Defining Global Governance

What Is Global Governance?

The field of global governance resists a single, tidy definition. One of the central intellectual tasks of this course is to grapple with what the term actually means and why that meaning remains contested. At the broadest level, global governance refers to the collection of rules, norms, institutions, actors, and processes through which collective decisions are made and implemented at a transnational or global scale — in the absence of a world government. It is not a synonym for “world government,” nor is it simply a description of what international organizations do. Rather, it is a lens for understanding how authority, legitimacy, and coordination operate across borders and across multiple levels of political life simultaneously.

The breadth of that actor array is striking. Global governance includes not only the highly visible institutions of world political-economic authority — the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank — but also quasi-formal intergovernmental gatherings such as the Group of Seven (G7) and the World Economic Forum (WEF); combinations of state and non-state actors such as the UN’s Global Compact and the International Labour Organization (ILO); private associations such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC); non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the World Development Movement (WDM); transnational religious bodies; transnational political movements; and even financial markets and global accountancy firms. This list, drawn directly from Wilkinson’s definition, deliberately includes uncomfortable entries — mercenary groups and international terrorist organizations — to underscore the point that global governance is a descriptive and analytical framework, not a normative celebration.

Key Terms Introduced in Week 1

Globalization and the Need for Global Governance

The lecture material for Week 1 makes clear that globalization is the underlying condition that makes global governance both necessary and challenging. As the world has become more interconnected — through trade, travel, communication technology, and the movement of people — problems have ceased to respect state borders. Pollution is the instructor’s running example: when a state generates industrial emissions, those emissions do not stop at the border. They drift across into neighbouring countries, affecting populations that had no say in the generating state’s industrial policy. The same logic applies to pandemics, financial contagion, climate change, terrorism, and refugee flows. Each of these is a problem whose origins lie in one place but whose effects are distributed across many — often many who lack the power to address the root cause.

From the creation of the League of Nations in 1920, the number of international organizations has grown dramatically and without interruption. This trajectory reflects a collective recognition that global problems cannot be dealt with by states acting alone within their own borders. States are essential actors, but they are insufficient actors. The problems outrun the jurisdictions.

It is crucial, however, to resist what the lecture calls a teleological view of globalization. Teleology is the assumption that history moves in a straight, progressive line toward a predetermined endpoint. Globalization does not work that way. There is momentum forward — more interconnection, more integration — but there is also resistance, backlash, and regression. The arc is uneven. Globalization creates winners and losers: for some populations, greater integration has brought prosperity and expanded opportunity; for others, it has meant dislocation, job loss, cultural erosion, and deepened inequality. Both Beeson and Zürn note this uneven development as a structural feature of the current global order. The existence of “losers of globalization” — Zürn’s phrase — is one reason why global governance is itself contested, not simply welcomed as a solution.

Global Governance vs. International Relations

Understanding global governance requires understanding how it departs from the analytical traditions of mainstream International Relations (IR). The contrast is worth laying out systematically.

Most IR theories — particularly the dominant schools of realism and liberalism — treat states as the primary and most important actors in the international system. States are assumed to be unitary rational actors pursuing their national interests in a condition of anarchy: that is, an international system with no overarching authority above the level of the state. Because there is no world government to enforce agreements, states must ultimately rely on self-help. International interactions, in the standard IR view, can be analyzed separately from domestic and local levels of politics.

Global governance departs from these assumptions in several important ways. First, global governance recognizes that the state is just one of many important actors. Multinational corporations, as Beeson notes, sometimes exercise more economic power than individual states. NGOs, social movements, religious institutions, and expert networks all participate in shaping and implementing global policy. Second, global governance treats the international system not as anarchic but as a system with hierarchies, networks, and embedded power inequalities. There is structure to the system, but that structure is not neutral — it reflects and reproduces historical patterns of domination and marginalization. Third, global governance insists that international interactions cannot be analyzed in isolation from domestic and local levels: the international and the local are mutually constitutive. What happens in Geneva shapes what happens in Lagos, and vice versa. This multilevel quality is definitional for global governance analysis.

The transcript from Lecture 1.2 emphasizes that global governance theories emerged historically as a resistance to the rationalist theories that dominated IR in the 1970s and 1980s. Writers developing the first global governance frameworks were responding to the limits of game-theoretic, interest-based models that struggled to explain the explosion of international institutions, norms, and transnational civil society activity in the postwar period. Global governance, as a result, is interdisciplinary in a way that IR typically is not — drawing on sociology, psychology, organizational theory, history, and legal studies.

Zürn’s Framework: Normative Principles, Institutions, and Contested Authority

Michael Zürn’s article “Contested Global Governance” (2018) provides one of the course’s foundational analytical frameworks. Zürn identifies three connected layers in the global governance system.

The first layer consists of normative principles: the foundational ideas and values that legitimate actors invoke when claiming the right to exercise authority. These principles — such as the common good, human rights, free trade, sustainable development, or democratic self-determination — provide the justificatory vocabulary for global governance action. Actors in the global system do not simply assert power; they claim that their power serves a legitimate purpose traceable to broadly recognized values.

