Understanding Global Governance

Definition of Global Governance

• Global governance entails resolving global issues through the establishment of transnational authority spheres
• These spheres consist of diverse actors and unique institutional frameworks
• Global governance seeks to solve public global goods problems like world health
• Global governance is influenced by power dynamics and does not always have benevolent goals

Aspects of Global Governance

• It involves constructing public, private, and mixed goods
• Authority and global policies are constructed and implemented
• Actions vary, including dominating, controlling, cooperating, empowering, and liberating

Characteristics

• Global governance does not create hierarchy among international political actors, highlighting non-state actor roles
• It integrates international and national politics into a multilevel system
• It recognizes diverse governance forms, mechanisms, and purposes, without a single logic
• The purposes of governance are diverse and not always noble

Four Essential Ingredients of Global Governance

• Global problem-solving addresses conflicts that cross borders and have intermestic qualities
• These multidimensional issues require cooperation which results in public goods
• Globalization intensifies these challenges, exceeding individual governments capabilities
• One example is global democratization seen during the Arab Spring
• Creation of authority spheres involves a social contract where rulers offer political order for compliance

Spheres of Authority

• Transgovernmentalism involves networks of officials cooperating on specific policies, like the Mérida Initiative
• Supranationalism cedes authority to entities like the EU, which then regulate monetary policy and justice
• Private governance sees non-state actors creating global rules, sometimes negatively
  • Example: the 2008 financial crisis

Governance Structures

• Global governance is made up of various actors, necessitating polycentric, complex, multisectoral models
• State centrism, private networks, and transnational networks are key components
• Governance architecture refers to the system of public/private institutions in specific world politics areas
• Variable geometry, formal/informal institutions, and governance complexes are involved

Multilateralization and Private Governance

• Proliferation of formal/informal multilateral institutions addresses global challenges
• Increase in private governance, particularly in economics and finance
• Increase interaction between state, intergovernmental, and private actors

Five Global Governance Gaps

• This framework serves to analyze global governance, stability, predictability, and fair distribution efforts
  • Knowledge and information gap: Lack of consensus on the nature, causes, and severity of global issues prevents solutions
  • Differing political and ideological override factual data
  • Rules/norms gap: Reaching consensus on global norms is hard, because cultural deconstruction of accepted principles such as human rights
  • Policies gap: International policy lacks the clarity of national policy due to state conflicts requiring the use of both "soft law" and "hard law"
  • Institutions gap: Policies lack power when not backed by resources and functioning institutions, UN system is one such example
  • Compliance gap: Compliance is challenging due to a lack of political will, poor monitoring, and difficulty in enforcing internatinal decision making
  • Material gaps: Limited resources hinder effective action

Public Goods

• Public goods are available to all countries and citizens universally
  • Non-rivalry: One person's consumption does not reduce availability to others
  • Non-excludability: It's impossible to prevent anyone from consuming the good
• Real-world goods produced from governance are a mix of public, private, and mixed

Government vs Governability vs Governance vs Global Government

• Government is a form of governance, which are formal systems at local, national, or regional levels
• Governments regulate, administer, and make binding decisions for citizens
• Governability is a domestic concept which relates only to the ability for a government to govern
• Governance is the broader decision-making processes, including various stakeholders
• Global government is a theoretical system with centralized international authority, addressing global challenges through collective action

Power

• Realist definition: Ability of A to get B to do something they would not otherwise do
• Barnett and Duvall define it as the production of outcomes by influential actors, (Barnett and Duvall 2023, 50)
• Power has emphasis on effects, evident vs hidden forms, with a focus on acting but also establishing understanding
• Structures such as capitalism or patriarchy are components

Power and Social Relations

• Power works in relations based on interaction or social construction
• Direct power: actor A influences actor B to do something they normally would not
  • This force might be bureaucratic, symbolic, or normative
  • International Organizations (IOs) use existing expertise
  • Structural power: shapes society's framework, influencing roles and resource distribution
  • Productive power: shapes identities, norms, and knowledge, influencing how people perceive the world

Intermestic Problems

• Issues are both international and domestic, linking national and global governance

Problem-Solving vs. Critical Theory

• Problem-solving theory focuses on immediate issues within the existing system
• It aims to fix problems without questioning the overall system
• Critical theory questions the current global order.
• It looks into historical origins and whether it should change. Critical theory advocates for transformation, and justice

Critical Perspectives on Global Governance

• Critical perspectives question traditional global governance legitimacy and fairness
  • There is an emphasis on inclusion, justice, and equitable approach
  • Critical International Political Economy (IPE): Questions power, wealth, resource distribution
  • Structuralism emphasizes how dominant states and institutions operate
  • Post/Decolonialism calls for decolonizing global governance and acknowledging historical legacies
  • Feminism focuses on gender inequality, incorporating equality into global governance

Relational vs Non-Relational Power

Global vs Planetary Governance

• Global governance implies methods and lasting institutions to maintain global markets and geopolitical power

Planetary Governance is Socially Just

• Climate change, pollution, inequality, and food crises are adressed by justice.
• Anthropocene involves everything resolving around the human
• Capitalocene involves anthropocene with globalized neoliberal capitalism

Global Governance as Discourse

• Global Governance is a complex web of binary oppositions, signs and symbols that make up meaning

Global Governance

• Global governance includes managing and technocracy, with a focus on state centric vision which lacks cosmopolitanism and creates limits, visibility, and exclusion
• Global governance operates as neoliberal governmentality, managing political conduct through discursive means

Technology in Governance and its Effects on Gender

Wicked and Super Wicked Problems

• Wicked: Social and public policy problems which are ill-defined Properties include:
  • No definitive formulation
  • No stopping Rule
  • No true or false solution, only good or bad
  • No immediate test to a solution -No learning from trial and error -Not exhausively describable solutions -Essentially unique features -No one has the right to be wrong Superwicked properties; -Time is running out -No Central authority -Cause the problem -Dismiss the future

Multilevel Governance

• Dispersion of governance through multiple jurisdictions
• Interactions between governmental levels and differing types of actors which are hard to fill by public actors alone.
• Multilevel concepts originated with the European Union because it required complex coordination and multiple stakeholders Authority involves -Dispersion -Decentralization -Deconcentration Jurisdictions Involve
• Overlapping Mandates

Multilevel Types

• Type 1 hierarchical structures with vertical and horizontal dimensions
• Type 2 structures overlap jurisdiction Crucial Components:
• Differing levels
• Non Governmental Actor participation
• Emergence of Complex Hierarchal Networks

Governance Actors and Concepts

• Shifting Responsibilities can be either: up, out, or down Governors are authorities who exercise authority across borders Governance faces challenges revolving arround accountability.
• Transnational refers to issues that happen across borders
• International relations are agreements between nations
• Global Public policy involves strategies regarding welfare for the globe
• Global policy has broader sets of actions with the purpose of managing
• A policy is a set of ideas applied to economics or business