Group items tagged

"The notion of global governance has always been intimately linked to that of crisis. In recent crisis episodes the architecture of global governance has been held responsible for weak or ineffective regulatory mechanisms that failed to either prevent systemic crises or to at least give an "early warning" of impending disasters, while in other episodes global governance institutions have been blamed for poor crisis responses and management. Global governance institutions have also been blamed for failing to expand the scope of their jurisdictions to incorporate new systemic risks and new market players, as well as for their inability to adapt to new political, economic, social and environmental challenges. The framing article for this special issue on "Global Governance in Crisis" examines four key features of global governance in the context of the global financial crisis: (1) the dynamic role played by ideas in making global governance "hang together" during periods of crisis; (2) how crisis serves as a driver of change in global governance (and why it sometimes does not); (3) how ubiquitous the global financial crisis was as an event in world politics; and (4) the conditions that constitute an event as a crisis. Due to the complexity and institutional "stickiness" of the contemporary architecture of global governance, the article concludes that a far-reaching overhaul and structural reforms in global governance processes is both costly and improbable in the short-term."

Voluntary governance arrangements focusing on responsible business behavior have proliferated over the past decades, and in many sectors of industry, different governance organizations now compete for business participation. This private governance competition has negative consequences for the effective functioning of these arrangements. In the literature up until now, optimism prevails on how a process of policy convergence between organizations may come about that would solve some of the problems that arise because of this competition. It is remarkable, however, that in one of the key industries referred to in this literature, the garments industry, convergence is virtually absent. This article explains why this is so and suggests that next to three existing approaches to the evolution and possible convergence of private governance organizations, actually a fourth, pessimistic type should be introduced, taking into account the evolution and perseverance of political difference between interest groups creating and supporting private governance arrangements.

This article challenges the optimism common to liberal IR and IL scholarship on the 'rule of law' in global governance. It argues that the concept of the 'rule of law' is often employed with sparse inquiry into the politics of its practical meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on liberal research that advocates the emergence of a 'global' judiciary, and the claim that judicial governance will marginalize state power and authority. Rather than employ a zero-sum conception of power, this article regards a prospective global legal system less as a constraint on state power and more as a rationale for rule 'through' law by vested actors. To make the argument, Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is combined with Barnett and Duvall's notion of 'productive power' to denote how legal techniques of power are integral to the construction of social 'truth' and consequently the governance of conduct. This is further associated with Koskenniemi's critical scholarship on the power of law's perceived objectivity and universality. In this vein, the article questions how liberal scholars use the American judicial model (the Marbury ideal) to claim that an institutionalization of 'global' judicial authority can deliver the rule of 'no one' in global governance. A governmentality perspective is then applied which suggests that the lack of supreme constitutional rules at the global level makes judicial governance less a check than a means to propagate normative standards conducive to dominant state power.

This paper discusses the potential contribution of parliamentary institutions and networks to the democratization of global economic governance. It places the analysis in the context of the larger debate on the democratic deficit of international economic institutions, in particular the WTO. On a theoretical level, the paper distinguishes different notions of legitimacy and democracy in order to identify which aspects of democratic legitimacy of global economic governance can be addressed through transnational parliamentarization. It is argued that national parliaments must react to the emergence of global economic governance in a multi-level system through new forms of transnational parliamentarization. In its empirical part, the paper assesses the Parliamentary Conference on the WTO (PCWTO) and the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank (PNoWB) as two examples of such transnational parliamentarization. Drawing on the theory of deliberative democracy the paper argues that the contribution of these settings to democratic global governance should not be measured on the basis of their formal decision-making power but with regard to their role as fora for transnational discourses and on their potential to empower national parliamentarians.

In International Relations, the question of global governance has become a main issue that has given rise to numerous research programs and products on the question of how to govern. IR scholarship, however, has more or less been conducted according to the tradition of regime and institution studies, focusing on how rules govern and how institutions can promote cooperation by lowering transactional costs and reduce conflict by increasing predictability and decreasing uncertainty. 1 In the IR discourse, rule-based governance seems to be the only model at international, regional, and global levels.

"Battles over the control of information online are often fought at the level of Internet infrastructure. Forces of globalization and technological change have diminished the capacity of sovereign nation states and media content producers to directly control information flows. This loss of control over content and the failure of laws and markets to regain this control have redirected political and economic battles into the realm of infrastructure and, in particular, technologies of Internet governance. These arrangements of technical architecture are also arrangements of power. This shift of power to infrastructure is drawing renewed attention to the politics of Internet architecture and the legitimacy of the coordinating institutions and private ordering that create and administer these infrastructures. It also raises questions related to freedom of expression in the context of this increasing turn to infrastructure to control information. This article explores the relationship between governance and infrastructure, focusing on three specific examples of how battles over content have shifted into the realm of this Internet governance infrastructure: the use of the Internet's domain name system for intellectual property rights enforcement; the use of 'kill-switch' approaches to restrict the flow of information; and the termination of infrastructure services to WikiLeaks. The article concludes with some thoughts about the implications of this infrastructure-mediated governance for economic and expressive liberties."

"Both academic literature and popular ideas focus on the ways in which globalisation might be leading to convergence in the ways in which societies are governed. This is misleading. There are marked differentiation processes. Patterns of governance are diverging. These divergences are concentrated in smaller, poorer countries outside the ranks of the oecd and bric/emerging economies category. This article focuses on the ways in which these divergences are driven by changes in sources of government and elite revenues ('political revenues'). As a result of late 20th century globalisation, fewer governments are funded by broad general taxation, and elites in poor countries face increased incentives to use their power for personal profit rather than the collective good. The emergence of 'failing' or 'weak' states is not an isolated or random phenomenon, but an aspect of a broader shift in the character of public authority. That understanding has direct implications for the policies employed to combat the problem."

Voluntary services and the word 'volunteer' have been discursively highlighted as something 'new' in China in the last few years. The large number of volunteers involved in relief work following the 5/12 Sichuan earthquakes, in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and in the 2010 Shanghai Expo are examples of this yet understudied phenomenon. This article aims to examine volunteerism and its close relationship with the production of model citizens. It attempts to shed light on how China uses soft power - through appeal and attraction - in its governing strategies. Informed by Foucault's work on governmentality, this article aims to show how promotional strategies and training materials pertaining to volunteering programmes acted as governing strategies that invoked and produced specific power relationships through which the state governed its citizens. Taking the Beijing Olympic volunteer programme as a case to examine how a new model citizenry is produced, I trace three discourses: dream and glory, hosting a great Olympics, and not to 'lose face'. These discourses shape citizens' everyday lives; they help volunteers internalize and embody the ideal of a model citizen, and as such they are part of the organized practices through which subjects are governed in China.

"A Conservative accepts that democracy entails government by and (especially) for the people, but what constitutes the people is seen not in narrow but in expansive terms: the people are not confined to those who constitute a present transient majority but encompass rather past and future generations. Democracy is tempered by the need to avoid dictatorship of the masses, entrusting the task of governing to those chosen by the people and able to lead in interests of the people. Government entails a balance between accountability and autonomy, a balance delivered by the Westminster system of government, a system challenged by attempts at fundamental constitutional change."

"The eleven countries of Southeast Asia vary widely by type of regime and quality of governance. Those that are the most democratic are not always the best governed, and the reverse is also true. Based on evidence from these countries, this essay explores two propositions-one normative, the other empirical. The normative argument is this: Good things ought to go together. Because democracy is more humane than dictatorship, democracy in Southeast Asia should also do a better job delivering security, welfare, and other public goods. The empirical argument, whose validity would bolster the normative one, is this: Good things do go together. Democracy and governance, however, do not co-vary in Southeast Asia. These two good things do not go together. Gaps exist, and they are worth minding, in theory and in practice."

Since the 1970s, China has changed from a centrally planned economy to a more open and globalized one. Within this context we ask how, under what circumstances and through what means are local governments able to make policy innovations in upgrading the business environment within their jurisdictions. Theoretically, it is possible to learn policy innovations from the past, from neighbours and from aboard. Leading development regions, like the Yangtze River Delta, are unlikely to learn from either their domestic neighbours or their past communist history. Therefore, they must learn from the experiences of other countries. We argue that this transnational learning process occurs through three different but interrelated mechanisms. These are (1) the personal networks of local officials interacting with foreign investors who are familiar with international business standards of global production networks; (2) institutional alliances in which local officials interact with foreign governments that have co-invested in development zones and joint interests; and (3) hegemonic discourse, wherein local officials interact with foreign consultants who have essential development knowledge. We examine this contention by analysing three empirical cases of local governments in the Yangtze River Delta - Kunshan, which demonstrates the personal network learning mechanism; Suzhou, demonstrating institutional alliance learning; and Shanghai, which exemplifies learning through hegemonic discourse.

Governance architectures are strategic and long-term institutional arrangements of international organizations exhibiting three features; namely, they address strategic and long-term problems in a holistic manner, they set substantive output-oriented goals, and they are implemented through combinations of old and new organizational structures within the international organization in question. The Lisbon Strategy is the most high-profile initiative of the European Union for economic governance of the last decade. Yet it is also one of the most neglected subjects of EU studies, probably because not being identified as an object of study on its own right. We define the Lisbon Strategy as a case of governance architecture, raising questions about its creation, evolution and impact at the national level. We tackle these questions by drawing on institutional theories about emergence and change of institutional arrangements and on the multiple streams model. We formulate a set of propositions and hypotheses to make sense of the creation, evolution and national impact of the Lisbon Strategy. We argue that institutional ambiguity is used strategically by coalitions at the EU and national level in (re-)defining its ideational and organizational elements.

Most research on global governance has focused either on theoretical accounts of the overall phenomenon or on empirical studies of distinct institutions that serve to solve particular governance challenges. In this article we analyze instead "governance a

"In 2006, Bangkok's middle-class residents overwhelmingly supported the military coup that displaced the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra. Survey research shows that opponents of Thaksin had a stronger commitment to liberal democracy and possibly to royalist values while rural voters supported Thaksin because he fulfilled their social demands. Opposition to Thaksin was not motivated by economic interests, but rather, there is some evidence that urban middle- and upper-class voters disliked Thaksin because they heard negative reporting about him, which were less available in the countryside. These findings are compatible with a new theory of democratic consolidation, in which the upper classes have the means that would enable and encourage them to pay sufficient attention to politics to discover that what they viewed as 'good government' was violated by the ruling party, which could have led to demands for more democracy historically. More recently, however, in Thailand and perhaps other instances in Southeast Asia and Latin America, those with the money and leisure to follow politics closely have heard reports about the 'bad government' of populist, democratically elected leaders, and thus have turned against them."

"The global governance of climate change represents one of the more profound and, to date, intractable sets of problems confronting humanity. Legitimacy, accountability, fairness, and representation matter as well as effectiveness. In the absence of effective centralised authority, these democratic norms need to be sought in a polycentric context. An approach to democratisation is advanced that de-emphasises authoritative formal institutions, and instead operates in the more informal realm of the engagement and contestation of discourses in global public spheres. Democracy here is conceptualised not in terms of elections and constitutions, but in aspirations for inclusive, competent, and dispersed reflexive capacity. Based on empirical analysis of discursive engagement in several structured settings, key challenges for improving the democratic quality of global climate governance are assessed."

"Liberal democratic governments may differ in both their kind and degree of democracy. However, the literature too often conflates this distinction, hindering our ability to understand what kinds of governing structures are more democratic. To clarify this issue, the article examines two prominent contemporary models of democracy: developmental liberal democracy (DLD) and protective liberal democracy (PLD). While the former takes a 'thicker' approach to governance than the latter, conventional wisdom holds that these systems differ only in kind rather than degree. The article tests this assumption through an empirical comparison of electoral, legislative, and information-regulating institutions in two representative cases: Sweden and the United States. The empirical findings lead us to the conclusion that developmental liberal democracies represent not only a different kind, but also a deeper degree of democracy than protective liberal democracies. The implications for democracy promotion appear substantial."

Participatory democracy has been studied as an auxiliary to state processes and as an institutional and cultural part of social movements. Studies of the use of participatory democracy by the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Movement-MST) of Brazil show a shared concern with autonomy, in particular avoidance of demobilization through the clientelism and paternalism induced by government programs and political parties. Both movements stress training in democracy (the experience of "being government") and the obligation to participate. Detailed examination of their governance practices may be helpful to communities building democratic movements in other places.

Foucault introduced the concept 'governmentality' to refer to the conduct of conduct, and especially the technologies that govern individuals. He adopted the concept after his shift from structuralist archaeology to historicist genealogy. But some commentators suggest governmentality remains entangled with structuralist themes. This article offers a resolutely genealogical theory of govermentality that: echoes Foucault on genealogy, critique, and technologies of power; suggests resolutions to problems in Foucault's work; introduces concepts that are clearly historicist, not structuralist; and opens new areas of empirical research. The resulting genealogical theory of governmentality emphasizes nominalism, contingency, situated agency, and historicist explanations referring to traditions and dilemmas. It decenters governance by highlighting diverse elite narratives, technologies of power, and traditions of popular resistance.

The demand for measuring democracy, human rights and governance is increasing from international development partners. This report is a record of the proceedings of a seminar which focused on governance assessments in the context of the Paris Declaration

This Working Paper by Stefan Meyer summarises the current debate on governance assessments. It describes the emergence of the 'governance' concept in international development cooperation and identifies the implications of the aid effectiveness principles