Contesting Global Governance

A rich analysis of the increasingly important engagement between international institutions and global social movements.

Few authors have sought to explain the links among development, global governance, and globalization, Contesting Global Order traces dominant values and patterns on a world level over the last half century.€Including a framing introduction written for the volume, this book brings together for the first time James H. Mittelman's most influential works, offering cross-regional analysis, and including fieldwork in nine countries in Africa and Asia.

This work examines the challenges faced by those wishing to develop progressive visions of transparent global governance and civil society. It traces the history and development of the institutions of global governance as well as the emergence of the anti-globalization movement.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

International organizations like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, or the European Union are a defining feature of contemporary world politics. In recent years, many of them have also become heavily politicized. In this book, we examine how the norms and values that underpin the evaluations of international organizations have changed over the past 50 years. Looking at five organizations in depth, we observe two major trends. Taken together, both trends make the legitimation of international organizations more challenging today. First, people-based legitimacy standards are on the rise: international organizations are increasingly asked to demonstrate not only what they do for their member states, but also for the people living in these states. Second, procedural legitimacy standards gain ground: international organizations are increasingly evaluated not only based on what they accomplish, but also based on how they arrive at decisions, manage themselves, or coordinate with other organizations in the field. In sum, the study thus documents how the list of expectations international organizations need to fulfil to count as 'legitimate' has expanded over time. The sources of this expansion are manifold. Among others, they include the politicization of expanded international authority and the rise of non-state actors as new audiences from which international organizations seek legitimacy.

For many commentators, global civil society is revolutionising our approach to global politics, as new non-state-based and border-free expressions of political community challenge territorial sovereignty as the exclusive basis for political community and identity. This challenge 'from below' to the nation-state system is increasingly seen as promising nothing less than a reconstruction, or a re-imagination, of world politics itself. Whether in terms of the democratisation of the institutions of global governance, the spread of human rights across the world, or the emergence of a global citizenry in a worldwide public sphere, global civil society is understood by many to provide the agency necessary for these hoped-for transformations. Global Civil Society asks whether this idea is such a qualitatively new phenomenon after all; whether the transformation of the nation-state system is actually within its reach; and what some of the drawbacks might be.

Global and domestic policies, and the rapid processes of economic globalisation, have led to burgeoning levels of inequality. Drawing upon insights from critical international relations theory, this book explores how global justice movements use socioeconomic rights to challenge neo-liberal global governance.

The key challenges of globalization are diffuse and outside the control of any one state. In its most ambitious and forward looking form, global governance seeks to create an international social fabric, albeit imperfect, which cumulatively, amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Global Governance in the Twenty-first-century aims to open a number of new areas for further analysis, and in particular, to begin a process of cross-fertilization between different disciplines examining issues related to global governance.