Managing Global Issues

Lessons Learned

P.J. Simmons, Chantal de Jonge Oudraat

• Publisher: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780870033360
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization is pushing to the fore a wide variety of global problems that demand urgent policy attention. Managing Global Issues provides a comprehensive comparative assessment of international efforts to manage global problems. It identifies and explains successes and failures of such efforts, examines the roles of different actors, and outlines lessons that may guide future action by governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. The volume's 16 case studies examine organized crime, drugs, corruption, human rights, labor rights, health, trade, financial markets, development assistance, the environment, the global commons, communications, weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, internal conflicts, and refugees. Managing Global Issues is the result of an international multidisciplinary research team composed of experts in specific global issue areas. The book's broad scope, numerous case studies and its rigorous comparative analytical framework offers a unique and valuable contribution to the rapidly growing literature on global governance. Contributors include Vinod K. Aggarwal (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas Bernauer (University of Zürich), William Drake (Carnegie Endowment), Octavio Gómez-Dantés (National Institute of Public Health, Mexico), Catherine Gwin (World Bank), Peter M. Haas (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Christopher C. Joyner (Georgetown University), Brian Langille (University of Toronto), Robert E. Litan (Brookings Institution), Kathleen Newland (Carnegie Endowment), Peter Richardson (Transparency International), Peter H. Sand (Institute of International Law, Munich), Dinah L. Shelton (Notre Dame Law School), Timothy D. Sisk (University of Denver), Joanna Spear (King's College, London), and Phil Williams (University of Pittsburgh).

Part I

Introduction

Managing Global Issues: An Introduction

P. J. Simmons and Chantal de Jonge Oudraat

Contagious diseases and financial contagion, civil conflicts and regional security, carbon sinks and ozone layers, patent infringement and human rights infringement, biodiversity and biological weaponry, refugee flights and capital flows. Diverse and, at first glance, unrelated, these topics share a common identity. They are all global concerns that cannot be successfully addressed unilaterally, bilaterally, or even regionally. They and a swelling roster of topics are the stuff of almost ceaseless international discourse that sometimes inaugurates cooperation and sometimes dissolves in discord. Over the last generation, the international community has scored a number of impressive victories in dealing with issues requiring extensive cooperation across borders. But overall, the track record is decidedly mixed, while the number of challenges is increasing.

In this book, sixteen respected experts investigate a number of global challenges in areas where changing settings are altering familiar assumptions about who sets policy, how, and with what results. Collectively, their essays amount to coloring outside the neat lines that define academic disciplines and diplomatic practice and too frequently insulate both scholars and practitioners from others with complementary knowledge and concerns.

The intent is not to examine particular issues so much as successful and failed attempts to manage them. The goal is to draw practical lessons from the recent past for their relevance to the near future. The forecast is for more such global challenges, more difficult to compartmentalize, more demanding of innovative responses. Early lessons like the ones our authors extract can help shape policies that have yet to be formulated for threats already with us and for many that are still indistinct.

SHRINKING PLANET, PROLIFERATING ISSUES

Depending on the size of your globe, there have always been global issues—from Attila the Hun’s rampages to the Black Death to the European colonizers’ grab for Africa. Until relatively recently, most such matters fell under the general rubric of security—military, political, and economic. If states could or had to deal with these challenges, they designated high-level representatives to do the dealing. At formal encounters, behind closed doors, the envoys attempted to make the world “safe for democracy” or “determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”1

But the familiar ordering of international dealings is giving way to a very different modus operandi as the pressures of globalization reshape the nature of policy challenges, the efficacy of traditional responses, and the attributes of actors needed as problem solvers. Globalization—a magnified version of interdependence—is occurring on multiple fronts: economic (including the spread of consensus around a basic economic model and vast increases in international trade and capital flows); political and social (including increased democratization, expanding civil society, the spread of ideas, information, and people); technological (brought about by revolutions in information and telecommunications technologies); and environmental and biological (including transboundary flows of materials that affect human health and wellbeing, from climate-changing gases to viruses).2 Although various forms of interdependence have been present for centuries, contemporary globalization is marked by an unprecedented degree of integration of markets, states, and technologies—all of which are “enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.”3 The implications of such pervasive mutations for the work of managing global issues are profound.

Crowding In

One change is numerical. Clubby gatherings of ministers and central bankers from the affluent Atlantic states and Japan could once make the rules for world trade and finance and make them stick. But UN membership has grown 370 percent since 1945, and powerful nations increasingly find themselves challenged by assertive coalitions of lesser states. The claims of these newer arrivals can complicate even such seemingly simple matters as the allocation of orbital slots for communications satellites. When only a few countries launched satellites, it was easy to divide the pie. Now, with governments often fronting for the thousands of commercial enterprises in the field, the bargaining over lucrative berths in space is anything but routine.

Places at the bargaining tables, moreover, are no longer limited to sovereign states. They are also occupied by multinational enterprises, technical experts, and, with increasing frequency, independent organizations that may even have served as catalysts for the gathering. Thousands of highly motivated, skillful, and often antagonistic private groups—businesses, labor unions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—dedicated to causes as varied as Tibetan independence, fossil fuels, debt relief, children’s rights, and the gospel of Ayn Rand not only throng the corridors of power but penetrate the conference rooms as well.

