to the end – and were in evidence in the aftermath – of the Cold War. Early works on global governance were also concerned with identifying and enhancing the prospects for a better world order after a half century in which East-West rivalry had crowded out many a progressive global public policy initiative; thinking through how feminist analyses could be brought to bear in a subject where they had previously found little traction; and understanding the transformative potential of grassroots resistance and civil society movements.² Global governance was, as a result, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 MAKING SENSE OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE FUTURES
• Part I Planetary
• Part II Divides
• Part III Challenges
• Index