The second layer consists of specific institutions: the organizations, treaty regimes, and regulatory bodies that invoke those normative principles to justify their activities. The WTO, for instance, justifies its authority over trade rules by appealing to the normative principle that free and predictable trade serves the common good. The WHO justifies its global health interventions by appealing to the principle that health is a universal human right. These institutions do not simply act — they explain and defend their actions in normative terms.

The third layer describes the interactions between authorities: the processes of cooperation, overlap, and contestation that occur when multiple actors — states, international organizations, NGOs, social movements — claim or contest authority over the same issue area. This is where contested global governance comes into view. Authority in the global system is not distributed hierarchically and clearly; multiple actors claim it simultaneously, leading to ongoing negotiation and struggle.

The WTO example illustrates this structure beautifully. On one side, the WTO presents itself as a legitimate, consensual institution serving the global common good through free trade. On the other side, protest movements — most famously at Seattle in 1999 — contest the WTO’s claim to legitimacy, arguing that its conception of “free trade” serves the interests of powerful corporations and wealthy states at the expense of food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and environmental sustainability. What is notable, as the lecture points out, is that the protesters also appeal to normative principles: they are not simply opposing authority, but contesting which principles should govern global trade. Even the 1999 Seattle protests saw an unusual coalition — from anarchist groups to religious organizations — working together to contest the same institution, which itself reflects the multilevel, multi-actor character of global governance contestation.

Levels of Global Governance

Global governance operates across multiple levels simultaneously. At the transnational level, institutions like the UN and the WTO claim authority that is explicitly not anchored in a single state. At the international level, arrangements between states — bilateral treaties, regional agreements — shape the conditions of interaction. At the national level, states implement or resist global norms. At the local level, municipalities, communities, and individuals are affected by, and increasingly active participants in, global governance processes. The key analytic insight is that these levels are not cleanly separable. Even an institution as apparently “international” as the UN has national, local, and municipal dimensions. Clean categorizations are useful for analysis but always simplify a messier reality.

History(s) of Global Governance

The Contested Origins of International Order

Glenda Sluga’s essay “The Beginning(s) and End(s) of the International Order” (2017) offers a sweeping historical argument: that the international order has not one origin but several, and that understanding where it began depends on what we think it is for. Sluga’s intervention is framed by a contemporary anxiety — the sense, widespread in the late 2010s, that the international order is in terminal decline. Her response is to historicize: to track the “beginnings” of what we are supposedly losing, so that we can understand better what its “ends” — both meanings of the word, termination and purpose — actually are.

1814: The Congress of Vienna and the Congress System

Sluga traces one plausible beginning to 1814 and the Congress of Vienna. After decades of wars against French hegemony, the victorious coalition of Russia, Britain, Prussia, Austria, and smaller powers established what became known as the Congress system: a mechanism of international cooperation based on negotiation, conferencing, and transnational discussion in the interest of permanent peace. The Congress system introduced several features recognizable as precursors to modern international order: diplomatic procedures designed to preserve the “amour propre of states” through ceremonial equality; multilateral treaty-making; and committees addressing issues that cut across national boundaries — the free navigation of rivers, the Slave Trade, territorial disputes.

What Sluga emphasizes is the entanglement of economic and political principles from the very beginning. The Free Navigation discussions invoked principles “so general” that commerce would not be impeded by local circumstances or war. The Slave Trade debates reveal how the language of “universal morality and humanity” was deployed by British diplomats not out of personal conviction but in response to domestic public pressure — a reminder that “humanitarian” norms in international politics are always embedded in political contexts. Dissenting voices, especially Spain’s argument that the Congress had no right to decide the legislation of nations on moral questions, introduce another durable theme: the tension between international governance and state sovereignty.

The Congress system is limited in important ways. It removed women from the evolving practices of high politics (despite women’s historical role in the salon culture that trained male diplomats). It excluded non-European powers from the scope of its negotiations. It was not a guarantee of peace — wars in Spain, Ottoman and Persian territories, and the Crimean War (1853–1856) all followed within decades. “International ‘order’ and international ‘society’ were always a work-in-progress,” Sluga concludes.

1919: The League of Nations and the Post-WWI Order

The end of the First World War produced another reconfiguration. Woodrow Wilson’s vision for a new international order, based on “broad and universal principles of right and justice,” resonated — at least rhetorically — with some of 1814’s themes: national self-determination and international federation. The establishment of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO) embodied the new conviction that social justice was connected to the maintenance of world peace.

But 1919 also introduced new limits. Who could belong to this international order? Only nation-states, with “national self-determination” as the organizing principle — yet this principle was applied selectively. Wilson himself blocked the inclusion of a clause in the League Covenant declaring racial equality, despite a majority of other peacemakers agreeing to Japan’s request for its inclusion. The 1919 order thus embedded racial discrimination — in the form of immigration policies — as a permissible expression of national sovereignty. This contradiction between the universalist rhetoric of the new order and its racialized exclusions haunts the history of global governance.

1945: The United Nations and the Post-WWII Order

The 1945 order, born at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, is the one most commonly treated as the “international order” under contemporary threat. Its moral vocabulary was shaped by the Atlantic Charter (1941), agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill and signed by a remarkably broad coalition: the “freedom from fear and want” as the catchphrase of postwar ambition. The spectre haunting this order was the refugee — the stateless human being — and its moral cause was increasingly oriented around human rights.

Yet the 1945 order was also the product of strategic compromises frozen in the membership and veto power of the UN Security Council (US, UK, USSR, France, China). Sluga notes the curious persistence of wartime alliance structures in the architecture of the postwar peace — a reminder that international institutions are never purely principled constructions but always also reflections of the power relationships at the moment of their creation.

The Westphalian System and Sovereignty

The standard periodization in IR traces the modern state system to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Sasson Sofer’s reading for Week 2 (“The Prominence of Historical Demarcations: Westphalia and the New World Order”) engages with this periodization critically. The Westphalian system is associated with the principle of state sovereignty — the idea that each state has exclusive authority over its own territory, and that other states should not interfere in its internal affairs. The international system is, on this account, a system of formally equal sovereign states operating in anarchy.

Global governance scholars note several important qualifications to this narrative. First, the “Westphalian” story is partly a retrospective construction — the treaties of 1648 did not immediately produce a neat system of equal sovereign states. Second, and more importantly, the Westphalian framework was a European construction that was extended globally through colonialism, meaning that sovereignty was never universally enjoyed: colonized peoples were subject to European authority precisely by being denied the status of “civilized” states. Third, the growth of global governance institutions in the twentieth century has progressively qualified sovereignty in practice, even as sovereignty rhetoric remains politically powerful.

The lecture notes that states are “relatively new” actors in the international system — they rose alongside capitalism — and there is therefore nothing inevitable about their permanence as the dominant form of political organization. Global governance opens up analytical space to think beyond the state.

Key Actors, Theories, and Concepts in Global Governance

Power in International Politics

Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s “Power in International Politics” (2005) is a foundational theoretical reading that disaggregates the concept of power. Standard IR approaches tend to treat power as material and relational: State A has power over State B when A can compel B to do what B would not otherwise do, typically through superior military or economic resources. Barnett and Duvall argue that this conception misses much of how power actually operates in world politics.

They identify four forms of power:

Compulsory power is the familiar dyadic relationship: A directly controls B through material resources or coercion. This is closest to the realist conception of power.

Institutional power operates through the formal and informal rules and procedures of international institutions. When states design the IMF’s weighted voting system so that the United States retains veto power, they are exercising institutional power — not by directly coercing other states, but by structuring the rules of the game in ways that systematically advantage themselves.

Structural power operates through the constitution of social positions and relations of capacity and incapacity — it shapes who can be what kinds of actors in the first place. The structure of global capitalism, for instance, constitutes some states as “developed” and others as “developing,” creating conditions of dependency and hierarchy that constrain the choices available to each.

Productive power operates through diffuse social processes that produce subjectivities, identities, and knowledge. The discourse of “good governance” — promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions — does not merely describe reality; it constitutes what counts as a legitimate and capable state, thereby disciplining governments into adopting particular policies.

This taxonomy matters for global governance because it shows that analysis limited to asking “which states are most powerful?” misses the power that operates through institutions, through structural conditions, and through the production of knowledge and normality.

Postcolonial Perspectives: Race, Gender, and Class

Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair’s introduction to Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations (2004) introduces a critical dimension that mainstream IR and even much global governance scholarship has tended to marginalize: the constitutive role of race, gender, and class in structuring international politics.

Postcolonialism as a theoretical orientation insists that the history of European empire — its conquest, exploitation, and racial ordering of the globe — is not merely a historical background to contemporary world politics but is constitutive of the structures and norms of that politics. The categories and concepts through which IR organizes knowledge — sovereignty, development, security, civilization — bear the marks of colonial origins. Postcolonial scholars work to make these marks visible and to ask whose experiences and perspectives are systematically excluded from mainstream analysis.

For global governance, the postcolonial critique raises urgent questions. When international institutions promote “good governance,” whose model of governance are they promoting? When development programs are designed by multilateral banks, whose understanding of development is operative? When human rights frameworks are declared universal, from what cultural and historical location were they formulated? Postcolonial analysis does not necessarily reject international institutions, but it demands that they be interrogated for how they reproduce hierarchies of power based on race, culture, and history.

Social Movements and Global Governance

Elizabeth Anne Bennett’s “Global Social Movements in Global Governance” (2012) situates transnational social movements as key actors in the global governance landscape. Social movements are collective actors — formed by networks of individuals and organizations sharing goals, identities, and strategies — that operate outside formal institutional channels, though they increasingly work both within and around those channels simultaneously.

Social movements matter for global governance in several ways. They contest the authority and policies of international institutions — as in the WTO protests discussed in Week 1. They serve as accountability mechanisms, monitoring and publicizing the behavior of states and corporations. They participate in formal governance processes — as NGO representatives in UN conferences, for instance. And they generate normative innovations — new ideas about rights, sustainability, justice — that eventually become incorporated into international norms. The history of international human rights law, for example, is inseparable from the campaigning of transnational advocacy movements.

The relationship between social movements and global governance institutions is, however, deeply ambivalent. Movements can be co-opted, domesticated, or marginalized. Their inclusion in governance processes can create legitimacy for institutions that continue to pursue policies those movements oppose. And movements themselves are not homogeneous: the Seattle protests against the WTO included disparate groups — environmentalists, labour unions, anti-capitalist activists, religious organizations — whose ultimate goals were far from identical.

BRICS and the Politics of Multilayered Global Governance

Maria Raquel Freire’s chapter on “Political Dynamics within the BRICS in the Context of Multilayered Global Governance” (2018) introduces the BRICS as a case study in how emerging powers navigate and seek to reshape the global governance order.

Freire’s argument is that BRICS cannot be understood as a coherent bloc with unified interests. The five member states have significantly different political systems, development models, regional ambitions, and global priorities. What they share is a dissatisfaction with the distribution of power in existing global governance institutions — particularly the IMF, World Bank, and the UN Security Council, where the United States, the European Union, and their allies retain disproportionate influence despite the shifts in global economic power toward the emerging economies.

The BRICS dynamic illustrates a central tension in global governance: the tension between the status quo — the existing institutional architecture built largely in the aftermath of World War II — and reform pressures from states and movements that were marginalized in the construction of that architecture. China’s dramatic economic rise, in particular, has created a situation in which the world’s second-largest economy operates within an institutional framework designed for a world in which it was a poor, isolated power. The BRICS coordination, the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are all expressions of this pressure for reform and alternative institution-building.

Key Actors Continued — Multilayered Governance and Non-State Actors

Multilayered Global Governance

The concept of multilayered global governance refers to the recognition that governance does not occur at a single level but across multiple interacting levels simultaneously: the local, the national, the regional, the international, and the transnational. These levels are not cleanly separable from one another. A city’s climate policy, for instance, may be shaped by national legislation, international treaty commitments, and the norms propagated by transnational networks of municipalities. Understanding governance outcomes requires tracing these interactions across levels.

This multilayered quality is one of the features that distinguishes global governance analysis from classical IR. IR tends to focus on the international level — the interactions between states — and treats domestic and local politics as separate “levels of analysis.” Global governance scholars argue that this separation is analytically misleading: the international and the domestic are thoroughly interpenetrated, and neither can be understood in isolation.

Cities as Global Governance Actors

Simon Curtis’s “Cities and Global Governance: State Failure or a New Global Order?” (2016) — an optional reading for Week 4 — raises the provocative argument that cities are emerging as significant actors in global governance, particularly on issues like climate change, sustainability, and urban development. Networks of cities — such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — coordinate transnational climate action independently of national governments. This suggests that global governance is not only a story about states and formal international institutions but also about the emergence of new forms of governance from below.

Global Governance, Environment, and Climate Change

Climate Change as a Global Governance Problem

Climate change is paradigmatic of the kind of global collective action problem that global governance is designed to address. Greenhouse gas emissions are generated by activities distributed across virtually all national economies; their effects — rising sea levels, extreme weather events, agricultural disruption, species loss — are felt globally but with profoundly uneven distribution, with the poorest and most vulnerable populations typically bearing the greatest impacts despite having contributed least to the problem. This asymmetry between responsibility and impact is at the heart of the climate justice debate.

Transnational Advocacy Networks in Climate Politics

David Ciplet’s “Contesting Climate Injustice” (2014) examines how transnational advocacy networks (TANs) — networks of non-governmental organizations, activists, and experts operating across borders — have sought to advance climate justice norms within the formal UN climate governance process. TANs are influential in global governance not primarily through electoral politics but through framing — shaping the way problems are understood and what counts as an acceptable solution — and through monitoring and accountability — documenting and publicizing when powerful actors fail to live up to their commitments.

Ciplet’s analysis shows that TANs advocating for climate justice within UN processes face significant structural obstacles. The formal negotiating process is dominated by state delegations, with NGOs accorded observer status but limited formal influence. The complexity and technicality of climate negotiations creates barriers to participation for organizations from lower-income countries. And the normative agenda of climate justice — which demands that wealthy countries bear the larger share of mitigation costs and provide significant climate finance to vulnerable nations — encounters resistance from the very states whose compliance is most necessary.

Cities and Multilevel Climate Governance

Michele Betsill and Harriet Bulkeley’s “Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change” (2006) extends the multilevel governance framework to the urban scale. Cities are simultaneously major sources of greenhouse gas emissions (responsible for an estimated 70% of global CO2 emissions) and key sites for policy innovation. The transnational municipal networks that have emerged — including the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program — allow cities to share best practices, coordinate commitments, and develop capacities that national governments have been slow to provide.

Global Governance, Postcolonialism, and the Global South

“Idea-Shift” and the Challenge to Western-Dominated Norms

Amitav Acharya’s ‘“Idea-Shift”: How Ideas from the Rest Are Reshaping Global Order’ (2016) makes a crucial argument against the assumption that global governance norms flow in one direction — from the global North (and particularly from the United States and Western Europe) to the global South. Acharya documents how ideas and normative innovations from the “Rest” — from developing countries, from non-Western civilizations, from postcolonial states — have shaped and continue to shape international norms in significant ways.

Examples include: the Non-Aligned Movement’s articulation of sovereignty and development norms during the Cold War; the Global South’s promotion of economic self-determination in the Declaration on the New International Economic Order (1974); and the concept of Human Security (developed partly through Canadian-Japanese collaboration with significant input from developing country perspectives), which shifted security discourse away from state security and toward the security of individuals and communities.

Postcolonial Critique and the Study of Politics

Uday Chandra’s “The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics” (2013) argues that mainstream political science — including the study of international relations and global governance — systematically reproduces Eurocentric assumptions. The categories of “democracy,” “development,” “governance,” and “rights” that organize the discipline were constructed in specific historical and cultural contexts and encode particular assumptions about what counts as rational, modern, or legitimate. Postcolonial analysis asks political scientists to examine these assumptions critically, to attend to the experiences of those marginalized by colonial history, and to consider how colonial power relations persist in contemporary political structures.

For global governance scholarship, this means interrogating the institutional design of organizations like the IMF and World Bank, which reflect the power and preferences of their founders (primarily the United States and Western European powers); questioning the universality of norms that have in practice been constructed by particular actors; and centering the experiences of Global South populations in the analysis of governance outcomes.

Gendering Global Governance

Feminist Approaches to Global Governance

Shirin Rai’s “Gendering Global Governance” (2004) makes the case that global governance institutions are not gender-neutral: they reflect and reproduce patterns of gender inequality even as they sometimes formally commit to gender equality goals. Global governance institutions — like most political institutions — have historically been designed, staffed, and dominated by men, and their agendas and procedures have often reflected male-dominated conceptions of security, development, and order.

Rai distinguishes between “governance feminism” — the incorporation of feminist demands into governance institutions — and transformative feminist politics that challenges the underlying structures of inequality. The UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, developed through Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions, is a key site of this tension. The WPS agenda recognizes women as important actors in peace processes and requires states to consider the gendered dimensions of conflict and security. But Dianne Otto’s critique (the other Week 8 reading) argues that the WPS framework actually reproduces problematic representations of women — primarily as victims needing protection — that constrain rather than advance gender justice.

Global Governance and Health

Global Health Governance: A Conceptual Framework

Richard Dodgson and Kelley Lee’s “Global Health Governance: A Conceptual Review” (in Global Governance: Critical Perspectives, 2013) provides the foundational framework for analyzing global health as a governance problem. The chapter argues that global health governance has become an increasingly prominent arena precisely because health challenges — from infectious disease to non-communicable disease to environmental health threats — are increasingly global in nature and require coordinated transnational responses.

The World Health Organization (WHO), established in 1948 as part of the postwar international institutional architecture, is the primary intergovernmental organization with a global health mandate. Its authority rests on the International Health Regulations (IHR), which were substantially revised in 2005 in the wake of the SARS epidemic to give the WHO greater authority to respond to international public health emergencies.

However, global health governance extends far beyond the WHO. The landscape includes:

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (established 2002), a public-private partnership that channels financing to programs in lower-income countries. The GAVI Alliance (now Gavi), a public-private partnership for vaccine access. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose health programming budget exceeds that of many national governments and rivals that of the WHO. NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) that provide direct health services in crisis settings. Multinational pharmaceutical corporations, whose decisions about research priorities, intellectual property, and pricing have profound consequences for global health equity.

Imperial and Postcolonial Dimensions of Global Health

Tim Brown and Morag Bell’s “Imperial or Postcolonial Governance?” (2008) brings the postcolonial critique to bear on global health governance. They argue that contemporary global public health strategies — including those promoted by the WHO and other international institutions — carry genealogies traceable to colonial medicine: the systems of health surveillance, quarantine, and control developed by European empires to protect colonial troops and facilitate colonial economic activity. The language has changed — from “tropical medicine” to “global health,” from “sanitation” to “health security” — but many of the underlying assumptions about which populations are sources of disease risk and which need to be governed persist.

The COVID-19 pandemic, though post-dating the 2021 course, is an acute illustration of these dynamics: debates about equitable vaccine distribution, about the adequacy of WHO authority and funding, and about the relationship between national sovereignty and global health obligations all reflect the tensions that Dodgson, Lee, Brown, and Bell identify.

Global Governance, Economics, and Labour

The World Bank as Global Governance Actor

Paul Cammack’s “The Mother of All Governments: The World Bank’s Matrix for Global Governance” (in Global Governance: Critical Perspectives, 2013) presents a sharply critical analysis of the World Bank as a global governance actor. Cammack argues that the Bank does not merely provide development financing; it promotes a comprehensive vision of governance designed to integrate developing country economies into the global capitalist system on terms favored by its major shareholders — primarily the United States and Western Europe.

The World Bank’s “good governance” agenda — promoted from the 1990s onward — extended its reach beyond economic policy into the design of political institutions: judicial reform, anti-corruption measures, civil service reform, and democratic governance norms. Cammack’s critique is that this agenda is not politically neutral; it constitutes a form of disciplinary power (in the Foucauldian sense) that defines acceptable forms of governance and marginalizes alternatives.

China and the World Bank in Africa

Dominik Kopiński and Qian Sun’s “New Friends, Old Friends?” (2014) examines the changing landscape of development finance in Africa, where China’s growing presence as a lender and investor has challenged the World Bank’s de facto monopoly on development discourse. Chinese development finance operates without the governance conditionalities characteristic of World Bank lending — creating what some analysts see as a beneficial alternative for African governments seeking infrastructure finance without political strings, and what others see as a facilitator of authoritarian governance and resource extraction.

The International Monetary Fund and Global Economic Governance

The IMF was established at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference alongside the World Bank, with the mandate to manage international monetary stability and provide short-term balance-of-payments financing to member states. The IMF’s conditionality-based lending model — like the World Bank’s structural adjustment framework — has been extensively criticized for imposing economic policies that impose hardship on poor populations.

The weighted voting system of the IMF (and World Bank) gives the United States effective veto power over major decisions, reflecting its dominant economic position in 1944 but creating significant tensions in an era when China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies have dramatically increased their global economic weight. IMF governance reform has been a persistent demand of Global South states and a significant factor in the appeal of alternative institutions like the BRICS New Development Bank.

The WTO and International Trade Governance

The World Trade Organization, established in 1995 as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), is the central institution of international trade governance. As the course slides and transcript repeatedly note, the WTO justifies its authority by claiming that free, predictable trade serves the common good — promoting economic growth, reducing poverty, and facilitating international cooperation.

Critics contest this claim on multiple grounds. The anti-globalization movement — represented most dramatically in the Seattle protests — argues that the WTO’s conception of “free trade” systematically advantages wealthy states and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, small farmers, and the environment. The WTO’s intellectual property regime (TRIPS) has been specifically criticized for enabling pharmaceutical companies to maintain monopoly pricing on essential medicines in lower-income countries. The special and differential treatment provisions nominally designed to accommodate developing country interests have been argued to be insufficient to address the structural asymmetries in global trade.

Global Governance and Security

Beyond the Liberal Peace

Dominik Zaum’s “Beyond the ‘Liberal Peace’” (2012) engages with one of the most influential frameworks in international security governance: the idea that liberal democratic institutions, markets, and norms provide the foundation for durable peace between states. The liberal peace thesis underpinned much of the post-Cold War international project of democratization and peace-building, informing interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Zaum argues that the liberal peace framework has encountered profound challenges in practice. International peace-building operations frequently produce what critics call “liberal peace” in form but not in substance — creating institutional facades of democracy and markets without the underlying social and political conditions that make them meaningful. Local populations often experience such interventions as neo-colonial impositions that displace indigenous governance mechanisms and impose external templates with insufficient attention to local context.

China’s Rise and Asian Security Order

Amitav Acharya’s “Power Shift or Paradigm Shift?” (2014) examines what China’s dramatic economic and military rise means for the regional security order in Asia. Is China’s rise producing a power shift — a redistribution of material capabilities from the US to China — or a paradigm shift — a transformation in the norms and institutions through which security is organized? Acharya argues that neither a simple power-transition model nor a pure continuity model captures the complexity of Asian security dynamics.

This question has direct implications for global governance. If China’s rise produces primarily a power shift within existing frameworks — China replacing the US as the dominant power while maintaining the basic institutional architecture — global governance institutions may remain largely intact, though with different power distributions. If it produces a paradigm shift — China promoting fundamentally different norms of sovereignty, development, and security — the institutional landscape of global governance may be more profoundly transformed.

Global Governance and Law, and the Future of Global Governance

International Law and Global Governance

International law is a foundational element of global governance: it provides the rules, norms, and procedures through which states and other actors manage their interactions. The scope of international law has expanded dramatically over the twentieth century, from its origins in diplomatic relations and the laws of war to encompass human rights, trade, environment, labour standards, intellectual property, investment, and criminal justice.

Richard Falk’s (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014) argues for a vision of international law grounded in cosmopolitan humanism — the idea that the legitimate ends of international law are not the security and interests of states but the wellbeing and rights of individual human beings. Falk advocates for the progressive development of international institutions that are accountable not just to governments but to global civil society and to humanity as a whole.

The International Criminal Court

Catherine Gegout’s “The International Criminal Court: Limits, Potential and Conditions for the Promotion of Justice and Peace” (2013) examines the ICC as a case study in the possibilities and limitations of international legal governance. The ICC, established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and operational from 2002, represents the most ambitious attempt to date to hold individuals — including heads of state — accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under international criminal law.

The ICC’s record is deeply contested. Gegout identifies several structural limitations. The ICC lacks enforcement capacity — it cannot compel the surrender of suspects without state cooperation. Its jurisdiction is limited to states that have ratified the Rome Statute; major powers including the United States, Russia, and China are non-members. And its prosecutorial record has been criticized for disproportionately targeting African states and leaders, raising concerns about selective justice and the reproduction of global inequalities within the supposedly universal framework of international criminal law. The ICC case illustrates the broader tension in global governance between the aspiration to universalism and the persistent reality of power-based selectivity.

The Future of Global Governance

The final week of the course turns to the question of where global governance is heading. Several forces are reshaping the landscape:

Multipolarity and the challenge to US hegemony. The postwar international order was built around and largely sustained by American power and American preferences. The rise of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies is redistributing global economic and political weight in ways that the existing institutional architecture was not designed to accommodate. The result is both pressure for reform of existing institutions and the creation of parallel, alternative institutions.

Democratic deficits and legitimacy crises. International institutions face persistent questions about their democratic legitimacy — their accountability to the populations affected by their decisions. Most global governance institutions are accountable primarily to their member state governments, not to citizens directly. And within those governments, executive branches — foreign ministries and finance ministries — dominate, with limited parliamentary or civil society oversight. This creates what scholars call the democratic deficit: a gap between the scope of global governance authority and the mechanisms available for democratic accountability.

The rise of populist nationalism. The late 2010s saw a significant backlash against globalization and international institutions in many countries, expressed through the rise of populist nationalist movements and the election of governments (Trump’s United States, Brexit Britain) explicitly skeptical of multilateralism. This backlash reflects in part the “losers of globalization” dynamic identified by Zürn — those for whom increased global integration has not delivered promised benefits. The institutional consequences have been significant: US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (briefly), the weakening of WTO dispute settlement, and the stress-testing of transatlantic alliances.

The COVID-19 pandemic (ongoing at the time of the course) has both revealed the limits of global health governance and created new pressures for reform. The pandemic exposed weaknesses in the WHO’s authority and funding, the fragility of global supply chains, and the inadequacy of mechanisms for ensuring equitable global vaccine access. It has reinvigorated debates about whether the post-WWII international institutional architecture is adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Crosscutting Themes

Mulieri and the Question of Democratic Global Governance

Alessandro Mulieri’s chapter “Can We Democratize Global Governance?” (in Global Governance and Democracy: A Multidisciplinary Analysis, 2015) — one of the Week 1 readings — frames one of the course’s most persistent tensions. Democracy, in its standard formulations, presupposes a bounded political community (typically the nation-state), an electorate of citizens, and institutions accountable to that electorate. Global governance institutions meet none of these criteria: they lack a bounded demos, they are accountable primarily to governments rather than citizens, and their decision-making is often technical and opaque.

Mulieri explores two scenarios for thinking about democratic global governance. The first is a cosmopolitan democratic model, in which global governance institutions are reformed to become directly accountable to a global citizenry — through mechanisms like a directly elected UN Parliamentary Assembly or expanded civil society participation. The second is a pluralist model, in which democracy at the global level is achieved not through a single global democratic institution but through the preservation of diverse national democratic communities, each of which participates in and provides accountability for global governance arrangements.

Both scenarios face serious challenges. The cosmopolitan model risks thin, technocratic democracy without genuine citizen engagement. The pluralist model risks providing cover for powerful states to veto global governance in the name of national self-determination. The tension between these models reflects the deeper tension between global interdependence and democratic self-governance that runs through the entire course.

The Procrastination Problem: Agency and Inaction in Global Governance

The course’s inclusion of a reading on procrastination — Tim Urban’s “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator” — is not merely a note about student habits. Applied to global governance, the psychological dynamics of procrastination map onto a serious structural problem: the tendency of global governance processes to defer action on urgent collective problems because the immediate costs of action are highly visible while the future costs of inaction are diffuse and seemingly distant.

Climate governance is the paradigmatic case. The scientific evidence on the urgency of emissions reduction has been unambiguous for decades. The costs of inaction are projected to be catastrophic and widely distributed. Yet national governments repeatedly defer ambitious climate action, in part because the economic interests of fossil fuel industries are concentrated and politically organized while the beneficiaries of climate stability are diffuse and unorganized. The “panic monster” of near-deadline crisis — a major climate event, a public health emergency — may force action, but the results are typically inadequate and the costs of delayed action have already been paid, disproportionately by the most vulnerable.

Theoretical Frameworks Summary

Liberalism and Global Governance

Liberal internationalism in IR — associated with scholars like Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and John Ikenberry — is the theoretical tradition closest to mainstream global governance scholarship. Liberals argue that states have incentives to cooperate even in anarchy because cooperation generates absolute gains — outcomes that make all parties better off than they would be without cooperation. International institutions reduce transaction costs (the costs of negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing agreements) and provide information that makes cooperation more feasible. International regimes — sets of rules, norms, and decision-making procedures — can sustain cooperation even when a hegemonic power is declining.

Liberal institutionalism is broadly optimistic about the capacity of international institutions to manage global interdependence. But it has been criticized for ignoring distributional questions (who gains more from cooperation?), for assuming that the preferences feeding into institutional design are legitimate, and for underestimating the degree to which institutions reflect and reproduce power inequalities.

Realism and Global Governance

Realism — the dominant theory in IR — is skeptical of global governance ambitions. Realists argue that states are the dominant actors in international politics, that they pursue power and security in a condition of anarchy, and that international institutions are at most arenas in which states pursue their national interests, not autonomous forces that constrain state behavior. From a realist perspective, international institutions persist only when they serve the interests of powerful states; when they cease to do so, powerful states withdraw or undermine them.

The realist critique of global governance is not without empirical support: the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the repeated invocation of sovereignty against human rights interventions, and the resistance of major powers to meaningful reform of UN Security Council membership all reflect dynamics that realist theory predicts. Yet realism struggles to explain the persistence and influence of norms, the behavior of non-state actors, and the many instances of cooperation that generate genuine collective goods.

Constructivism and Global Governance

Constructivism in IR — associated with scholars like Alexander Wendt, Martha Finnemore, and Kathryn Sikkink — occupies a middle ground. Constructivists argue that the structures of international politics are socially constructed: that is, they are the product of shared ideas, norms, and identities rather than fixed material realities. States do not have fixed, pre-given interests; their interests are shaped by the social and normative environment in which they operate. International norms — about sovereignty, human rights, environmental responsibility, or financial governance — are not just constraints on state behavior; they constitute the identities and interests of states.

For global governance, constructivism offers tools for explaining how new norms emerge and spread, how international institutions shape state preferences rather than merely reflecting them, and how non-state actors — NGOs, social movements, expert networks — participate in norm entrepreneurship: the advocacy and promotion of new normative standards in global governance.

Critical Theories: Marxism, Feminism, Postcolonialism

Critical theories in global governance — Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial approaches — share a commitment to interrogating the power relations embedded in existing governance structures rather than taking those structures as given. Marxist approaches attend to the class interests served by international economic institutions. Feminist approaches reveal the gendered assumptions and exclusions in governance norms and institutions. Postcolonial approaches interrogate the colonial genealogies of supposedly universal governance norms and the persistence of racial and civilizational hierarchy in contemporary global governance.

What these critical approaches share is a commitment to the transformative potential of global governance scholarship: the idea that understanding how global governance works is not merely an academic exercise but a contribution to the project of making it more just, more inclusive, and more accountable.

Key Readings Reference List

Acharya, Amitav. ‘“Idea-Shift”: How Ideas from the Rest Are Reshaping Global Order’. Third World Quarterly 37, no. 7 (2016): 1156–70.

Acharya, Amitav. ‘Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China’s Rise and Asia’s Emerging Security Order’. International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2014): 158–73.

Amrith, Sunil, and Glenda Sluga. ‘New Histories of the United Nations’. Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 251–76.

Barnett, Michael, and Raymond Duvall. ‘Power in International Politics’. International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 39–75.

Beeson, Mark. ‘The Forerunners of Global Governance: A Brief History’. In Rethinking Global Governance. London: Macmillan Education UK, 2019.

Bennett, Elizabeth Anne. ‘Global Social Movements in Global Governance’. Globalizations 9, no. 6 (2012): 799–813.

Betsill, Michele M., and Harriet Bulkeley. ‘Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change’. Global Governance 12, no. 2 (2006): 141–60.

Brown, Tim, and Morag Bell. ‘Imperial or Postcolonial Governance? Dissecting the Genealogy of a Global Public Health Strategy’. Social Science & Medicine 67, no. 10 (2008): 1571–79.

Cammack, Paul. ‘The Mother of All Governments: The World Bank’s Matrix for Global Governance’. In Global Governance: Critical Perspectives, edited by Steve Hughes, Rorden Wilkinson, and Paul Cammack. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

Chandra, Uday. ‘The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics’. New Political Science 35, no. 3 (2013): 479–91.

Chowdhry, Geeta, and Sheila Nair. ‘Introduction: Power in a Postcolonial World’. In Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations. London: Routledge, 2004.

Ciplet, David. ‘Contesting Climate Injustice’. Global Environmental Politics 14, no. 4 (2014): 75–96.

Dodgson, Richard, and Kelley Lee. ‘Global Health Governance: A Conceptual Review’. In Global Governance: Critical Perspectives. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

Falk, Richard A. (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Freire, Maria Raquel. ‘Political Dynamics within the BRICS in the Context of Multilayered Global Governance’. In BRICS and Global Governance, edited by John J. Kirton and M. V. Larionova. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Gegout, Catherine. ‘The International Criminal Court: Limits, Potential and Conditions for the Promotion of Justice and Peace’. Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 800–818.

Kopiński, Dominik, and Qian Sun. ‘New Friends, Old Friends? The World Bank and Africa When the Chinese Are Coming’. Global Governance 20, no. 4 (2014): 601–23.

Mulieri, Alessandro. ‘Can We Democratize Global Governance? Two Guiding Scenarios Based on a Narrative Approach’. In Global Governance and Democracy: A Multidisciplinary Analysis. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.

Otto, Dianne. ‘Contesting Feminism’s Institutional Doubles: Troubling the Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda’. In Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Rai, Shirin. ‘Gendering Global Governance’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 4 (2004): 579–601.

Sluga, Glenda. ‘The Beginning(s) and End(s) of the International Order’. International Relations (2017).

Sofer, Sasson. ‘The Prominence of Historical Demarcations: Westphalia and the New World Order’. Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 1 (2009): 1–19.

Wilkinson, Rorden. ‘Global Governance: A Preliminary Investigation’. In Global Governance: Critical Perspectives, edited by Steve Hughes, Rorden Wilkinson, and Paul Cammack. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

Zaum, Dominik. ‘Beyond the “Liberal Peace”’. Global Governance 18, no. 1 (2012): 121–32.

Zürn, Michael. ‘Contested Global Governance’. Global Policy 9, no. 1 (2018): 138–45.