In environmental affairs, particularly, the power of NGOs to thrust issues into the spotlight and force the pace of negotiation has been not just novel but astonishing. They, not just the governments that signed it, were principal authors of the 1992 Rio Framework (Rio) Convention on Global Climate Change. Some see NGOs as hugely productive forces—the most effective grass-roots agents of many otherwise top-down multilateral assistance initiatives. Others find them obstructionist if not obscurantist. Tariff reductions on manufactured goods, for example, were far easier to negotiate when the parties were like-minded countries that had shared the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II. Iconoclastic NGOs that inserted labor and human rights issues and environmental concerns into the equation of global commerce have undone the older consensus. Similarly, government ministers lost their freedom to operate in cozy confidentiality in 1997 when protesters disrupted and helped to scuttle negotiations on what was to have been the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

The near-monopoly on information once enjoyed by government officials has also blurred into the cacophony of the wired world. Journalists who used to get by on a communiqué and a background, not-for-attribution briefing may now have ringside seats or multiple ringside sources inside any international assembly. More significantly, inside information has moved outside and into the hands and analytical competence of corporations, citizens’ groups, scholars, and others able and often eager to put their own spin on the data and disseminate it more widely. Technology—fax machines and the Internet—has strengthened governments, but it has empowered legions of free agents, jostling for position and the chance to influence policy.

Linking Up, Down, and Sideways

These added participants—known in the literature and throughout this book as nonstate actors—may enrich the process, but they do not simplify it. Simplicity, in any case, is bound to be elusive in dealing with issues that are not only complex in and of themselves—development assistance, refugee relief, and nuclear nonproliferation, for example—but that add layers of difficulty as they intertwine with other issues. Development, once quantified in gross domestic product (GDP) or miles of roadway or rates of infant mortality, has become inseparable from concerns for environmental sustainability. Intellectual property rights—drug patents—are sacrosanct, except when the lives of AIDS victims in poor countries are at stake.

Globalization is spinning new strands of complexity, stitching issues and actors together in a world where economic, humanitarian, health, and environmental concerns respect no national frontiers. Domestic conflicts drive refugees from their homes and across national borders, sometimes in desperate, disorderly flights that threaten to destabilize whole regions such as the upper Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. “As with ‘chaos’ theories, and in weather systems,” Keohane and Nye have commented, “small events in one place can have catalytic effects, so that consequences later and elsewhere are vast.”4 Ozone-depleting chemicals consumed in the United States raise anxiety levels in Chile, Argentina, and Australia where a thinning shield against ultraviolet rays threatens a higher incidence of skin cancer. Diseased food from one continent may reach consumers in another before contamination is detected.

New kinds of links are also making the formerly internal affairs of states into international issues. “Since 1990 the Security Council has declared a formal threat to international peace and security 61 times, after having done so only six times in the preceding 45 years,” Jessica Mathews observed in 1997. She continued: “[I]t is not that security has been abruptly and terribly threatened: rather, the change reflects the broadened scope of what the international community now feels it should poke its nose into.”5 Now a Bosnian Serb accused of overseeing multiple rapes is taken before an international tribunal in another country to answer for alleged war crimes.

Globalization’s synthesizing effect creates more connections across distances and disciplines and more occasions where people and issues mingle at greater and greater depth. Its attributes include mounting speed of exchanges (not just capital and information but also diseases and cures), swelling scale of all kinds of activity (financial, criminal, and technological, and all three together), and constantly expanding scope of both opportunities and risks. All of this makes the protection and advancement of human welfare more complicated.

Raising the Bar

Complexity is generally unsettling. The impulse to undo a Gordian knot with one swift swordstroke is understandable. In a nuclear world of 189 nations, six billion people, and trillion-dollar economies, however, quick, neat solutions are impractical and even potentially self-defeating. Banning arms flows to a war-torn country, for instance, would seem to offer a promising response to genuine threats. In practice, though, the action may paradoxically expand opportunities for criminals to circumvent restrictions and supply combatants with weapons.6 The shortages created by arms embargoes increase the price of goods and thus, the profit margins—luring suppliers willing to ignore restrictions. The same is true, on a grander scale, of shortages created by international campaigns to dry up the flow of opium, cocaine, and their derivatives. Such efforts may cut supply but also raise profits and unintentionally encourage both smuggling and commerce in other drugs to satisfy hungry, illicit markets.

As intricate international dealings become labyrinthine, globalization drives not just the pace of transactions and their multiplicity but the twisting turns of the follow-through as well. In some respects, the easy part is over. Conventional negotiation—tying norms and goals into discrete issue packages—begins to looks like child’s play compared to the exacting demands of setting standards and reaching accords where technical intricacies and disparate interests proliferate. Trade negotiations that once concentrated on reciprocal lowering of border tariffs have now become arenas for debates over workers’ rights, environmental protection, and claims of equity—issues that penetrate deeply into domestic affairs. What were once issues of coordination mutate into clashes of values.

Even more daunting, though, is ensuring compliance with proliferating agreements ranging from the highly specialized (the UN Agreement on the Conservation and Management of Straddling and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks) to the highly general (the 1995 intergovernmental pledge to reduce poverty by half by 2015). Banning landmines, for instance, is an easier and cheaper goal to proclaim than detecting and removing them. Nations far more law-abiding than Iraq resist verification measures on the production or destruction of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons because the intrusive activities undercut sovereignty and may expose corporate or state secrets. Controlling the output of pollutants, whether from cruise ships at sea or from furnaces on land, depends on enlisting, rewarding, and punishing private enterprises that have entrenched interests in business as usual. Controlling transnational criminal organizations is proving a task beyond the means and ingenuity even of the states most harmed by their activities. For customs and immigration inspectors in 1999 at the United States’ 301 ports of entry and 3,700 terminals, globalization was a nightmare of “475 million people, 125 million vehicles, and 21.4 million import shipments…. Intercep...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Global Issues
• Part III: Conclusions
• Acronyms
• Index
• Contributors
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace